The Economy sucks.
Most of us are running harder to stand still for sure.
Italy, Spain, Greece, China and Russia are struggling
Despite the global economy woes, the ‘THREE horsemen’ are cranking away devouring market share and price appreciation.
$AMZN – The most underowned great stock of all time. Main street America and your mutual fund won’t own it because the stock performance mystifies them based on their financial performance. One day that will matter and Amazon always seems the most likely to fall from grace. Those that have just used the services and trusted Jeff have been rewarded. It’s not much more than that and sometimes that is all that matters. If I were not to own one of the horsemen, this would be it (but I do).
$AAPL – I have been shaken out of the stock recently, but I will probably own it again. There is nothing but Apple equipment in my house save a few kindles and a TV. The stock sits near all-time weekly closing highs. If you told me they would miss their recent numbers and sit where they sit, I would not have believed it. Wall Street has moved on from Steve Jobs to Tim Cook. They have given the company a new multiple. I don’t know why, it just happened. The company was undervalued while Steve ran the show and by January we will know a lot more. For now, it’s just the stocks price that seems to matter.
$GOOG – This is the strongest Company of the four horsemen. They are confident and relentless. If you are an employee that stayed at Google through the Facebook blitzkrieg, you feel smart and more loyal than ever. I believe search is getting better and MORE important. Add Maps, Chrome, Gmail, YouTube, Droid, bandwith and sheer brainpower it finally feels like the stock I have to own again. I don’t quite yet.
There is no fourth come to think of it. Salesforce is doing an amazing job keeping itself relevant with acquisitions and vision from the top, but the stock is 30 percent from it’s highs.
The most deserving new horseman would be Wal-Mart but it’s Wal-Mart and I don’t do sales and greetings creep me out when I am about to spend money.
It’s pretty thin at the top and that is why it has been hard for most managers to outperform.
If you peel back things a little further like Ivan and I with the Stocktwits50, you will see some great new leadership emerging in this tape. The Three Horsemen matter but finding and holding the next few are just as important.
GOOG continues to be the biggest one trip pony of all time. Admittedly that one trick was a really good one. It’s amazing how much good will the company buys itself by giving away free products. MA or V would be my third horse.
i agree on $V …if I were to add a fourth and I should, it would be $v and $nke. I would like it to be Fedex but just too cyclical still
guess it’s time we call this the Tablet Economy
it really is, but desktops still matter enough. I would say Tablet and Payment society which is why a $V needs to be added I imagine.
Reminds me of a conversation I had with a coworker last fall – that I would have never imagined a search engine, a book seller, and a computer manufacturer would end up in the head-to-head, brutal business showdown of the decade. It’ll be interesting to watch it play out – these are definitely the three big ones to watch, but who will come out on top (content distribution all the way to the end device) remains to be seen.
As far as Salesforce, I’m not bullish in the long run. I’ll be at Dreamforce for work and, don’t get me wrong, 70,000 people descending on the Moscone Center is impressive, but in the end they’ve just built a slightly nicer, slightly more modern, slightly more open piece of junk. CRM is a must-have, and if I had to spend money on one, I’d buy Salesforce, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not a market ripe for disruption.
CRM has failed to deliver on its core value prop of visibility for management down the funnel. Salesforce still relies on sales people manually entering quality data (which they don’t) and has a poor analytics layer on top. Solve for those two, and $CRM becomes a legacy app just like the other CRM players. Looking at SAP and ORCL, there’s still good money to be made in being the incumbent legacy software company, but it’s not where the growth is.
thanks Dan
I agree, yet SF continues to grow.
Street could not trust a messiah, but it does understand a supplier.
interesting commentary about Amazon. I didn’t realize the stock was mystfying to mutual funds and other investors. Perhaps a social media index could be the fourth horseman??
check out the swebindex we created for stocktwits. http://swebindex.com/
social media is not a business, but a tool. the index we set up was of companies posiued to benefiit the most FROM the social web, not the social web as the investment itself.
Would not surprise if your dark fourth is your buddy $LKND over the long haul. The Amazon of social media.
yep. still early to call a horseman
How about Samsung?
not a horseman, but a workehorse for sure.