Daily Brief United States: Medtronic Plc, Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, NVIDIA Corp, BILL Holdings , Inter Parfums, Immix Biopharma Inc and more

• Medtronic Plc (MDT US) reported Q2FY24 revenue of $8B, representing 5% organic growth, topping guidance of 4.0–4.5%. Cardiovascular, neuroscience, and medical surgical grew mid-single-digit with diabetes accelerating to high-single-digit.
• The company now expects FY24 organic revenue growth of 4.75% versus the prior 4.5%. Medtronic raised FY24 adjusted EPS guidance to $5.13–5.19 from $5.08–5.16 earlier.
• In November, the company has received FDA approval for innovative renal denervation device for the treatment of hypertension, which should open a multi-billion-dollar market opportunity.

• The VIX INDEX has reached very OVERSOLD levels, it could bounce soon. Our models predict a short-lived bounce, probably 1-week.
• An increased VIX could trigger panic selling also in Asia-Pacific markets, dragging down returns and increasing volatility.
• The S&P500 is also WEEKLY OVERBOUGHT, the combination of VIX OVERSOLD and SPX OVERBOUGHT for us is a clear indication: WEEKLY pullback incoming!

• Nvidia’s street-beating results indicate strong growth to continue; Generative AI demand will next expand from startups, consumer internet, and cloud service providers increasingly to enterprise AI-linked demand.
• Nvidia is not expensive despite recent market concerns. We believe Nvidia can meet or even beat its current calendar year 2024 earnings expectations and forward PE is cheap.
• Short a basket of Taiwan AI concept stocks vs. a core Nvidia long position rather than take profits in Nvidia. We have swapped one Taiwan stock in our short basket.

• BILL Holdings is a cloud-based provider of SaaS, payments, spend and expense management products, which automate accounts payable (AP) and accounts receivable (AR) transactions
• The company has successfully completed its IPO in 2019 and raised $200M+ in net proceeds. Today, BILL Holdings includes subsidiaries such as Bill.com, DivvyPay, Invoice2go, Cimrid and Finmark Financial.
• My bear case assumes a ~5% ten-year revenue CAGR from FY24 through FY34, maximum competitive pressure, high customer churn, headwind to float revenue and volatile transactional revenue.

• IPAR issued its initial 2024 sales and EPS guidance proving clarity as investors value the stock for the year ahead.
• IPAR is forecasting sales and EPS in line with our current estimates suggesting there could be ample upside to the numbers if the current demand for fragrances were to continue.
• IPAR expects 2024 sales of $1.45 billion and EPS of $5.15. Both of which are in line with our estimates of $1.42 billion and $5.16, respectively.

The FDA has accepted Immix’s Investigational New Drug (IND) application for lead CAR-T asset NXC-201. In our view, this decision from the FDA represents encouraging progress for Immix in delivering, potentially, the first outpatient CAR-T therapy, provided the data continue to be supportive. This regulatory decision enables Immix to start dosing patients with amyloid light chain amyloidosis (ALA) in the US as part of the NEXICART Phase Ib/IIa clinical trial, which has previously been operating in Israel. Further, management has communicated that the favourable tolerability profile of the therapy to date could warrant a potential expansion into autoimmune indications; we await additional updates on this front. NXC-201 has demonstrated a desirable safety and efficacy profile in 72 patients with ALA or multiple myeloma (MM) to date, potentially supporting NXC-201 as the first outpatient CAR-T therapy.