Market manipulation going on against Adobe, Intuit, Salesforce, and other software stocks

The IGV ETF sector is down at levels not seen before. Adobe beat expectations and is still getting punished. Salesforce stock has fallen consistently every single day for the past couple of weeks. A Goldman Sachs analyst downgraded Intuit. I would love to know how much the investment side of the house had input options against Intuit. There is supposed to be separation of concerns between the analyst side and the investment side but I would not put anything past Goldman Sachs.

Look at the gross margins: Intuit 80%, Salesforce 76.5%, Adobe 88%

Look at the operating margins (GAAP): Intuit 54.7% (-133 BPS), salesforce 34.8% (+250 BPS), Adobe 44.5% (-100 BPS).

Salesforce actually has better operating margins despite the cost of AI. The other two are investing heavily in marketing spend and other AI related spend which is why you see the negative BPS. That should actually be seen as a positive by the market because they’re trying to grow their AI revenue.

Despite all of this, the stock keeps falling.

I think this is by design.

I believe that all the hedge funds and institutional investors are colluding to drive down the price of software stocks so that they eventually shed employees, shut down products, raise prices thereby churning customers, and then the PE firms can come and acquire these companies and further hollowed them out. It will then be ripe for the frontier model companies to take over these hollowed out software Titans.