That's complete bull. The drastic expansion in the world marketplace opens up huge new populations that complete justify the increase in average p/e ratios (therefore assumed growth rates). There is increased cyclicty, too, because of the pace of information. But don't accuse the market of not working, just of being unpredictable.
Gambling? Sure--the activly traded security market is more efficient than ever. Nearly all publicly available information is taken into account in every security's price, and so movements nowadays are caused by unpredictable, or nearly unpredictable, events in business, macroeconomics, etc. But that's not to say that the market doesn't work, just that you may not be able to beat it without luck.
Yes, you understand that is what investing is, right? Giving money to someone now and hoping you'll get it back later? Investors gave microsoft money and expect it back eventually. Now that Microsoft is throwing off $1b in cash every month, it won't take that long. The payback is within sight. They don't NEED to go into boom mode on anything, because the market (made up of reasonably intelligent investors) confirms what I'm saying here: that $1b a month at some expected growth rate is the annuity required to pay back a $27 investment, including the cost of capital.
Have you never put money or time into something knowing that you'll get it back in spades later?
Look, I'm not saying that Microsoft will necessarily outperform the market. Hell, I certainly don't think it will outperform the tech market over the next ten years. But it's a pretty fucking stable stock, and if all you're saying is "I think MS has future prospects so poor that it will fail to make even half of $27 per share on a discounted cash flow basis," I think you'll be proven wrong.
Just a reminder--remember your tax rates. Since the company is profitable and doesn't have any deferred tax assets, that $1 of extra bottom-line goodness will be taxed at roughly 35% and they'll only make $750mmm (so extra 7.5%). Good point, though--the financial analysis most people conduct here on slashdot is pathetic.
Oh, and by the way, if you think their stock is really in for a crash, then please be my guest and short it. No, really. Buy some put options or something, and see how well you do.
Insightful?? What? You divide the cash earnings this year by the number of shares, factor in a market growth rate discounted for the cost of capital, and add in the $60b of cash (which soaks up $7 or so of the stock price right there) and you pay for the stock easily (with maybe a little up or downside depending on what you think growth will be).
Why are you using the historical income to value the stock?
I'll give you $5 every day, starting today, if you pay me $25 for it. Tomorrow morning, you will have spent $25 and only made $5 back. Are you saying you're getting screwed? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out, man. Investments are what make our economy go around, and what drive the development and proliferation of the technologies that improve our quality of life. You, my friend, are an idiot.
suuuuuuuuuch bullshit. Saying the company lost $18b is saying that the shareholders suffered a combined loss of $18b, which is completely untrue. If you were a shareholder, you would have made your (somewhat smaller) chunk of that $4.5b, not lost money.
Yeah--cost per employee is a common stat used to demonstrate the general average force an employee has in the business. Another common one is revenue per employee. High cost per employee frequently shows that a company is working hard to expand, spending a lot of money on something (whether it's R&D or plant infrastructure) to build capacity, technology, etc. It's good that ms is doing this--if they cut that much, the employees will, on average, not be as empowered to expand. Don't forget that microsofts market cap still assumes pretty high growth rates compared to the average (i.e. high P/E).
Simple math would answer your question, too: the article says 57,000 employees, so do 57k * 300k and you come out with $17bb in expenses.
Um, sure. That's why it demands that you have activex enabled to play it, eh? No really, try it--disable activex and see what it says. It uses it somehow, though obviously not for the primary architecture.
Doesn't mozilla support activex apps? My anecdotal experience was on a mac (on which I'm generally clueless), but I know I was using a friend's computer to access gmail and the complaint with every other browser I tried (including mac IE) was that activex was not activated; mozilla, despite no official gmail support, had no problem.
Cute. I spent a year as an equity analyst and am now investment banking (finishing shit up past midnight!), so I have some degree of experience determining attractive vs unattractive prospects both in terms of cash appeal and market appeal.
In the same way it might bug an IT professional when a user does something idiotic, it definitely bugs me when people make off-base and, frankly, impossible claims about a stock or company. The reason the original poster was so completely idiotic was that he claimed sbux was using its expansion to raise its cashflows. I'm reasonably certain that no company has EVER used expansion to raise cash flows, because expansion requires cash investments, necessarily LOWERING cash flows (from investments, anyway). It's pretty clear that the second starbucks stops sinking all that cash into expansion it will begin throwing off nearly twice as much positive cash flow as ever before, making the OP look like an idiot.
