Thomas J. Gordon

How to Value Amazon?

Good article. I see msft and intc with true monopolies in their segment (and I don't imply the got that position in a nefarious way) with stocks that have made no serious move in the last five years. And amazon with no monopoly pricing power is a stock darling. As far as I'm concerned the only explanation is the momo day traders and fad favoring money managers have latched on. It's a short but telling when to step in is extremely difficult.

Why Amazon Will Continue to Outperform in This Sluggish Market

Invest Baboo,
I have no doubts growth stocks are back. The question is, which ones. msft and amzn have both been around a long time. No big question about what each one does and that they have good management. msft has a p to e of 10. someone above said amzn has a p to e of 40 on 2010 earnings. I think msft has true monopoly pricing power in many of its products. I'm less sure that amzn has monopoly pricing power in what it does. this shows in their margins. amzn has had a good ride. the momo investors are once again enamored. but I have seen this before and it ended in tears.

Why Amazon Will Continue to Outperform in This Sluggish Market

It's obviously a crap shoot but I think amzn is very vulnerable to a bad economy. I can think of nothing more discretionary than a buy from amzn. I think they made 2008 because 1/2 the people in the country budget christmas from the beginnning of the year and the other half will borrow money for christmas and deal with it next year. hpq made q4 2008 and then said "uncle" in q1 2009.

Amazon Demonstrates How Cloud Computing Can Change the World

Would big companies really put highly summarized and accurate datasets out on a cloud service they didn't control? Maybe there are people who have large datasets to analyze that don't have the computer resources to do so. These people might be the customers here. But pc's do so much now and the software is so cheap. I used to do statistical analysis in college on mainframes and I'm very confident any pc could easily do that stuff now. I don't think this is going to be a major business unit of amazon in 5 years.

Shorting the Four Horsemen as Market Grinds Lower?

I am shorting amzn as a hedge. The p to e is high, I think their q4 was forward momentum from earlier in the year that will not continue into 2009. But if the stock market goes up, sales of publicly traded companies increase, the economy gets better, amzn goes up, my short loses, but the rest of my portfolio gains so I am happy. If everything is going downhill, amzn seems like a good stock to be short.

The Dangers of Cloud Computing: VirtSec on Steroids

I find this interesting. How a saas environment does new releases is fascinating to me. How does crm do new release of its sales lead mgmt software? I have worked in IT a long time. When you have a 1000 different companies using the same software (is that how crm does it?) what happens when you want to do a release? Some people get really irratable when you change what they are using. What if the changes you want to make require database changes and you have to upgrade 1000 customers at the same time? My guess is crm doesn't do many changes to its software that affect existing customers and that changes are slower than for most shops that have in house IT. But I'm not sure. Anyone have any experience with this? ... Flash