Thanks for dropping by, Netconductor, and sorry to hear you are dropping out (of Symantec).
Yet must confess that I am shocked -- shocked! -- to learn that you would abandon a virtuous company like Symantec for profligate, no-earnings, cash-burning and altogether wicked ASP's and web-hosters!
Speaking seriously, just how do you, as a Morningstar analyst, justify the evaluation of such companies? This Rekenthaler Report is typical of the basic Morningstar approach:
news.morningstar.com
How do you evaluate them, period? Morningstar, after all, uses very traditional, very conservative, measures to determine the "fair price" of a company (in its "Business Appraisal"). By those measures, it considers even Symantec overvalued, appraising it at about $30, half of what it is selling for at this very moment ($61). It doesn't even provide a business appraisal for the companies you now are covering, on the grounds, I suppose, that until you have some earnings you have nothing to appraise.
The problem, as I see it, with using measures like price/sales, price/subscribers, price/webpage hits, etc., is that all too often companies with this kind of profile lose money on every sale/every new subscriber/every hit. So the more sales/subscribers/hits they have, the more money they lose! (The Amazon model.)
But I am not asking rhetorical questions here. Skeptical, yes, but willing to learn, even to change my mind, also yes.
Another OT question. I see you have only been an SI member for little over a year. What leads you to believe that SI is a "dying community"? True, members focus on a fairly narrow range of stocks, but I have found many threads useful and informative. What similar community, in your opinion, is alive?
Best,
jbe
|
