Today on the Joseph Carlson Show, the US economy contracts
at a .3% rate in the first quarter of 2025.
This marks the first time the economy has shrink since the
first quarter of 2022. And part of the reason the
economy is shrinking is softer consumer spend.
But there's more to the story. In fact, there's a much bigger
aspect to this economic report. We'll explain why the tariffs
had such a huge impact on this first quarter result, even
though the tariffs weren't in place during this time period.
Now, of course, we have a lot of other news to get into.
S&P Global, my largest holding, I have this company in two
portfolios with over $100,000 invested in it.
They just reported earnings. The stock is up, it's flat on
the year and the company's divesting their mobility
business. SME Global Management has
decided that it's best to separate this segment of the
business into an entirely separate stock.
I'll explain why they're doing this, how it works and how it
will impact current investors. We also have Visa reporting
earnings, giving a gauge of the overall economy that works in
conjunction with this first quarter GDP report.
We'll see how Visa's report stacks up with GDP growth.
Booking Holdings reported earnings.
The stock is flat after earnings after being flat year to date.
Booking Holdings report painted a slightly different narrative
than the one you've heard in the media.
In fact, the CEO of Booking Holdings went on to CNBC and
said travel remains very strong globally, that people continue
to want to travel across the world, including the US.
Even this appearance from the CEO saying travel remains strong
caused a lot of people to get upset.
Every comment is upset at this video.
Lowell demand as collapsed. I listened to several airline
conference calls. Just cancelled trip to the US
going to Australia or Canada. Not true.
Travel has been going down. This dude is full of it.
The booking CEO, oh boy, how bigly he dismisses the macro
reality. We'll be responding to some of
these comments and we have so much more to get into with
multiple companies reporting earnings including FICO,
Spotify, Microsoft. I'll be going over some thoughts
on each of these as well as the big earnings piece tomorrow,
which is Amazon. This company is coming under
central focus and I want to share a few thoughts on Amazon a
day ahead of earnings. So we have a ton of stuff to get
into in this episode. Now, before we jump into the
headline news that the market is going down as a response of the
GDP report, I first want to take a look at My Portfolio.
We've had a lot of new people join the channel over the past
month or the past six months if you're new here.
These are my personal portfolios.
I've shown them publicly for over 5 years.
This one's called the passive income portfolio.
It is my primary investment account.
It's where I have the majority of my money right now.
I've been building this portfolio full of compounding
machines with the goal of outperforming the S&P 500.
I want to have better risk adjusted and overall total
performance in the market. Now when I measure this, I take
a look at things like the Yeartodate return.
Right now this ortfolio's down 388.
When we compare that with the 500 Yeartodate, it's down 6
ercent. So we have a little bit of
outperformance here with the S&P 500 on the year to date.
When we look back over the course of a year, if we go back
to trailing year now to be clear, this is not money that
I've contributed to the portfolio.
This is gains. I compare that 13.64% against
the S&P 500, which is currently up 9.27% over the same timeline.
So whether we're looking at the year to date or the past
trailing year, the passive income portfolio has
outperformed the market. If we load in my other
portfolio, this one's called the Story Fund, this one is a bit
more aggressive, it's more concentrated, and the goal here,
again is to outperform the benchmark index.
If I look at the performance of this one year to date, it's
currently down .7%. The NASDAQ 100 during the same
time period is currently down 8%.
When we look at the trailing year, this one is up 30%.
That's $63,000 in gains. Over that same time period, the
Nasdaq's up 10%. The Story Fund continues to see
wide outperformance of both the NASDAQ and the S&P 500.
Both of these portfolios have outperformed the market since
inception. But a lot of people suggested
that the only reason that Joseph, that I was outperforming
the market was because I had higher beta, meaning my stocks
were simply just more volatile. I was just taking on more risk
with more volatile stocks. And when the market went up,
they would go up more. When the market went down, they
would go down more. But what we're seeing here with
the data is that narrative fall apart as the market goes down.
