I’ve owned Verisign at times and am eyeing it again. I do not own it at the moment.

Here is a very long-term chart:

VRSN data by YCharts

The first internet bubble was very very good for Verisign…most likely on the back of domain names.

Today they are a $10 billion company. Huge, but in a tech world of goliaths they could easily be gobbled.

Internet Security has been the rage this year but Verisign gets little coverage. The stock has doubled since 2014. The rest of the ‘cyber-security’ stocks get covered all day and traders like talking about them. A very popular ETF was created of course to meet the craze- $HACK -and it’s done nothing all year and in fact is down 20 percent the second half of this year.

I have my own instincts and thesis I am starting to build about this space.

Verisign like all the others is offering ‘enterprise’ solutions. The solutions cost retailers fortunes and retailers also have PCI costs of compliance with all the data they hold. Guess what…they still get hacked and just today Target is saying the recent breach has already cost them $290 million.

No wonder Verisign never goes down.

At the early stage level a perfect storm is developing as entrepreneurs leave the big credit card companies to help solve this problem with consumer products/apps/code. In effect Verisign 2.0 and security 2.0 might just be about a different angle of attack. Today we have the cloud, the blockchain, our smartphones and digital wallets. Recently I have seen three great pitches with respect to Verisign 2.0 and consumer privacy and I expect our fund to make one or two investments.

Verisign is in a great spot as they have the currency to acquire their way to continued dominance.

They would be wise to ‘channel’ Benioff and Salesforce who have been relentless in sales and product development and acquiring the future before the future sneaks by, using their currency while the currency is good.

I am also recently long $LOCK which is not directly related but an identity play itself.