Cognex Corporation (CGNX-Q)

Don't buy now. CGNX is a leader in machine vision, an amazing technology that enables automation. Automation equipment gets installed only when machine tool orders are rising--that's the problem. Those orders are poor now. CGNX has sort of held its revenues given automation in warehousing and the drug industry, but without any major changes in machine tool orders and in making smartphones, it will be hard to grow revenues. Watch CGNX closely, if a 5G iPhone get made in Sept. 2020, and Apple is a customer of Cognex.

Sold down their position because it ran up over his 3% weighting. Will be affected by slowdown in iPhone sales. Valuations got way too stretched. If it got 15-20% lower, he’d be an aggressive buyer. Nothing wrong with it.

This is one of a small group of companies that do advanced machine vision. This is a very fine company. Its primary public competitor is Keyence Corporation (KYCCF-5) in Japan, which he has shares in. Their business has slowed a bit this year. They do a lot of project work for large customers, like Apple. He expects it to remain range-bound at least for the first half of this year. He doesn’t own the company now out of mindfulness of the cycles in its business. He is looking for opportunities to get into this stock in the future.

They do robotics and logistics, like ensuring quality control on assembly lines. They're starting to get contracts from airports. Hit $72, but now in the $50s per share. Q4 is always tough for them. Take a half a position and watch it. They have over 1,000 outstanding patents.

Fundamentally he likes this company. It is an automation play company within the global market and it is a top-5 company in that space. Apple is about 11% of their sales, so be mindful. It is close to fair value.

This company makes software to determine what a computer is looking at. They own this for their American funds. The company has made great progress in these tools. Demand has been explosive. Revenues have been growing yearly and the prospects are tremendous. There will be continued capital spending and “machine vision” will be a fast growing part of this.

Not a fan of chasing a stocks and this one's run up. Take some money off the table.

This is the eyes of the robot. They have 2 distinct businesses. One is looking at quality controls in 2-D and 3-D through the assembly lines. The 2nd line of business is reading bar tags and barcodes. Also has a burgeoning business with Airport contracts where they can read barcodes on the luggage, getting the luggage to the passengers in 5-10 minutes. This has a lot of room to run and is a good 5-10 year hold. Dividend yield of 0.3%. (Analysts' price target is $62.25.)