This year with fair uncertainty, tariffs and contracting GDP,
this portfolio is holding up better than the market.
And the reason that I highlight this is because investing is not
about taking risk, it's about reducing risk.
If you observe the behaviour of every great investor like Warren
Buffett, their entire strategy is to reduce risk as much as
possible. Invest in the most predictable
winners in the market, companies with incredibly powerful, deeply
embedded business models, ones that will not be disrupted even
during economic contraction. Those type of companies are
called compounding machines. And in My Portfolio, I
compounding machines, that's what you're seeing them do this
year and that's what you've seen them do over the past five
years. Now, as easy as investing seems
and as simple as it seems to hold these great companies
during troubling times, it actually is more difficult than
people anticipate. It takes a lot of willpower to
continually invest in great companies knowing that there's
economic uncertainty. For example, I'm sure you've
seen the headlines that the markets down today after we had
the news of the first quarter GDP report, the GDP contracted,
meaning the economy overall, the way that we're measuring it with
GDP is going down from the Wall Street Journal, the US economy
contracts at a .3% rate in the first quarter.
Now the prediction was that it would grow .4%.
We were projecting out growth and then we had a bit of
contraction. So what caused this contraction?
Was it the impact of the tariffs?
Well, tariffs certainly had something to do with it, but not
in the way that many people May 1st think about it.
Now we can look at the GDP over time.
This is what it looks like going back to early 2021.
We had some quarters of really good growth going up 4 to 6 to
almost 8% and then it leveled out a little bit between the two
to 4% range, which is typically where the US grows.
That's kind of the the mid range there.
That's what we're expected to grow over time.
And then we have 2025 Q 1 which is noticeably much weaker than
any previous quarter. Now the projection remains that
growth will resume next quarter, but with the tariff uncertainty
that makes it nearly impossible to predict right now.
What we know for certain is that the economy contracted for a
single quarter, raising the chances of a recession.
A recession is when the economy contracts for two consecutive
quarters. So to put this in perspective,
the economy contracted quite a bit in the first quarter of
2022, but that wasn't technically a recession because
the economy did not contract the next quarter.
There was not six months or two consecutive quarters of GDP
contraction. So that didn't meet the
definition of a recession. But now we're back to territory
where we have that first quarter of GDP contraction.
If we have another one below 0, we have a recession.
The US recession chance, according to Polymark, is now
67%. They're saying it's now likely a
decent chance, 7 out of 10 that will have a recession.
Now, this all looks very grim, but if we put this in context,
it doesn't look quite as bad. The first thing to understand
about whether or not we're in a recession is to back up a little
bit and look at the calculation. For example, GDP is the
calculation of consumption, that's spending by households,
the calculation of investments, business capital, residential
construction, the calculation of government spending on goods and
services. So all three of those things are
captured in gross domestic product calculation.
But the other aspect that a lot of people may forget about is
that GDP calculation incorporates net exports,
meaning exports minus imports. Which also means if for some
reason a lot of people in the United States had a strong
incentive to rapidly import as much goods as possible, knowing
that there was going to be a price hike on those goods in
just a couple months, then that may affect GDP negatively
because a net export measure would look far worse.
And that's exactly what happened this quarter.
In Q1 of this year, everyone knew that there was going to be
tariffs. Trump was talking about them
incessantly. And many businesses got ahead of
that. They ordered all these supplies,
all this stuff that they could warehouse ahead of paying for
these expensive tariffs. Q1 had a record amount of pull
forward imports. For example, we have here an
economist from Wells Fargo saying the headline declines
overstates the weakness because a lot of that was tariff induced
pull forward. When you factor out the pull
forward from tariffs, she says that overall I think that it was
relatively solid underlying report when it comes to demand.
Now again, this is not an attempt to defend Trump or say
that the economy is in great shape or even say that I like
the tariffs. I'm not saying any of that.
