Alphabet overtakes Apple to become most cash-rich company

Post by jonny_eh » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 8:49 PM UTC

buzzerbetrayed wrote: post #106

bena wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His motive is fair game when we're discussing his credibility as a source or information.

Of course you can discuss his motive. But it is a logical fallacy to use his motive to disprove his statement. The person I responded to said that since he showed motive, his ad hom attack wasn’t fallacious. If someone without his proposed motives had made the same statement, the statement wouldn’t be more or less true.

Post by dahfizz » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 8:53 PM UTC

TheGRS wrote: post #82

dahfizz wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody is claiming that money managers have omniscience. What they do certainly have is more information and expertise than a random internet commenter. They don't know everything, but it's safe to assume they know more than you.

Well the actual decision-making tends to be more important than just what one knows. A pile of cash seems more indicative of investment paralysis than some grander strategy. Like, "we can't figure out the best investment to make with this money, so the safest thing we can do is hoard it until we come up with a better idea".

Post by ErikVandeWater » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 8:57 PM UTC

dmix wrote: post #22

ralph84 wrote: post #5

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Once you get to Google or Apple scale, you’re essentially a government and run into the same problems with central planning that governments do. It’s absolutely the right move to return the money to shareholders and let them reallocate it to more economically promising endeavors. That doesn’t make a statement about innovation stagnation on the whole, it just reflects the reality of diminishing returns to scale.

Why not buy some companies and get some proper entrepreneurs back into the mix of management? I can't remember any recent major Google acquisitions. No mega company really has to have internal innovation. And I doubt the pretend internal startups ala skunkswork with an unlimited budget and extensive runways are a real replacement for innovation popping out of the marketplace among the bodies of a hundred other failed…

Post by ptr » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 9:04 PM UTC

mastratton3 wrote: post #90

gvhst wrote: post #34

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Buffett puts this well when he says: > “Every decade or so, dark clouds will fill the economic skies, and they will briefly rain gold. When downpours of that sort occur, it's imperative that we rush outdoors carrying washtubs, not teaspoons. And that we will do.” The thing here is you have to be confident in your ability to deploy capital during those downturns. Your average expected return over multiple cycles (cash…

^This.. I don't see why people thinking hoarding cash when capital is cheap is a bad strategy. It totally ignores the fact that ease of raising and cost of capital is time dependent. If you had a war chest of cash in 2008/2009, that'd be insanely valuable.

Post by asdf21 » Fri, Aug 02, 2019, 9:09 PM UTC

pyb wrote: post #45

wpasc wrote: post #4

This reminds me of a talk I watched with Peter Thiel and Eric Schmidt. I know Thiel is controversial, but he was well-meaningly digging at Google for running out of ideas and no longer innovating. The criticism was something like "You have so much cash on hand but no ideas to invest in. However, you can't pay a dividend because the second you do, you're admitting you've run out of ideas and are no longer innovating".…

It's hard not to acree with Thiel here. We only need to look at Elon Musk to realize that there are still plenty of opportunity for moonshot investments. What does Elon know that Google as a whole doesn't?