What are you TALKING about?? SBUX has EPS of 80+ cents and growing, and its cash flows from operations dwarfs its (still extremely positive) net income; it's been sinking cash from operations INTO expansion, not somehow relying on expansion to fuel cash flow, which really doesn't make ANY sense at all. Jesus christ, you're insane.
I work for a very small, eight-person, technology-focused investment bank. We make a lot of money, but we don't get shit in terms of devices, because yeah, we're pretty much expected to be that kind of person anyway, else they wouldn't have hired us.
I agree. I sat and thought a while ago and decided that if The Matrix can be made for a $63mm production budget, ANY movie ought to be able to be made for the same amount (inflation adjusted), and my friends in the biz agree. If the studios would adhere to this philosophy and challenge directors, the losses on flops would shrink drastically (think The Alamo) and the gains on blockbusters would be magnified, often to the point of an extra 100%.
The interesting hole in this theory is as follows:
Investors or execs will literally say to producers "we've got $500mm in production costs we need to use this year, so put it to use however you have to." None of the studios throw much cash back to shareholders except (sort of) the ones owned by GE; instead, they're just told to reinvest it, and execs feel they might as well throw it at making movies that much flashier rather than let it sit around.
Um, Sorry, he says $7/hour for the UK, but I spent a week in london recently and there was only one place out of many where it was two pounds an hour; everywhere else was just one pound.
He still signed a non-compete agreement. The real issue is whether or not the courts will uphold that (being that Cali courts don't, generally speaking).
I have to say, it seems pretty difficult for management to ignore the IP an employee brings from one company to another. That is, they obviously hired him with the knowledge that he had done this sort of thing before, and they'd really have to be looking the other way to ignore the similarities (especially because I'm sure Orkut himself wasn't the only one working on the code). I don't work in a development environment, but I do work at a small company which has taken a significant amount of IP from previous employers, and it's really obvious what has traveled and what hasn't.
But Wired has a lot of great cultural coverage; nobody really cares about the stupid device reviews, they're just filler. It's always interesting to hear what's going on in the minds of people who are philisophically advancing the world of technology (even if the big articles they print are often by extremists). Agreed, as a computer magazine Wired has little worth. But as a cultural magazine it's better than any tech rag I've found (though I'd LOVE to hear suggestions if you've got any).
Hm... good point... I was considering going dual, but hadn't thought about the spec ramifications of doing so. Since I'm kind of a linux n00b anyway, any suggestions on where I could find more info on what I'd need to do?
Well, I said an EXTRA mile or two. And I don't drive; I live in the city and walk, bike, or (more frequently) take public transportation. How about the "all drivers are assholes" stereotype among us bikers?
There's a HUGE differential in mileage caused by people's acceleration/deceleration habits. Some people have a very consistent foot on the gas, keeping the engine from having to accelerate all the time. Conversely, I know many people who always drive at highly varying speeds, and then brake or speed up when they notice how far off the speed limit they are (most of these are women. coincidence?). There are many other habits that can affect things when the mileage differences are aggregated, too. Don't scoff at an extra mile or two to the gallon by paying attention to how the engine's running and what the car is doing.
My T Pass (Boston) and my bike get me where I need to go reliably for like $50 a month. I don't know how much fuel a T train consumes per person (especially because it consumes kilowatt hours, not gallons), but it's not much. My bike is less.
The speeding of others rarely infringes on my time. In fact, it often saves me time and is a great convenience (I take public transit and almost never drive, but y'know, in theory). Obviously I don't like it when people are unsafe because it potentially infringes heavily on my time and causes me great inconvenience.
I'm not saying "you can't have fun because it's the law." In fact, as I pointed out, the question was purely philisophical; I'm not even making a statement at all. I just thought he'd made an interesting comment, an wanted someone else's take on the matter. In short, cute metaphor, but it's really off-topic.
Out of curiosity, and I speak purely philisophically here, do you think we should be content with just a few illegal calls? I'm not sure myself, and I only use a cell so I don't get any, but I feel like the government has said "you have the right not to be called by an unsolicited commercial caller" and can't stand up to its word, again.