But we need to be clear here. This GDP report looks a bit
worse than it actually is because of this pull forward.
A logistical consideration makes Wednesday's report difficult to
interpret. Imports subtract from the
Commerce's Department calculation of GDP since they
represent spending on foreign made goods and services.
GDP is gross domestic, so foreign spending doesn't count.
Since companies spent a ton of money on foreign goods ahead of
the tariff, that for certain negatively impacts the GDP
report. It's difficult to interpret what
the impact would be without that because there's so many
different aspects, But a measure of the consumer business
spending that gauges underlying demand in the economy.
Final sales to private domestic purchasers rose at 3% annual
rate, and even though consumer spending is slowing down, it
still rose at 1.8% on an annual rate.
Business spending on software, research and development,
equipment and structures rose at 9.8% on an annual rate.
So again, when we look at different areas of spending, it
still looks like consumers are spending money.
The economy underneath this is still growing to some degree,
but when you have this one-of-a-kind substantial uptick
in overall imports buying other foreign goods, that's going to
impact this measurement. So looking at this, it's
difficult to interpret what the real economy looks like.
How much of this was a one time event?
We know that tariffs are expected to slow the economy,
slow consumer spending as they raise prices for imported goods,
which a large part of the US economy relies on.
But we also know that the US economy would not have
contracted at a .3% rate without the measurement of this pull
forward in imports. Either way, the market is down a
little bit today with this negative news, and we have the
president now disowning the stock market.
He posted just today that this is Biden's stock market, not
Trump's. I didn't take over until January
20th, But when the stock market was headed up during Biden's
term in January 29th of 2024, he said this is the Trump stock
market because my polls against Biden are so good that investors
are projecting that I will win. Like most politicians, he's
trying to take credit when things are going well and not
take credit when they're going poorly.
But the stock market is for looking.
It's not looking at previous GDP reports as much as it's looking
at the tariff plan ahead. Investors are trying to
underwrite the growth and prospects of these US
businesses, and Trump will have to own the stock market over the
course of 2025. Now, as investors, you're free
to do whatever you want with your money during this time of
uncertainty. But my plan and my advice
remains the same, to stay invested and stick to your plan
to buy stocks when they become cheaper, especially because of
macro concerns. Concerning yourself with macro
is generally a waste of time. I've had but multiple of my
holdings report earnings over just the past couple of days and
they've done incredibly well. My largest position is S&P
Global and the report was great. As you would expect, the stock
went up after hours. The company is flat year to date
on a down year and this is a company that's still today,
right now I believe is attractively valued.
When we combine the quality and the current valuation multiple,
this one's still trading at a discount.
Let's take a look at the most recent quarter on a trailing 12
month basis. This will give us a better idea
of overall smoothed out growth. This company's been around for a
long period of time. Let's zoom into just the past 10
years. The last year on a trailing
basis, as of the most recent quarter, it grew by 13%.
Now in Qualtrum, we have a KPI that breaks up this revenue
growth into segments. We have the market Intelligence
segment. We have the market Intelligence
segment. This is the Bloomberg Terminal
like product. A lot of data on a lot of
companies that they sell at a license or with yearly
subscriptions. Then you have the ratings
business. This is the business where they
rate the debt. Similar to Moody's, we have
commodity Insights. This is an analytical platform
that prices and gives information on commodities.
So even though commodities are highly cyclical, this data
analytics platform is far less cyclical than the underlying
commodities. Then you have mobility.
This is the car index portion of the business that owns different
assets like CarMax. It's a really great business,
but they're spinning this one off.
They're making it an entirely separate company.
We'll go into that in just a minute.
And then you have the indices where they're the owners of the
Dow Jones, the owners of the S&P 500 index.
So everyone that's investing in VOO or SPY pays this company a
little bit of a licensing fee. By that investment, they make
money as more and more people invest in the S&P 500.
Overall these businesses are growing at 13%.
