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Company name: Microsoft Corporation
Stock ticker: MSFT
Live stock price feed: [stckqut]MSFT[/stckqut]

P/E compared to competitors: Good

Employee productivity: Good
Sales growth: Fair
EPS growth: Good
P/E growth: Poor
EBIT growth: Poor

Confident Investor Rating: Fair

Target stock price (high): $20.51
Target stock price (low): $15.17

At this price and at this time, I do not think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in this stock.

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In a recent Wall Street Journal article, Goldman Sachs compared the top 5 companies in 2000 to the top 5 companies today. In that comparison, Goldman concludes that the market is not repeating the problems of 2000 that caused the stock bubble in today’s market.

The top 5 companies in the S&P 500 today are:

  1. Facebook Inc.  [stckqut]FB[/stckqut],
  2. Apple Inc.  [stckqut]AAPL[/stckqut],
  3. Amazon.com Inc.  [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut],
  4. Microsoft Corp.  [stckqut]MSFT[/stckqut],
  5. Alphabet Inc.  [stckqut]GOOGL[/stckqut].

and of 2000 were:

  1. Microsoft,
  2. Cisco Systems Inc.  [stckqut]CSCO[/stckqut],
  3. General Electric Co.  [stckqut]GE[/stckqut],
  4. Intel Corp.  [stckqut]INTC[/stckqut],
  5. Exxon Mobil Corp.  [stckqut]XOM[/stckqut].

The five companies in 2000 traded at 47 times expected earnings, according to Goldman. Today’s five biggest companies trade at 30 times expected earnings—making them by no means a bargain, but still less expensive than the stocks that dominated the stock run in the early 2000s.

The tech giants powering the S&P 500 today also reinvest far more of their profits into their businesses than their predecessors did. The five companies funnel about 48% of their cash flow from operations into capital expenditure and research and development spending, according to Goldman, well above the S&P 500’s 21% average and the 26% average for the five biggest companies in March 2000.

According to Goldman, “Lower growth expectations, lower valuations and a greater reinvestment ratio suggest the current concentration may be more sustainable than it proved to be in 2000.”

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Big Tech can generate big numbers, but it was fast growth in the cloud business that helped ignite a buying frenzy Friday that drove up market values by nearly $139 billion in 30 minutes.

The stunning growth of the cloud businesses at Amazon.com Inc. [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut] Microsoft Corp. [stckqut]MSFT[/stckqut], and Google parent Alphabet Inc. [stckqut]GOOGL[/stckqut] were a relatively small part of the strong quarterly results the three companies reported Thursday. But fast growth in cloud revenue, along with relatively stable service prices that helped profit margins during the quarter, gave investors reasons to bet the three giants could maintain their growth trajectories.

Shares of the three companies kept rising Friday, with their combined $147 billion market-value gain topping the value of more than 90% of the other companies in the S&P 500, including nearly every other company selling cloud-based software services.

Source: Tech Rally Is Juiced by Highflying Cloud Business – WSJ

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Some things, even huge piles of money can’t buy.

One of those things might be the ability to unseat Amazon.com Inc.’s [stckqut]AMZN[/stckqut] AWS as the king of the cloud computing market. Not that others haven’t made a game effort. The two largest challengers— Microsoft Corp.[stckqut]MSFT[/stckqut] and Google parent Alphabet Inc.[stckqut]GOOGL[/stckqut]—have dropped about $52 billion combined in capital expenditures over the past three years, much of which goes toward their massive networks of data centers and related equipment. That’s double what the two spent over the previous three-year period.

It’s not been without results. Microsoft’s Azure cloud service more than doubled its revenue in 2016 to about $2.7 billion, according to estimates from J.P. Morgan. Google’s Cloud Platform surpassed $1 billion in revenue in 2016, estimates Aaron Kessler of Raymond James.

The latter is particularly of note, given that it’s been barely a year since Google brought in former VMware chief Diane Greene to run the cloud division and focus on enterprise customers. It took AWS at least five years to hit the $1 billion mark, judging from Amazon’s limited disclosures at the time.

Source: Amazon Rivals Have Big Clouds to Fill – WSJ

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Apple [stckqut]AAPL[/stckqut] is known for brutal efficiency, regularly killing off features and products that no longer serve its purposes.

So there is irony in the fact investors have taken a similarly ruthless view of Apple itself, penalizing the company heavily ahead of what is expected to be the slowest year on record for its key product: the iPhone. Apple’s share price ended 2015 down 4.6%, marking its first drop in seven years. That selloff looks overdone, even if one accepts the prevailing view that the iPhone 6s won’t sell at a pace anything like that of its predecessor.

Consider that Apple is now the cheapest stock among the 10 largest tech companies in the S&P 500, once its huge net cash pile of $150 billion is excluded. That means Apple is cheaper than other growth-challenged giants like Microsoft [stckqut]MSFT[/stckqut], Oracle, Cisco Systems [stckqut]CSCO[/stckqut] and International Business Machines [stckqut]IBM[/stckqut].

Source: Apple Peeled: Getting Under the Skin of iPhone Worries