Pinning a value on big tech's top names. Not as easy as it looks Does the efficient markets hypothesis (EMH among friends) have any value when looking at tech companies in the enterprise and data centre world? EMH does not mean markets are the efficient way of doing things. There is no implication at all that healthcare, scientific research or the military should be delivered by market …
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Amazon's model is to not make a profit until there is only Amazon. Any money it does happen to make from selling the latest Harry Potter is spent on building new business areas. In this way it should be worth more than Apple.
Think Honda when they first started out making mopeds vs Rolls Royce - who would you rather have invested in in the 1950s?
Markets are what are? Surely they can't be "right" or "wrong".
Then there is pricing by vendors. Too high and they lose sales. But sometimes too low and they lose sales. Sometimes they need to price higher than Competition (Apple).
So how do you even compare prices of similar products.
Right for who? Investors, Speculators, Consumers, Tax gatherers, resource producers, factory owners (who don't sell to public).
I think if I could figure it I should make money, maybe get a Nobel when I expose all in biography and not waste time writing here.
Not only do you have a statistical chance of doing better, you'd have to underperform by the amount of the management fee to come out worse off. Find me a fund manager that charges fees only if they do better than the index and only then will I consider letting them gamble with a bit of my hard-earned.
"Repeated experiments have shown those random monkeys outperform most fund mangers."
Repeated experience have also shown that random monkeys can outperform most "tech" pundits when it comes the future of the industry.
You'll notice that some of the companies in your list are highly diversified and operate in mature markets, while others are narrowly focused and operate in rapidly growing markets.
If you primarily sell PC operation systems and office packages, then your room for growing sales of those products is limited. If you are primarily in e-commerce and "cloud", then rapid growth comes naturally. There needn't be anything extraordinary about the companies in either case, they are just following the general trend for the market they are in.
As for how does a company get in on the ground floor of a growth market? Very often, it's by chance. All they need to do then is to not screw it up.
Salesforce - Somebody, one of the big but stodgy vendors, will buy them out at a good premium.
This is important, because if the EMH is true in some form (even weak), then this information is also figured into the price. It's "information" even though it's only an estimate of probability (i.e., a guess). Some market actors will estimate that probability based on a model (actually reified in some form, or just implicit as a "hunch" or "intuition") derived from the history of M&A activity in the sector and similar data; others are simply following the crowd.
But in either case acquisition is a way for investors to realize some - often significant - return. So it drives the "rational" P/E higher, because it increases the probable rate of return.
On the other hand, you can explain a higher valuation without resorting to EMH in various ways, for example by claiming that stock prices are essentially stochastic because market actors are essentially irrational.1 So in that sense looking at P/E ratios doesn't really tell us anything to support or contradict the EMH. But then again, examining these things and thinking about them can be a useful paideic exercise, so what the hell.
1Not everything that's true is true for a reason. Gregory Chaitin proved that formally with AIT.
cheating.
And in the current system the questions no longer seems to be whether it's legal (who can tell with all those rules nowadays), but rather whether it's possible to get away with it. Bubbles, derivatives, hedging, speed trading, it's all about insider knowledge or moving the market with disinformation campaigns and money.
Maybe cheating averages out in the economic models (one person's loss is another's gain), but I'd guess it's greatly involved in the economic bottom --> top redistribution we see internationally.
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