S&P Global is a super profitable company.
It's one in an elite category. In the trailing 12 months, it's
up to $5.5 billion in free cash flow.
Stock based comp is a tiny fragment of their free cash
flow. This company is highly efficient
both in capital expenditures and stock based comp.
The earnings per share starting to grow as well.
The EPS is up 42% year over year, nearing back to all time
highs, even though the amount of debt being issued is still
reduced of what it was in 2021. So this company's profits are
surging far above where it used to be, even though the macro
environment was better back in 2021.
While they're posting these profits, they're buying back
shares, reducing the share count by 2%.
So you're earning more of the company as you simply hold it.
And again, throughout all of this, the company still remains
at the the lowest price to earnings ratio over the past
year. This is why I believe even
though it's had out performance, the company still attractively
valued. So overall, I was happy with S&P
Global's report, but they mentioned one thing that was a
little bit of a surprise to investors.
They mentioned that they were going to split off the mobility
portion of their business. Now again, this is the portion
of the business right here. It's a small portion and it
didn't seem to cause any trouble.
Overall, the mobility business was profitable, had fairly high
margins and was growing revenue. And when I looked into it, it
started to make more sense. On Qualtrim, we have a summary
of the earnings call transcript. This succinctly summarizes every
aspect that they discussed by topics and one of the main
aspects they discussed on the call was mobility division
separation. S&P Global announced the intent
to spin off the mobility division as a stand alone public
company within 12 to 8 months, expected to be tax free for the
US, US shareholders. They describe the mobility
business as being strong, so they're talking about it
attractively. Now this is where we have to
read between the lines. This company owns the mobility
business and they're trying to spin it off and have a
successful spin off. They're not going to talk
negatively about the mobility business, but one of the things
that they highlighted is that overall, in aggregate, when you
take all the other businesses of S&P Global, they are at a 50%
margin while mobility is at a 40% margin.
So the mobility business is a lower margin business than the
rest of S&P Global. They use vague terms here.
Again, they don't want to down talk one of the businesses that
they own. They say the separation is aimed
at sharpening strategic focus, leveraging similarities among
core divisions and unlocking value for shareholders.
The mobility business, for example, owns assets like
Carfax, Automotive, Mastermind, Market Scan.
They're entrenched with OEMs and dealers.
Now that sounds like a great business, which mobility is not
a bad business, but it doesn't align with the overall business
that S&P Global's in. The mobility business is a whole
different type of product with a different type of customer.
It usually deals with end consumers, the other segments of
their business overwhelmingly with ratings, market
intelligence, commodity insights and indices.
They serve institutional investors, governments and
corporate clients. These are clients that want
financial or macroeconomic data and analytics.
So the entire focus of the company except for mobility is
focused on these big institutional clients.
And then you have Mobility which focuses on OEM's, dealers and
consumers. It's an incredibly different
customer that you're dealing with.
And because of how different these businesses are and their
end customer, it's more operationally complex to have
this business as part of S&P Global.
S&P Global wants to be a data conglomerate selling to these
big institutional clients. They want to rely on a highly
scalable, more data centric reoccurring revenue model with
higher margins. So exiting out of the mobility
business helps them focus on that better.
And I do believe that overall this strengthens the portfolio.
S&P Global will be a higher quality company after the exit
of mobility than it was before because they are exiting a
business that's not aligned with their strategic goals and has
lower margins. Once they separate the mobility
business, I will likely exit that position as well.
Over a duration of time, I'll try to get a good deal on those
shares and reinvest them back into S&P Global.
I'm far more interested in their core business, in the credit
rating business, in the analytic platform, in the industry
business. My central thesis about S&B
Global has never been around the mobility business.
Next up, we have Visa that reported earnings.
This is a company that's held up well.
It's basically flat. The day after Visa reported
strong growth with revenue up 9% year over year, a growth rate of
10% in earnings per share. Payment volume grew by 8%, with
US payment volume up 6% and international payment up 9%.
