Saturday, June 04, 2011
Investments you wish you made, part deux
In tech, nothing is forever:
As of the close of markets Friday, Apple was worth more than Microsoft and Intel combined.
In 1998, the "Wintel" alliance had a combined market capitalization of $339 billion, compared to Apple's $3.5 billion, and now the two numbers are equal.
A few months back, along the same lines.
3 Comments:
By 
, at
Sun Jun 05, 11:03:00 AM:
If it earns like a utility, and it trades like a utility -- then it's a utility! As we hit the year 2000, MSFT made a conscious decision to downshift from high growth to being just a steady eddie performer. As MSFT was never really innovative, this was probably the right course for it to take.
Meanwhile, AAPL was a near total reboot. It hardly competes with MSFT, as it turned itself into a consumer electronics leader. Ironically, the core foundation for this was finding a way to monetize music after the traditional music business had been Napsterized to death. I doubt anyone in 2001 could have foreseen a world where AAPL would become worth 50% more than GE within a decade -- not even Steve Jobs.
You can centrally plan outcomes like MSFT. You never can centrally plan outcomes like AAPL. There's a huge lesson in that.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs ....
By 
Progressively Defensive, at
Mon Jun 06, 01:01:00 PM:
Amazing; I bought at 24 and sold and 50 and thought I was a genius. And the P/E ratio is still attractive.
Mr. Tigerhawk can you post something about this:
I watched Kudlow Report on Friday and the only theme the Democratic spokesperson had was this. When Bush left the economy was losing 800,000 jobs a month, now we have 15 straight months of job growth, therefore, the stimulus worked. And the Republican spokespeople were flummoxed. It's a great misdirection that confuses the issue. Obamanomics is a disaster compared to Reaganomics and a waste of what is actually, however, relatively inexpensive debt to maintain. [I'm not one to get upset about the debt itself, but the reasons it was incurred.]
But it requires a sound bite. This is a good one:
Even if you take Obama's absurd concept as given, i.e., that the stimulus "created or saved" 3 million jobs, that is about $300,000/job. If you discount the "saved" aspect of it, a figure more like $500,000/job might be more apt. Can you write something incisive on this? The point is the waste, not the absolute effect. And the explanation one might provide is that it’s “crony socialism” or “political payout for campaign kickback,” i.e., not so much job creating as campaign coffers inflating.
Obama might win unless the devastation he’s caused can be communicated concisely to the otherwise uneducated and distracted masses.
By , at
Mon Jun 06, 02:06:00 PM:
The "jobs created / saved" were in the public sector. And they weren't always the "cops/firemen/teachers" we're supposed to love.
I suspect that true private sector jobs and related wages have been flat or in decline over the last decade. (has anyone seen good data?). But our public sector has grown -- even in the recession -- even though the private sector tax base neccessary to support it has declined.
That issue has been compounded by another issue: entitlements. The taxes for these programs used to exceed outlays. Once upon a time, this "overcollection" used to support general spending. No longer. [Memo to Al Gore: there never was a "lockbox" had we had proper accounting.] But outlays for these programs now exceed their "dedicated" tax revenues. And that's before ObamaCare.
We're covering the resulting gaps with over a trillion each year in new borrowing. Right now the Fed is the only buyer. This is unsustainable.
At the margin, "saving" a job in the public sector has probably cost us at least two in the private sector. Folks who care about ROI don't want to hire in the USA. Obama & Co keep finding new excuses, but they've taken a bad situation and made it worse.
Take a look at this -- be sure to scroll down to the second graph. It puts our recent purported job growth in proper perspective.
