Just own the damn robots
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Just own the damn robots
1–10 of 356 posts
Re: Just own the damn robots
#2Whoa. No solutions, at the end, but what a story.
As someone in a situation similar to the 45 year old he mentions, I worry about being displaced. Not every day, but every month or so I wonder.
What a fascinating thesis. I wonder what happens when the 'replacement fear' buy collides with the 'boomer retirement' sell?
Re: Just own the damn robots
#3[deleted]
Re: Just own the damn robots
#4HN hug of death strikes again. Website does not reply.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#5Interesting investment thesis, but isn't there a better way to hedge yourself than buying tech stocks?
That's just a huge bet on a tiny number of cyclical revenue sources: online shopping, online advertising, cloud services, iPhones, Microsoft Office, and Windows.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#6Whoa. No solutions, at the end, but what a story. As someone in a situation similar to the 45 year old he mentions, I worry about being displaced. Not every day, but every month or so I wonder. What a fascinating thesis. I wonder what happens when the 'replacement fear' buy collides with the 'boomer retirement' sell?
Pretty sure the proposed solution is to buy stocks of the U.S. technology giants: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#7Whoa. No solutions, at the end, but what a story. As someone in a situation similar to the 45 year old he mentions, I worry about being displaced. Not every day, but every month or so I wonder. What a fascinating thesis. I wonder what happens when the 'replacement fear' buy collides with the 'boomer retirement' sell?
Pretty sure the proposed solution is to buy stocks of the U.S. technology giants: Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, and Alphabet, the parent company of Google.
The largest market cap companies in a given decade, overwhelmingly tend to be under-performers in the following decade. It's a trend that has repeated decade after decade. Many of these types of companies - AMZN, NFLX, GOOGL, FB - have pulled a massive share of their future returns forward (which is what happened to Microsoft, stagnating its stock for ~15 years).
In 2007 the largest companies were: Exxon, GE, Microsoft, PetroChina, Royal Dutch Shell, Citigroup, AT&T, Gazprom, BP, Toyota, Bank of America, China Mobile, HSBC, ICBC, Walmart. All have performed at a mediocre level at best over that time. See:
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-11/apple-vau...
Is Amazon going to grow into a $2 trillion market cap over the next ten years? No, there is zero possibility of that happening. It'll be very lucky to grow into its existing market cap today, over that ten years. Keep in mind, they have $100 billion in retail sales, generating Walmart style margins on that business; Walmart has ~$450 billion in retail sales, generating ~$15 billion in net income. For that, Walmart gets to trade at half the market cap of Amazon. That's Amazon's future value compression. That multiple erosion won't occur until the market starts to realize the AWS growth machine isn't going to last forever (AWS representing a very large portion of the Amazon stock appreciation the last three years), as that growth curve slows in the next few years, the market will push down on Amazon's present extreme premium.
Netflix has a ~200 PE ratio, there is no means for it to ever justify its existing valuation (400 million global subscribers? no chance), much less a far higher one. Their present business model has never proven the ability to produce good margins, content has perpetually sapped their earnings potential and is likely to continue to do so.
Facebook and Google will stagnate and grow into their valuations. Google particularly is trading far beyond where it should versus its now modest growth rate. ~37 times earnings, $700 billion market cap, for 10%-15% annual growth over the next five years? No thanks. In the not very distant future, Google will pull a Microsoft and begin paying out a dividend, after this latest stock market bubble ends and their stock returns drift to mediocrity.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#8"We’re in an age where we’re being told AI is about to start writing its own software."
The most pregnant sentence in the entire piece.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#9Interesting investment thesis, but isn't there a better way to hedge yourself than buying tech stocks? That's just a huge bet on a tiny number of cyclical revenue sources: online shopping, online advertising, cloud services, iPhones, Microsoft Office, and Windows.
I didn't read this as an investment thesis. I don't think he's trying to prescribe an investment strategy.
Re: Just own the damn robots
#10"We’re in an age where we’re being told AI is about to start writing its own software." The most pregnant sentence in the entire piece.
All the problems in every serious piece of software I've ever worked on stem from the customer (be it external or in-house) not knowing what they want, the person in charge of capturing that doing a pretty bad job of it anyway, and the chain from there to the person writing the software taking that failure and making it worse.
AI writing software will just get me another flavour of the wrong software. AI working out what people want the software to do would be useful.