Now, this is another thing that we can throw in conjunction with
this collapsing of GDP. Of course, Visa doesn't
represent the entire economy, but in terms of digital
spending, which in most cases people assume that you spend
with credit cards, US consumers are still spending money.
US payment volume was up 6% and international payment was up 9%.
In the quarter, Visa purchased $4.5 billion in stock and paid
$1.2 billion in dividends. And they highlight all these
different deals and advances they're making with their value
added services. Now, in terms of the GDP
contraction, they had some commentary on that.
They said that consumer spending remains strong and resilient
across segments and regions despite macroeconomic
uncertainties. You can take that how you want,
but when you put that in context of the GDP report, it seems like
they're contradictory. Visa over here is saying that
spending remains resilient by consumers.
This is incredibly different than what the news media will
tell you. They will tell you that the US
economy is in freefall, that it's collapsing, that nobody
wants to spend a dime anymore. They will cite different polling
data showing that everyone's backing off on their spending.
They're being more cautious. They're not going out, but then
you actually have the data from the source itself from Visa
themselves saying that US spending remains resilient.
There are some areas where the tariff is likely hitting the
United States, specifically with inbound travel from Europe and
Canada. Some travel categories, airlines
and lodging show slower growth, but total discretionary and non
discretionary spending is robust.
Aren't these things supposed to be caving in?
Isn't the sky supposed to be falling?
Isn't there no one traveling to the US?
It doesn't say that travel demand is collapsing.
It says that it's showing slower growth.
It's hard to come to terms with the real data, but as investors,
I'm always looking for the truth, and these companies have
the real data. It's not polls, it's not
intentions. It shows in the numbers what
consumers are really doing. As we look further into what's
going on with the US economy and the world economy, specifically
with travel, there's no greater illustration of the narratives
fighting against the data than Booking Holdings.
Booking Holdings is a company. That I invested in recently,
it's actually one of my newer holdings and it's been a quickly
profitable one. The reason that I invested in
this company is because Simply put, the fundamentals of this
company, the economics of it are breathtaking.
They are shockingly good. I pour over companies to look
for high quality ones, ones that have all the different financial
metrics that I like to see. And it's not an understatement
to say that Booking Holdings has some of the craziest financial
metrics you'll see in any company.
Whether it's the rapid and consistent revenue growth
outside of a global pandemic, the constant pouring in a free
cash flow this company generates at a very consistent and growing
basis. And doing it with almost no
stock based comp, incredibly fast earnings per share growth.
And importantly, this company has such incredible economics.
It was even profitable during the pandemic, a literal
pandemic, and a travel company still made money.
This company pours money into buybacks, aggressively lowering
the share count for investors. In the past year, they've
eliminated 4.7% of the share count.
If we look at the margins of this company, they have 100%
gross margins. No, that's not a mistake.
The operating margins are 31%. That's higher than the gross
margins of many companies and the profit margins are 25%.
This isn't an elite category that only few companies on
planet Earth have higher profit margins.
Ones like Visa, MasterCard and Booking Holdings trades at a far
lower valuation than either of those companies.
So I've loved this company from the very beginning.
The 2nd that I started learning about it, I liked it more and
more and I made a heavy investment in it and so far it's
done really well. It's flat year to date, even
amongst all the scary news that we've heard and seen around the
travel collapse. And if you've looked at the
mainstream news at all, you've seen article after article of
the collapse in travel demand from USA TODAY.
Canadian travelers are taking their loonies elsewhere, tanking
demand for US flights. CNBC reports that airlines
expect to cut 2025 outlooks as travel demand falters.
Plane tickets are getting cheaper as domestic travel
demand weakens. Economic turbulence shakes US
airlines as travel demand falters.
