From Growth To Value
Founder of Potential Multibaggers/Best Anchor Stocks
Fastly's overall offering falls far short of Cloudflare's, and the market has already rewarded the strongest cybersecurity players. Fastly is a more modern CDN than Akamai and has some cybersecurity exposure. Buying is off the table for now, though if forced to buy one stock, Fastly would probably be the pick. x.comÂ
Fastly is off the screen for a while: someone liquidated it in size, making it a controversial name when there are many better setups elsewhere. The best charts don't keep checking back to the 21-day EMA, and only the first check back is worth buying. x.comÂ
Akamai has catching up to do as an edge-network play on AI agents, with an overlooked AI-agent security angle. AI agents and LLMs constantly fetch data from websites and APIs, which needs fast edge networks; since that call, Akamai is up 20% versus Fastly's 48%. Its CFO recently discussed agentic security and shopping, and said a four-year, $600 million GPU deal with a US robotics-focused company lifts major wins to over $2.8 billion this year. Robots could be the leg to new highs. x.com x.com … Show more
Fastly is probably a long, even on the security angle alone. With its points of presence and edge network, it should only be a matter of time before its numbers are affected more meaningfully. x.comÂ
Akamai is overlooked at a reasonable multiple, with bot management set to become a huge security issue. Its CDN business has lost five competitors recently and is raising prices, while compute is growing over 50%. A post the author replies to notes security and compute are most of revenue and all of the growth Faster-growing security pieces should eventually drive acceleration, though mix disclosure makes it hard to know. Valuing it on free cash flow is like valuing Meta or Amazon that way. … Show more
Cloudflare's importance becomes clearest during outages, when disruption exposes how much of the internet depends on its platform. That dependence makes the stock hard to sell despite its obscene valuation. x.comÂ
Fastly's role with Meta Muse looks bigger than analysts have noted, which is bullish for a stock at 5x NTM revenue versus Cloudflare's 38x. In 738 controlled tests run by another investor, 29.3% of Muse agent traffic came from Fastly, versus 37.0% from Cloudflare, 19.4% from Meta and 14.4% from AWS. x.comÂ
Akamai trades on much more reasonable multiples than some peers, and growth in inference and security may let the stock work from here. The Anthropic deal is a nice reference win, though the core CDN business will probably keep bleeding share. x.comÂ
Fastly looks cheap at under 5x sales, but its growth is already down to 15% and slowing, which does not look like the makings of a winner. This is a preliminary view pending deeper work. x.comÂ
Akamai has a good catalyst in its expanded partnership with Anthropic. Cloudflare is leading this group and Fastly is also setting up, giving good confluence across stocks that do broadly similar things. x.comÂ
Fastly has one of the worst management teams in all of software, which makes the stock one to be careful with. x.com x.comÂ