Slashdot Mirror
That's complete bull. The drastic expansion in the world marketplace opens up huge new populations that complete justify the increase in average p/e ratios (therefore assumed growth rates). There is increased cyclicty, too, because of the pace of information. But don't accuse the market of not working, just of being unpredictable.
Gambling? Sure--the activly traded security market is more efficient than ever. Nearly all publicly available information is taken into account in every security's price, and so movements nowadays are caused by unpredictable, or nearly unpredictable, events in business, macroeconomics, etc. But that's not to say that the market doesn't work, just that you may not be able to beat it without luck.
Yes, you understand that is what investing is, right? Giving money to someone now and hoping you'll get it back later? Investors gave microsoft money and expect it back eventually. Now that Microsoft is throwing off $1b in cash every month, it won't take that long. The payback is within sight. They don't NEED to go into boom mode on anything, because the market (made up of reasonably intelligent investors) confirms what I'm saying here: that $1b a month at some expected growth rate is the annuity required to pay back a $27 investment, including the cost of capital.
Have you never put money or time into something knowing that you'll get it back in spades later?
Look, I'm not saying that Microsoft will necessarily outperform the market. Hell, I certainly don't think it will outperform the tech market over the next ten years. But it's a pretty fucking stable stock, and if all you're saying is "I think MS has future prospects so poor that it will fail to make even half of $27 per share on a discounted cash flow basis," I think you'll be proven wrong.
Just a reminder--remember your tax rates. Since the company is profitable and doesn't have any deferred tax assets, that $1 of extra bottom-line goodness will be taxed at roughly 35% and they'll only make $750mmm (so extra 7.5%). Good point, though--the financial analysis most people conduct here on slashdot is pathetic.
Oh, and by the way, if you think their stock is really in for a crash, then please be my guest and short it. No, really. Buy some put options or something, and see how well you do.
Insightful?? What? You divide the cash earnings this year by the number of shares, factor in a market growth rate discounted for the cost of capital, and add in the $60b of cash (which soaks up $7 or so of the stock price right there) and you pay for the stock easily (with maybe a little up or downside depending on what you think growth will be).
Why are you using the historical income to value the stock?
I'll give you $5 every day, starting today, if you pay me $25 for it. Tomorrow morning, you will have spent $25 and only made $5 back. Are you saying you're getting screwed? It doesn't take a genius to figure it out, man. Investments are what make our economy go around, and what drive the development and proliferation of the technologies that improve our quality of life. You, my friend, are an idiot.
suuuuuuuuuch bullshit. Saying the company lost $18b is saying that the shareholders suffered a combined loss of $18b, which is completely untrue. If you were a shareholder, you would have made your (somewhat smaller) chunk of that $4.5b, not lost money.
Yeah--cost per employee is a common stat used to demonstrate the general average force an employee has in the business. Another common one is revenue per employee. High cost per employee frequently shows that a company is working hard to expand, spending a lot of money on something (whether it's R&D or plant infrastructure) to build capacity, technology, etc. It's good that ms is doing this--if they cut that much, the employees will, on average, not be as empowered to expand. Don't forget that microsofts market cap still assumes pretty high growth rates compared to the average (i.e. high P/E).
Simple math would answer your question, too: the article says 57,000 employees, so do 57k * 300k and you come out with $17bb in expenses.
Thanks, much more helpful than the other dudes. Not that I'll be on a friend's mac anymore anyway.
Um, sure. That's why it demands that you have activex enabled to play it, eh? No really, try it--disable activex and see what it says. It uses it somehow, though obviously not for the primary architecture.
Doesn't mozilla support activex apps? My anecdotal experience was on a mac (on which I'm generally clueless), but I know I was using a friend's computer to access gmail and the complaint with every other browser I tried (including mac IE) was that activex was not activated; mozilla, despite no official gmail support, had no problem.
Cute. I spent a year as an equity analyst and am now investment banking (finishing shit up past midnight!), so I have some degree of experience determining attractive vs unattractive prospects both in terms of cash appeal and market appeal.
In the same way it might bug an IT professional when a user does something idiotic, it definitely bugs me when people make off-base and, frankly, impossible claims about a stock or company. The reason the original poster was so completely idiotic was that he claimed sbux was using its expansion to raise its cashflows. I'm reasonably certain that no company has EVER used expansion to raise cash flows, because expansion requires cash investments, necessarily LOWERING cash flows (from investments, anyway). It's pretty clear that the second starbucks stops sinking all that cash into expansion it will begin throwing off nearly twice as much positive cash flow as ever before, making the OP look like an idiot.
