Here’s today’s question: do you think 18.3x forward earnings is a good risk/reward bet? For me, the answer is no. And I say this because investors have a very compelling alternative. We don’t need to look any further than bond yields. For example, the 12-month US treasury yield offers investors 5.45%
Stocks Treading Water for a Good Reason
Stocks cannot get out of neutral. If anything, they appear to be going into reverse. Makes sense… they ripped~ 30% higher in 9 short months. But the risks are increasing as prices rise. This post looks at “equity risk premium”. In short, investors are not being adequately compensated for the risk being taken in stocks (at current valuations) against the risk free return from Treasuries.
Buffett is Buying Bonds
Warren Buffett is pouring tens of billions of Berkshire money into short and longer-term bonds. And I’m not surprised… For e.g., Jul 9th I offered this post “Think About Adding Bonds”. Shorter-term bills were offering investors ~5.50% and the longer-date 10-year bond above 4.0%. That’s attractive for a number of reasons… this post explains why.
Apple: An Incredible Business – But Don’t Overpay
This week the final two mega-cap tech names reported Q2 earnings. Amazon handily exceeded what were very low expectations. AWS (Cloud) sales rose 12% year over year – much better than feared – given the soft results reported from Microsoft’s Azure. This sent the Cloud and eCommerce giant higher by ~11% . On the other hand, investors had a very different reaction to Apple’s earnings. The iPhone maker’s results were mostly inline. But “inline” is not good enough when it’s trading ~30x to 31x forward earnings. So what is the right multiple to pay for Apple? And can it reignite growth looking ahead?
For a full list of posts from 2017…