And so on and so forth. We've seen article after article
of US travel demand faltering. And what did Booking Holdings do
this quarter? Booking holdings beat the annual
assessments on the revenue, the earnings per share, the gross
bookings, Adjusted EBITDA, adjusted earnings per share and
the room nights sold. Every category of this company,
they be analyst estimates and the CEO went on to an interview
of CNBC to explain that this was overall a great quarter.
We're saying that we're still saying for the future for the
full year EPS mid double digit numbers, the top widen out a
little bit too low double digit. So that's not not coming out
with something that's recognizing that there could be
some uncertainty. By the way, we're not really
seeing it yet. We started the whole call with
say, hey, we're seeing steady travel globally.
I'll be in some parts of the world like the US maybe having a
little bit of a softer time. But for us, we're very.
Global He notes that the US is maybe having a softer time, but
they are a global company, so they're not as concerned if
there's a slowdown in travel from Europe and Canada
specifically to the United States.
I understand certainly we're going, we'd like the US to be
doing better too, but because we're so global, we get a
benefit. So if a Canadian, for example,
says I don't want to go to the US and they go to Mexico
instead, but we'll still get that booking and it's still
going to show up on our, you know, our PNL.
I'll be not so great for the hotelier in the US though.
The question for booking holdings is not whether or not
people want a vacation in the United States, it's whether or
not people want to go on vacations at all.
I still believe at the end of the day, people are always going
to want to travel. This is a point that I've
consistently agreed with him on is that travel is an innate
desire. People want to go, have
experiences, and over time people are prioritizing that
higher and higher. In the summary of the earnings
call, we have a section devoted to travel demand and market
trends. This is where they talk about
the US travel demand. They were asked specifically
about this by analysts and the response was more of the same.
They're basically saying that the news that there's a travel
collapse has an element of truth.
There is some moderation in travel to the United States, but
it's far exaggerated. Everything that they show here
shows that this news is continually being exaggerated.
They say that the regional room night growth of Europe and Asia
saw high single digit growth. The rest of the world grew at
low double digits while the United States grew at low single
digit growth. So the US travel industry is
still growing, but much slower than the rest of the world.
Booking Holdings remains far more resilient than people give
it credit for. The company is still undervalued
according to the metrics. It trades at APE ratio of 22, a
free cash flow yield of 5.3% while growing earnings double
digits. Despite the uncertainty it faces
in the future, I'm still excited about this company.
Now, a company that I don't currently own, annoyingly, is
Fair Isaac. And the reason that I believe
this company is annoying is because it's one that I don't
own and it consistently does so well.
So I'm sitting here watching this one from the sidelines.
So are higher and higher and do better and better.
In summary of their financial performance, they reported $499
million in revenue, up 15% year over year.
GAAP income was up 25%. GAAP earnings per share was up
28%. They had free cash flow this
quarter of 65,000,677 million over the past four quarters, a
45% increase year over year. And they reiterated their fiscal
2025 guidance. Nothing has changed their
prospects this year so far. I have this one as a top
consideration on the watch list. And for now, I'm still waiting
on the sidelines for an entry point.
Spotify's another company that just reported yesterday and it's
trading up another 4% today. Spotify and Netflix, ironically
these two companies that in many cases are considered weaker or
have a weaker Moat, are companies that are both widely
in the green this year, up 20 and 30% year to date.
The management of Spotify acknowledges the macroeconomic
uncertainty but believes its business model is resilient,
engaging and increasingly central to users lies.
The company maintains its confidence in the long term
outlook driven by its freemium model, high engagement,
retention and flexibility of the users during uncertain times.
In 2025, it positioned itself as the year of accelerated
execution. They are still hitting the gas
and the company continues to gain market share with new
subscribers. I have no complaints about
Spotify's quarter. I think it was good across the
board. It's really tough to be critical
about this company and Spotify's performance continues to prove a
lot of people wrong. I'm not going to talk about
these ones too much today. I want to have time to really
dive into the report and have a better take on them.
So I'll be talking about these companies later in the week.
Make sure you're following the Joseph Carlson After Hours
channel to see follow up commentary on these.
