[Gibbon1]

My feeling is when you refuse to limit yourself to the one true and golden measure of inflation (basically cat food, toilet paper, and very sketchy imputed rents) and look at differential inflation.

Becomes really obvious, there inflation in stock prices that isn't supported by any real economic growth. Makes sense then that if you can create bullshit stocks out of thin air and push them onto the market with all the other bullshit inflated stocks. Then you can make a lot of coin. Especially if you can get investors to swallow tech company valuations[1].

[1] Go ahead try and value any tech company as if it were a ordinary company. I dare you.

[thesausageking]

> Go ahead try and value any tech company as if it were a ordinary company. I dare you.

ok. Let's look at Apple compared with three non-tech F10:

         PE Yield PEG  EV/EBITDA
  AAPL   19 1.35% 2.0  14
  WMT    23 1.77% 5.3  13
  BRK    19 0.00% 0.86 10
  MCK     9 1.23% 1.27  8

Looks like it's priced right; if anything it's cheap.

[vtange]

"Any tech company" was probably an overstatement, companies like Apple and Google are much more grounded in valuation compared to companies like Amazon, which had a PE ratio of 85.99 in 2018 [0].

[0] https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/stocks/amzn/price-ear...

[paxys]

So...all tech companies are overvalued as long as you exclude the ones that are correctly valued?

[pbreit]

But PE is obviously the wrong metric for Amazon since we know it reinvests all its earnings and has proven ability to convert investment into cash flow.

[throwaway2048]

Or maybe it isn't? And the plan of theirs isn't going to result in huge profits, ever.

[BubRoss]

Profits reinvested into successful growth is still profit.

[dodobirdlord]

Seems unlikely, it's not as though their core business lines are unprofitable.

[s1artibartfast]

Do you think their core business lines have room to grow 400%? Alternatively, can they cut costs 75% with their R&D investments?

[gzer0]

This is due to Amazon purposefully keeping gross profits at $0 for years. The CapEX investment was through the roof; investments such as AWS which were criticized heavily in their infancy. It was widely known Amazon would be able to turn a profit, they decided to ruthlessly expand their enterprise.

[Mathnerd314]

Amazon has low margins, I think the theory with the PE is that they can increase margins after achieving market dominance and get better earnings. Walmart is still bigger so Amazon isn't there yet. And then it could also be high because of the cloud/tech bubble.

[freewilly1040]

No comment on whether public stocks are inflated at the moment, but it's odd to spin WeWork / Softbank as an indication we are in a stock market bubble. This whole thing blew up because public investors rejected the inflated valuation of Softbank's portfolio.