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Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

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Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. Imagine a coin flip where you earn $1.1 on head and lose $1 on tail. What is the value of such a flip? $0.05 Now I offer you a coin flip with less uncertainty. It earns you $0.6 on head and loses you $0.5 on tail. Would you pay more then $0.05 for it? No. Uncertainty was reduced, but no value was created.

This assumes that people operate only on expected value and don't care about variance at all, which is incorrect empirically, theoretically, and intuitively. The premium you pay for reducing variance is called a "risk premium", and it follows pretty trivially from the diminishing marginal utility of money (though there are many other ways to derive/explain it). This is the entire reason that insurance exists as a pro…

Well, if you pay me more then $0.05 for the $0.6/-$0.5 coin flip, I will happily sell you some. How much do you want?

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes that people operate only on expected value and don't care about variance at all, which is incorrect empirically, theoretically, and intuitively. The premium you pay for reducing variance is called a "risk premium", and it follows pretty trivially from the diminishing marginal utility of money (though there are many other ways to derive/explain it). This is the entire reason that insurance exists as a pro…

Well, if you pay me more then $0.05 for the $0.6/-$0.5 coin flip, I will happily sell you some. How much do you want?

I think GP disagreed with your assumption that a $1.1/-$1 coin flip was worth $0.05, so they'd pay more for the $0.6/-$0.5 coin flip than for the $1.1/-$1 flip, but still less than $0.05.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, if you pay me more then $0.05 for the $0.6/-$0.5 coin flip, I will happily sell you some. How much do you want?

I think GP disagreed with your assumption that a $1.1/-$1 coin flip was worth $0.05, so they'd pay more for the $0.6/-$0.5 coin flip than for the $1.1/-$1 flip, but still less than $0.05.

If that is true, then I will happily buy $1.1/-$1 flips for $0.049 from them!

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important point. The stock market doesn't try to reward companies with higher share prices, it tries to find the correct price and stabilize there. If your company is expected to do well, that performance is already built into your stock price. Doing exactly as well as expected, even if you've doubled your profits, won't cause your share prices to change at all. Because everyone already expected you to do…

What about uncertainty? Surely the removal of uncertainty would cause a movement in the price even when a company performs exactly as predicted?

Some funds are sufficiently large/diversified to avoid worrying about uncertainty in a single stock. If someone cared about this uncertainty, they would already have sold their shares to these funds before, so the reduction of uncertainty would have a negligible impact on share price.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think GP disagreed with your assumption that a $1.1/-$1 coin flip was worth $0.05, so they'd pay more for the $0.6/-$0.5 coin flip than for the $1.1/-$1 flip, but still less than $0.05.

If that is true, then I will happily buy $1.1/-$1 flips for $0.049 from them!

They would pay a premium to avoid uncertainty, so they wouldn't accept that offer either. The uncertainty is the same whether you sell or buy the flips. I don't know you, but I guess you wouldn't pay $499K for a $1M/$0 flip, and you wouldn't sell such a flip for $499K either. This is the same phenomenon on a much smaller scale.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#126

Two interesting points: 1) Close to 70% of Amazon operating income once again can be attributed to AWS. Consolidated operating income: $3,084 m AWS operating income: $2,121 m 2) AWS revenue was $8.3B for the quarter, 37% more than the same quarter last year.

That's the case since at least 2016. Back then, when Amazon shares were around 1k USD I had the theory that at least 800 USD came from AWS and the rest came from Amazon's retail business. Made sense back than because before AWS took of shares stood around 200 USD if I remember correctly.

Not sure what that says about Amazon in 2019, so.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If that is true, then I will happily buy $1.1/-$1 flips for $0.049 from them!

They would pay a premium to avoid uncertainty, so they wouldn't accept that offer either. The uncertainty is the same whether you sell or buy the flips. I don't know you, but I guess you wouldn't pay $499K for a $1M/$0 flip, and you wouldn't sell such a flip for $499K either. This is the same phenomenon on a much smaller scale.

    I guess you wouldn't pay $499K for a $1M/$0 flip
No. But the discussion here is about shares. And they are not $499k a piece.

We are discussing if the share price of a company that publishes numbers in line with expectations should go up.

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#128
post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AWS is basically "run your entire company's engineering as a service" now, and they've done a good job at it. It's not at all easy to compete with such an integrated and battle-tested platform (other than on cost; AWS can be pretty expensive).

This is absolutely true, sure, but the UX is dreadful. If someone like, say, DigitalOcean who has nice design spent the money to actually compete, I'd move in a heartbeat. Google is a nonstarter, and Azure is a 'maybe'. Most people use a few key services. Everytime I log in, I'm slammed with 200 tiny hyperlinks.

Just curious, why is Google a nonstarter?

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#129
post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We are looking to move some of our applications to the cloud and Kubernetes the coming time. We'd like to go for DO, partially for the horror the AWS interface appears to be. Could you give me an idea what we'd be missing by choosing DO over AWS? (as your comment appears to say we would)

> We are looking to move some of our applications to the cloud and Kubernetes the coming time. Google Cloud has a ton of built-in support and UI for Kubernetes clusters. They make it really nice. It's roughly the same price, so I'm not sure I'd run Kubernetes on any other service.

Have you compared it with DO's Kubernetes UI and support? Is DO really worse in that area?

Re: Amazon.com Announces Second Quarter Sales Up 20%

#130
post #94
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

P/E is NEVER useless. For instance, if a company misses on earnings, then maybe it was an outlier - an odd quarter of sorts. But if you do it a few times over, then you are not the growth company you thought you were, and your 100:1 p/e will come crashing down to join everybody else (albeit maybe on the high side) somewhere in the upper 20’s or in the 30’s. But here’s the key - to do that, a stock would have to lose…

But you are assuming that the end goal of the company and purpose of buying the stock is to participate in "earnings" in the form of dividends. But that is no longer the MO of many public companies now. The goal appears to just eternally grow the stock price and allow share holders to cash out in the form of appreciated shares which get a preferable capital gains tax treatment. Occasional earnings are just there to p…

You are the one conflating dividends and earnings. Even if a company chooses to reinvest retained earnings instead of returning cash to investors [1] it’s good to be profitable. Not just “to prove that you could”, but to avoid being just a money-burning machine (not Amazon’s case, mind you; they do not have “occasional earnings”, they’ve been consistenly profitable for the last 15 years).

[1] Either through dividends or through buybacks. The second option has some advantages relative to dividends and results in capital gains for the investors that choose to sell.

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