As was widely expected, the Australian tech sector has been one of the worst performing areas of the share market on Thursday.
This follows a tough night on trade which saw the Nasdaq index make its biggest single day decline in over seven years.
As you might expect, the popular WAAAX stocks have been bearing the brunt of the selloff today.
For those that are unfamiliar with this term, the WAAAX stocks comprise WiseTech Global Ltd (ASX: WTC), Afterpay Touch Group Ltd (ASX: APT), Altium Limited (ASX: ALU), Appen Ltd (ASX: APX), and Xero Limited (ASX: XRO).
At the time of writing the shares of Afterpay, Altium, Appen, and Xero are all down by 3% to 5%.
The same cannot be said for WiseTech Global, though. Against all odds, its shares are actually pushing higher today.
Why are WiseTech Global's shares on the rise?
The logistics platform provider is presenting at the Goldman Sachs Emerging Tech Day conference in Sydney today.
Ahead of its presentation, it released a trading update which included an upgrade to its FY 2019 earnings and revenue guidance.
According to the release, the company has experienced continued strength in its organic revenue growth as customers increase their use of its CargoWise One platform and its attrition rate remains comfortably below 1%.
As a result, WiseTech Global has increased its guidance for revenue growth to between 44% and 50% and EBITDA growth to between 31% and 37%. This equates to a guidance range of $320 million to $333 million for revenue and $102 million to $107 million for EBITDA. This guidance is subject to currency movements.
Previous guidance had been for revenue growth of 42% to 47% and EBITDA growth of 28% to 35%.
Should you invest?
While this is certainly a positive, I'm surprised that it has been enough to prevent its shares from crashing lower along with the rest of the WAAAX stocks. After all, its shares are still changing hands at over 80x estimated forward earnings and a slight bump to its guidance doesn't suddenly make them cheap.
I'm a big fan of WiseTech Global, but given rising bond yields and how the market is treating high PE shares right now, it would have to be trading at 30x to 40x earnings for me to pick up shares.