What are you TALKING about?? SBUX has EPS of 80+ cents and growing, and its cash flows from operations dwarfs its (still extremely positive) net income; it's been sinking cash from operations INTO expansion, not somehow relying on expansion to fuel cash flow, which really doesn't make ANY sense at all. Jesus christ, you're insane.
I work for a very small, eight-person, technology-focused investment bank. We make a lot of money, but we don't get shit in terms of devices, because yeah, we're pretty much expected to be that kind of person anyway, else they wouldn't have hired us.
I agree. I sat and thought a while ago and decided that if The Matrix can be made for a $63mm production budget, ANY movie ought to be able to be made for the same amount (inflation adjusted), and my friends in the biz agree. If the studios would adhere to this philosophy and challenge directors, the losses on flops would shrink drastically (think The Alamo) and the gains on blockbusters would be magnified, often to the point of an extra 100%.
The interesting hole in this theory is as follows:
Investors or execs will literally say to producers "we've got $500mm in production costs we need to use this year, so put it to use however you have to." None of the studios throw much cash back to shareholders except (sort of) the ones owned by GE; instead, they're just told to reinvest it, and execs feel they might as well throw it at making movies that much flashier rather than let it sit around.
Um, Sorry, he says $7/hour for the UK, but I spent a week in london recently and there was only one place out of many where it was two pounds an hour; everywhere else was just one pound.
He still signed a non-compete agreement. The real issue is whether or not the courts will uphold that (being that Cali courts don't, generally speaking).
I have to say, it seems pretty difficult for management to ignore the IP an employee brings from one company to another. That is, they obviously hired him with the knowledge that he had done this sort of thing before, and they'd really have to be looking the other way to ignore the similarities (especially because I'm sure Orkut himself wasn't the only one working on the code). I don't work in a development environment, but I do work at a small company which has taken a significant amount of IP from previous employers, and it's really obvious what has traveled and what hasn't.
But Wired has a lot of great cultural coverage; nobody really cares about the stupid device reviews, they're just filler. It's always interesting to hear what's going on in the minds of people who are philisophically advancing the world of technology (even if the big articles they print are often by extremists). Agreed, as a computer magazine Wired has little worth. But as a cultural magazine it's better than any tech rag I've found (though I'd LOVE to hear suggestions if you've got any).
Dude, just buy extra magnetic redundancy. Or, just backup files you've modified in the last X months, rather than messing with those you haven't.
Hm... good point... I was considering going dual, but hadn't thought about the spec ramifications of doing so. Since I'm kind of a linux n00b anyway, any suggestions on where I could find more info on what I'd need to do?
Well, I said an EXTRA mile or two. And I don't drive; I live in the city and walk, bike, or (more frequently) take public transportation. How about the "all drivers are assholes" stereotype among us bikers?
There's a HUGE differential in mileage caused by people's acceleration/deceleration habits. Some people have a very consistent foot on the gas, keeping the engine from having to accelerate all the time. Conversely, I know many people who always drive at highly varying speeds, and then brake or speed up when they notice how far off the speed limit they are (most of these are women. coincidence?). There are many other habits that can affect things when the mileage differences are aggregated, too. Don't scoff at an extra mile or two to the gallon by paying attention to how the engine's running and what the car is doing.
My T Pass (Boston) and my bike get me where I need to go reliably for like $50 a month. I don't know how much fuel a T train consumes per person (especially because it consumes kilowatt hours, not gallons), but it's not much. My bike is less.
The speeding of others rarely infringes on my time. In fact, it often saves me time and is a great convenience (I take public transit and almost never drive, but y'know, in theory). Obviously I don't like it when people are unsafe because it potentially infringes heavily on my time and causes me great inconvenience.
I'm not saying "you can't have fun because it's the law." In fact, as I pointed out, the question was purely philisophical; I'm not even making a statement at all. I just thought he'd made an interesting comment, an wanted someone else's take on the matter. In short, cute metaphor, but it's really off-topic.
Out of curiosity, and I speak purely philisophically here, do you think we should be content with just a few illegal calls? I'm not sure myself, and I only use a cell so I don't get any, but I feel like the government has said "you have the right not to be called by an unsolicited commercial caller" and can't stand up to its word, again.