One that I want to go over going into this earnings is Amazon.
Amazon is down another 3.28% on the day, trading at $180 as of
today. When we look at the stock price
and we zoom out five years, this is what it looks like.
Now I'm going to draw a line here and this line is from the
beginning of 2020 to current day, right about there.
You'll notice that today Amazon is trading at roughly the exact
same price it hit in Q2 of 2020, so the same price today as Q2 of
2020. What has happened over that time
period, over those past 4 1/2 years?
If we bring up the revenue of Amazon in Q2 of 2020, we can see
that it was $321 billion, so 321.
The last quarter was $637 billion, meaning during this
time period where the stock is the exact same, revenue has 2X
doubled the total revenue of the company, which was already
massive five years ago. Now importantly, not only did
the revenue double since Q2 of 2020, because that doesn't
really give Amazon enough credit, what really happened is
the low margin revenue, the first party sales.
This lowest margin revenue went from 163 billion to around 247
billion. So it did grow, but not that
much. When we look at the third party
seller services, which is a much more important form of revenue
with higher margins. This went from 63 billion to 156
billion. It over 2X.
During that time period, advertising went from virtually
nothing, not even a reportable metric, to now a $56 billion
advertising business. Which is notable because this is
expected to be one of the highest, if not the highest
margin form of Amazon's revenue. Meaning that not only did the
revenue double, but during the doubling of this revenue, the
revenue also became higher quality overall, higher margin,
a higher mix of higher quality businesses.
In Q2 of 2020, Amazon earned an EPS of $1.30.
The trailing 12 months to date is $5.53, so the earnings per
share roughly 4X D. Over that time period, Amazon's
net income went from 13 billion to 59 billion.
The operating margins have likewise doubled over that same
time period, again of the stock remaining flat.
Now, you may argue that Amazon was just dramatically overvalued
in 2020. Investors are simply making
their decisions of whether or not the stock was overvalued
then or undervalued now. When I look at the situation
here, I continue to believe that the stock was not overvalued in
2020. I believe investors buying the
company for around 170 or 180 in 2020 made the right decision,
and I believe investors selling the stock today are making the
wrong decision. We can look at a very similar
circumstance if we look at Netflix over the past five
years, investors could have incorrectly concluded the same
thing. The stock at one point looked
like it was an incorrect buy to buy it in 2020, like investors
are paying too much to buy it then.
After all, the stock was trading for $700.00 per share.
So during this time period, it felt like you were paying too
much. It was overvalued.
And look at where the company is now in 2022 or in 2023.
All the time you felt like you were overpaying.
But as soon as we got to 2024. But here's how the math works
Now. If you bought Netflix at the
highest point, the very top of the most expensive part of 2021,
let's say you had the absolute worst timing and you bought it
there and you simply held it to current day, you would have a
64% gain, far outperforming both the QQQ and the S&P 500.
Your gain in Netflix is 64%. Your gain in the S&P 500 over
this exact same time period would be 15%.
It's difficult to judge things even in hindsight in some
situations. A buyer that looked really bad
just a couple years ago now looks really good.
And I believe we're going to see the same thing with Amazon.
If we bring up Amazon again, we can look over the past five
years and it's disheartening to see a stock trade flat for so
many years. But if we look at the
fundamentals of the company and note the aggressive revenue
growth, all the different industries that Amazon has
gotten into, they've grown into the profitability metrics alone
show that this company fundamentally is on the move.
Even though the stock price doesn't reflect that today, it
eventually will. Stocks can remain a voting
machine for a short period of time.
Investors right now are voting because they're scared about
tariffs and the uncertainty in the market.
But over a longer period of time, these buys right here may
actually turn out to look like very smart buys.
The most important thing is to continue following the
fundamentals of a company and we'll see what Amazon says
tomorrow. Now that's gonna be it for this
episode. Hope you enjoyed.
See in the next one.