Speaker is bearish on buying SNOW now due to high valuation relative to sector average and competitive risks, despite acknowledging strong growth.

We have a leading technology company, located right at the intersection of cloud computing and artificial intelligence, serving thousands of companies around the world. This company is Snowflake, its stock symbol is SNOW, which Kathy strongly supports to increase her stake by nearly 2500%, with her purchases valued at more than half a billion dollars during the last quarter, bringing her total ownership to more than 700 million dollars.

When we consider how large companies operate today, we can understand why one of the world's largest investors would want to invest in this company. These companies possess enormous amounts of data scattered in different places, some of it on the Amazon cloud, some on the Microsoft cloud, and some even confined to old servers.

But Snowflake solves this problem for all these companies with a specially designed data cloud that brings together all this fragmented data into a single, secure environment, where it can be used to run all kinds of AI and machine learning analytics.

Snow offers a diverse range of artificial intelligence tools within its ecosystem, which is experiencing increasing demand. For example, its smart assistant Co-work helps employees, even those who are not technically specialized, to review company data, even that extracted directly from their email or chat applications, to accomplish tasks such as easily summarizing meetings, reviewing data to get quick answers, extracting key points, analyzing contract details, tracking sales trends, and much more.

It is currently used by approximately 6000 accounts. The company also offers Cocoa, an intelligent programming assistant for software developers, which is currently used in more than 9,100 accounts.

This tremendous growth is reflected in the company's financial performance. In the last quarter, for example, its product revenues jumped 37% year-on-year to nearly $1.15 billion.

This far exceeded analysts' expectations, by the way. Their net revenue retention rate also reached 126 %, indicating that their customer base is becoming more loyal as they become more integrated with the Snowflake platform.

These current customers, by the way, are spending more over time, having spent 26% more than the previous year. They also maintain 828 large clients who spend more than $1 million annually.

As a result, management anticipates continued growth for their business, with the target market doubling in size by 2031.

However, despite my respect for this company, there are some things that are difficult for me to ignore. Firstly, the company's stock tends to be highly volatile. It is currently experiencing a significant rise recently, making its market value hundreds of percentage points higher than the sector average.

This sector, by the way, is witnessing fierce competition from technology giants such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google.

Listen, I don't deny that Snow has many distinctive qualities in its business that may help it survive or compete in this crowded field. But, to be perfectly honest, when I look at the speed at which artificial intelligence is impacting the cloud computing landscape, it becomes difficult to predict who will be the biggest winner in the long run.

So, for my personal investment portfolio, I find myself increasingly drawn to larger, more established, diversified, and reliable companies that I trust will grow over time, such as the three companies I just mentioned.

In addition to Oracle and possibly two other companies. But in reality, this is what I invest most of my money in these days in the field of cloud computing. Not a less diversified company, you know, its shares trade at hundreds of percent above the sector average.

Therefore, I will continue to place it in a mid-range position for now due to its strong growth, but it is not a stock that I would buy for myself at the moment.