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Company name Google Inc
Stock ticker GOOG
Live stock price [stckqut]GOOG[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Fair

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

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

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Good
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $633.17
Target stock price (averages with growth) $839.56
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $628.82
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $607.82

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

Google Inc. (Google), is a global technology company. The Company’s business is primarily focused around key areas, such as search, advertising, operating systems and platforms, enterprise and hardware products. The Company generates revenue primarily by delivering online advertising. The Company also generates revenues from Motorola by selling hardware products. The Company provides its products and services in more than 100 languages and in more than 50 countries, regions, and territories. Effective February 7, 2014, Google Inc acquired the remaining 88% interest in Nest Labs Inc. Effective February 21, 2014, Google Inc acquired Spider.io, a provider of online fraud detection services. Effective March 12, 2014, Google Inc acquired Green Throttle Games. In April 2014, Google Inc acquired Titan Aerospace. Effective May 5, 2014, the Company acquired Rangespan. Effective May 6, 2014, the Company acquired Adometry Inc. Effective May 7, 2014, the Company acquired Appetas Inc.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this price and at this time, I think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in Google Inc.

If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor. You can review the best companies that I have found (and I probably invest my own money in most of these companies) in my Watch List.

How was this analysis of Google Inc calculated?

For owners of my book, “The Confident Investor” I offer the following analysis (you must be logged in to this site as a book owner in order to see the following analysis). If you have registered and cannot see the balance of this article, make sure you are logged in and refresh your browser.
[s2If current_user_can(s2member_level1)]
In order to assist you in using the techniques of this book, the values that I used when calculating the Manual pricing above were:

Stock price at the time of the calculation: $511

Growth: 0.14

Current EPS (TTM): $18.83

P/E: 27

Future EPS Calc: $36.25

Future Stock Price Calc: $978.9

Target stock price: $607.81

I hope that this makes you a better investor. [/s2If]

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ID-100203460The beginning of the year is when it seems like every financial website puts out its top or worst stocks. In that vein, I offer my 15 recommended stocks for 2014 – or at least the first half of the year. I cannot list the worst stocks, as there are too many of those to list. I can at least list the 15 recommended stocks that will give you a good basis for the first half of 2014.

Many sites do all year lists, but I am only committing to this list for the first 6 months. There is a great reason for this. It is almost impossible to predict the market farther out than 6 month. In fact, it is quite possible for the market to do a massive correction and even this list would be a fallacy. There is always some risk with any investment and you are encouraged to read this site’s disclaimer before acting on this list.

I would expect all of these companies to maintain their status as Good Companies on my Watch List. I would not expect all of them to make a top 15 recommended stocks list at the end of June. Some of them will grow a bit slower than I expect, and a couple of the 15 recommended stocks are probably going to lose money. As Peter Lynch famously said:

“In this business if you’re good, you’re right six times out of ten. You’re never going to be right nine times out of ten.”

By Peter’s standards, I hope to right on this list with 9 of these picks. I don’t expect all 15 recommended stocks to be massive growth stocks in the year. I also think the list is successful if the list of 15 beats the S&P 500 and the Dow30. In July, perhaps I will publish a list for the second half of the year.

If we would go back in time (starting from December 1) and buy the 15 recommended stocks 3 years ago our portfolio would have grown very nicely. These stocks would have appreciated by 73.35% year over year. They would have grown 184.79% over the last three years. These stocks would have beaten the market (as measured by the Dow Jones Industrial Average) for the last three years by 330.57%. In the past year, these stocks would have beaten the market by 212.17%. With that track record, we should expect good results in the next 6 months.

All of the stocks on this list are rated as Good Companies using the method that I describe in my book The Confident Investor.  You can purchase my book wherever books are sold such as Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Books A Million. It is available in e-book formats for Nook, Kindle, and iPad.

The 15 recommended stocks were chosen from Good Companies on my Watch List. This means we already know they are fairly well managed and have a history of solid growth. While all of the stocks on the Watch List are Good Companies, these 15 recommended stocks seem to be the most well setup for aggressive growth in the first half of 2014.

The 15 recommended stocks for the first half of 2014 also performed very well over the past year and the past 3 years. As I have written before, the past is not a perfect indicator of the future, but it is probably the best indicator that we have to use.

I didn’t try overly hard to make this list of 15 recommended stocks to be a balanced portfolio covering multiple industries. I am happy to report that it isn’t a terrible unbalance. The most glaring omission is that it is very light in banking and in consumer technology. I simply could not find a banking stock that was worth the risk compared to other industries. Also, the consumer technology vertical is simply not performing that well right now. I anticipate that trend to continue for the next few months at least.

It might be possible to criticize this list by its heavy reliance on healthcare and retail. That would be fair but, once again, I wasn’t trying to get a perfectly balanced portfolio.

If you want a more balanced portfolio, you may want to consider some of the Honorable Mention stocks at the end of the list. Also, I always maintain that you should have approximately 30% of your portfolio invested in index funds. These funds should be divided by large and small cap funds, an index bond fund, and an index international fund. This would help to balance your portfolio.

