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.”

NVIDIA Corporation [stckqut]NVDA[/stckqut] is driven by “specialized computing,” that is, the transforming of specific software tasks into physical silicon chips instead of depending on an ever-faster do-it-all CPU, or central processing unit. It has existed in some form or another for decades, but it has lately become the driving force behind pretty much everything cool in technology, from artificial intelligence to self-driving cars. Why? Because those CPUs aren’t getting faster at the pace they once were. Moore’s Law is dying.

Moore’s Law is the notion that, every two years or so, the number of transistors in a chip doubles. Its popular conception is that computers keep getting faster, smaller and more power-efficient. That isn’t happening the way it used to. “It’s not like Moore’s Law is going to hit a brick wall — it’s going to kind of sputter to an end,” says Daniel Reed, chair of computational science and bioinformatics at the University of Iowa.

As Intel and the other chip foundries spend fortunes to keep the wheel turning, chip designers across the industry are finding creative ways to continue at the old pace of Moore’s Law, and in many cases increase device performance even more quickly.

“Most of the advances today come from [chip] design and software,” says Nvidia chief scientist William Dally. “For us it’s been a challenge because we feel under a lot of pressure to constantly deliver twice the performance per generation,” he adds. So far, Nvidia has accomplished that cadence even when the size of the elements on the chip doesn’t change, and the only thing that does is its design, or “architecture.”

Here’s a less-than-exhaustive list of all the applications to which the principle of specialized computing has been applied: Artificial intelligence, image recognition, self-driving cars, virtual reality, bitcoin mining, drones, data centers, even photography. Pretty much every technology company that makes hardware or supplies it — including Apple, Samsung, Amazon, Qualcomm, Nvidia, Broadcom, Intel, Huawei and Xiaomi — is exploiting this phenomenon. Even companies that only produce chips for their own use, including Microsoft, Google, and Facebook, are doing it.

Many years ago, almost all computing was done with the CPU, one thing after another in sequence, says Keith Kressin, a senior vice president at Qualcomm. Gradually, often-used but processor-intensive tasks were diverted to specialized chips. Those tasks were processed in parallel, while the CPU did only what was absolutely required.

These task-focused chips come in a wide variety, reflecting the breadth of their uses, and the lines between them can be blurry. One kind, the graphics processing unit — think Nvidia and gamers — found wider use for tasks to which it’s uniquely suited, including artificial intelligence. Later on, the rise of smartphones created a gigantic need for another type, digital signal processing chips, designed to enhance photography, for example.

Source: How Chip Designers Are Breaking Moore’s Law – WSJ

Company name Intel Corporation
Stock ticker INTC
Live stock price [stckqut]INTC[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Good

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

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

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Good
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $16.31
Target stock price (averages with growth) $24.74
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $27.2
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $17.76

The following company description is from Google Finance: http://www.google.com/finance?q=intc

Intel Corporation designs and manufactures integrated digital technology platforms. A platform consists of a microprocessor and chipset. The Company sells these platforms primarily to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), original design manufacturers (ODMs), and industrial and communications equipment manufacturers in the computing and communications industries. The Company’s platforms are used in a range of applications, such as personal computers (PCs) (including Ultrabook systems), data centers, tablets, smartphones, automobiles, automated factory systems and medical devices. On February 2012, QLogic Corp. sold the product lines and certain assets associated with its InfiniBand business to the Company. In May 2012, Cray Inc. completed the sale of its interconnect hardware development program and related intellectual property to the Company. In September 2012, InterDigital, Inc.’s subsidiaries sold around 1,700 patents and patent applications to the Company.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this time, I think that a Confident Investor can cautiously invest in this stock as long as the price is correct. Most of the fundamentals of this company are good, in fact the company ranks as a Good company, but there are some concerns with the price of the stock and overall growth.  I will not be adding this stock to my Watch List.

Company name Intel Corporation
Stock ticker INTC
Live stock price [stckqut]INTC[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Fair
MANAGEMENT EXECUTION
Employee productivity Good
Sales growth Poor
EPS growth Poor
P/E growth Fair
EBIT growth Poor
ANALYSIS
Confident Investor Rating Poor
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $15.39
Target stock price (averages with growth) $20.2
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $16.99
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $18.47

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