You could also look at the Watch List of stocks. These stocks have shown that they are well-run companies. If you are concerned about a balanced portfolio, I suggest that you compliment the 15 recommended stocks with a couple stocks from the Watch List.

The list of 15 recommended stocks for the first half of 2014

  • ABMD
  • ALXN
  • BCPC
  • BLK
  • BWLD
  • CBI
  • CERN
  • GPOR
  • PCLN
  • QCOR
  • SAM
  • TMO
  • TSCO
  • UA
  • ULTA

Read More →

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I recently came across this list on Forbes on the largest 25 tax payers. Forbes does a bit of analysis on each of them. It is probably worth your time to jump over, but I thought I would give the highlights here:

 

Rank of tax expense

Company

Symbol

Effective Tax Rate
1 ExxonMobil XOM 39%
2 Chevron Corporation CVX 43%
3 Apple Inc. AAPL 25%
4 Wells Fargo & Co. WFC 31.2%
5 JP Morgan Chase & Co. JPM 26%
6 Wal-Mart Stores WMT 31%
7 ConocoPhillips COP 51.5%
8 Berkshire Hathaway Inc. BRK 28%
9 IBM IBM 24%
10 Microsoft Corporation MSFT 22.8%
11 Philip Morris International Inc. PM 29.5%
12 Goldman Sachs GS 33%
14 Comcast Corporation CMCS 32%
14 The Procter & Gamble Co. PG 23.5%
15 Johnson & Johnson JNJ 23.7%
16 Intel Corporation INTC 23.6%
17 Occidental Petroleum Corp. OXY 42%
18 UnitedHealth Group UHG 35.9%
19 The Walt Disney Company DIS 32.7%
20 AT&T T 27.8%
21 Oracle ORCL 21.4%
22 The Coca-Cola Company KO 23.1%
23 The Home Depot Inc. HD 37.2%
24 McDonald’s MCD 32.4%
25 Google GOOG 19.4%

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Gold prices have dropped a bit in the last couple months. This has caused some consternation among some investors. This is utterly foolish!

My gut is investing in gold right now is not particularly logical. It unquestionably is trending down. That is unwelcome news for some of the gold mines, but it is hardly a concern for a Confident Investor. We can easily invest in other companies that are doing well and are not subject to the whims of a commodity price. If you read this site even for a short time, you should know that I don’t like a “Buy and Hold” investment strategy.

Historically, gold was used as a safeguard against risk in the financial world. It was seen as a safe harbor when there was uncertainty in other investments. This was one of the principal reasons given when gold was growing so quickly from the beginning of 2006 to mid-2011. Then as the economy stopped hurting so badly, the price leveled off in late 2011 and 2012. It is not surprising, in fact it is expected, the price would drop with a stable economy.

As we look at the Gold ETF [stckqut]GLD[/stckqut], this is exactly what we see. There is quite a bit of volume as the price increases into 2011. Then, the volume drops substantially as the price oscillates in a sideways channel. Now the volume has increased as the price drops. What this shows is that money was flowing into this investment vehicle, it was be held, and now it is flowing out. The new home for that money is not currently clear but maybe it is the reason the stock market has been breaking records lately.

NYSEARCA GLD SPDR Gold Trust ETF from Google Finance

Many will point out that the economy is not as strong as it could be. That is fine. I won’t argue that point. However, the economy has been fairly stable for at least the last 12 months with a extremely slow recovery and painfully slow reduction in unemployment. The economy is not getting worse, and by most measures it is holding its own or slightly improving.

A while back I suggested that you should not invest based on politics or economic announcements. Gold is an economic announcement. You should watch it and understand it, but trying to decipher how it is going to move Google [stckqut]GOOG[/stckqut], Apple [stckqut]AAPL[/stckqut] or Ebay [stckqut]EBAY[/stckqut] is a fool’s errand.

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Company name Google Inc
Stock ticker GOOG
Live stock price [stckqut]GOOG[/stckqut]
P/E compared to competitors Good

MANAGEMENT EXECUTION

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

ANALYSIS

Confident Investor Rating Good
Target stock price (TWCA growth scenario) $1349.35
Target stock price (averages with growth) $1757.36
Target stock price (averages with no growth) $1269.54
Target stock price (manual assumptions) $1138.96

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

Google Inc. (Google) is a global technology company focused on improving the ways people connect with information. The Company generates revenue primarily by delivering online advertising. As of December 31, 2011, the Company’s business was focused on areas, such as search, advertising, operating systems and platforms, and enterprise. Businesses use its AdWords program to promote their products and services with targeted advertising. In addition, the third parties that comprise the Google Network use its AdSense program to deliver relevant advertisements that generate revenue. In May 2012, Google acquired Motorola Mobility Holdings, Inc. As of January 2012, over 90 million people had joined Google+. n April 2013, Google Inc acquired Wavii. In May 2013, Google Inc acquired an undisclosed minority stake in LendingClub Corp. In May 2013, Google Inc acquired Makani Power.

 

Confident Investor comments: At this price and at this time, I think that a Confident Investor can confidently invest in this stock.

If you would like to understand how to evaluate companies like I do on this site, please read my book, The Confident Investor.