Amazon earnings miss Street estimates, Kindle sales nearly triple - Page 4

Balderdash. In these stock threads we are constantly seeing people post about how a stock "should" be worth this or that, and how they can't understand why it's not worth more or less than the current price. They are expecting the markets to follow some sort of clear set of rules with predicable outcomes. In fact the markets are a function of mass behavior, which is inherently emotional, not rational. I presume you've heard about the classic polar driving forces behind the markets: fear and greed. Good luck rationalizing ether one. If you ever could, you'd be the first. Your Nobel Prize awaits.

I am in the market because I don't worry about its inherent irrationality. Maybe the difference between you and I is, I don't try to pretend that it is rational.


Oh, sure. Fine excuse.

The Doctor and I are actually in a state of amicable détente... but I do rib him on occasion.

I'm fascinated by those who believe the effectiveness of the Fire strategy can be assessed so quickly. And the stock did not *plummet*.

If the action we saw today on AMZN continues in the same trend... then, yes, it plummeted.

To paraphrase Frank Perdue's old TV chicken commercials, "Costs is costs."


You've been mind-reading, well, my mind at least...



We both picked up on those deep Amazon pockets! However, FTR, from what I've read, you could only buy about half of the Iraq war costs for that - not including all the VA and other vet benefits that will pile up over coming decades. The Civil War (1860's for the historically challenged) was still costing the US government money well into the 20th Century, and WWII (1940's) continues to be a source of payouts.


My question is how do they get away with this as a public company when this is clearly intended as a key strategic direction for the corp?


1. Repeat yourself in the same paragraph much? (And actually those extraneous electrons are pushed "at AI's expense.")

2. Remind me again of Apple's recent "failing agains" and "miniscule market shares" on any strategic initiative.

a) PC's - 90% share of models $999 and above. And for the last 4-5 years continually increasing US and world share (and on a trajectory to be #1 in the US).

b) MP3 player gizmo thingies - stable over 70% (in a mature and declining market, where nearly all phones now include those functions).

c) Smart phones - #1 profit share (by a country mile), and now blunting Android's share growth in the US and strongly growing sales around the world.

d) Pads/Tablets - over 70% even with competitors selling below costs and a new model just about to debut.

e) Content and apps - number one music seller in the US (tho' video/movie content is still very competitive among a number of companies), far more app revenue per device than any other (read Android) platform and a huge lead in quality tablet apps, while it will take a year or more for a fairly large number of ICS-capable tablets to even be in consumer's hands. And the Mac App store seems a burgeoning success as well.

iAuthor, iBooks2 and the expanded iTunes U are also all looking promising, if not revolutionary.

f) The "cloud" - after a number of false starts I believe I read there are already 85 million iCloud accounts, and iTunes match is going to be my web music repository of choice. (Though SugarSync is my off-line big backup solution and I don't believe any one company's going to dominate "cloud services" for awhile at least.)

g) The living room - still a "hobby" and many viable or potentially viable competitors (X-Box, other boxes, Samsung TV's with modular plug-in firmware updates, etc., etc.) but many signs point to Apple's going "pro" in this arena sometime this year or next (and we'll see how they do).

h) Connectivity - I believe Thunderbolt's still going to be the real deal and that Apple has and will hold the lead. And also that Apple's going to be first to market (or close to first) with 811ac Wi-Fi and the first "all day," "smaller than a bread box" 4G phone.

i) The "Enterprise" - despite dropping server hardware and not giving the MacPro much (if any) love of late (if ever again), iPhones, iPads and MB Airs and Pros are making sizable inroads into big companies, and IT is finally starting to come to terms with them in both general and vertical areas (like Medicine, photography, etc.).

So actually, things have never looked better for Apple in the F500. (Allowing, of course, that MS, IBM, Oracle and others will continue to dominate the "big iron," productivity programs and infrastructure software areas.

j) Brick and mortar - Apple stores have the highest revenue per sq. foot of any retail chain of its size or larger. Period. They're even tourist destinations, and in Hong Kong you have to enter a lottery for a chance to actually buy iPhones at the store.

And the chain is growing steadily around the globe.

i) Disappointments and areas to work on - iAds, Ping, video calls over cell networks, Finder (STILL!), hiccups in video content distribution, and the release of an immature Final Cut redo that is admittedly biting them on the butt. But none of these are utterly strategic (except maybe Final Cut, and the iAd and video distribution spaces are going to be huge for someone[s]), so I'm going to stop there and allow the more critical to "populate this point" with whatever I've missed (or you think I'm missing).

You presume right.

But, dang, my Nobel prize for operationalizing greed and fear have been usurped, unfortunately: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Markowitz (the vertical axis, btw, is 'greed,' and the horizontal axis, 'fear.')

You should read up a bit more about the basics of finance, since you seem to like it (certainly, have very strong views on it -- it's always better when those views are less uninformed).

Maybe you should read the random articles you link. Markowitz is the godfather of the theory of portfolio diversification as a method of maximizing returns at tolerable risk levels. This is foundational work for contemporaries such as David Swenson (who I know I have mentioned here at least once). I didn't have to google that because I have Swenson's book and he talks about Markowitz.

The axises on the charts are all "risk vs. return." This article says nothing about markets being rational, and the words fear and greed never even appear. (And why would they, since these concepts have nothing to do with his work?)

But I guess it's me who needs to be better informed. Yup, it sure looks that way.

Wow, I am impressed! Even more that you appear to follow his insights in institutional investing to apply to your individual investing when he tells you that might be a foolish thing to attempt. (But there's no law against it).

Btw, it's Swensen. Also, as an aside, Markowitz (84, bless him), and Swensen (60) are hardly 'contemporaries.'

The rest of your points are not even worthy of a serious response.

Just the fact that $50 is a round number should tell you that its made up. It was an analyst figure, and it's already been debunked.


Ordering online retains a convenience factor, especially with cheap/free shipping. The $50 thing was a made up number. You know that, and you can stop trolling with it.


That's quite a lot of investment.


Did they actually miss Wall Street estimates? All I see here is biased journalism.

Where has it been debunked? And it wasn't $50. It was something close to $50 - and the articles that cited the original source rounded it off.

The original source claimed to have found the cost of all the components and added them up and it came to $250 (roughly). That's a $50 loss - JUST ON THE COMPONENTS. When you add in labor, shipping, packaging, quality, overhead, etc, the total loss would be greater.

Now, I don't know if that's an accurate number, but at least they showed how they derived it - unlike all the people claiming that the loss was only $5 or 10.


So what's the real number? Please show us something that proves the $50 figure to be wrong.


They missed not only Wall Street revenue estimates, but also their own guidance. PLUS, their future guidance was that they might lose money this quarter. So what's the bias?

I don't know if the $50 figure is right or wrong for sure. But if it was arrived at using the simple arithmetic you've just outlined then I'd strongly bet that it is wrong. It's not a simple calculation you can put together because you're not factoring in the volume discounts Amazon will be getting from suppliers for a start. People can guess and estimate, as they do with Apple products too, but usually even "expert analysts" are way off base with these projections. Apple demonstrated that perfectly last week when they announced their quarterly results and another solid increase in margins.

I say there's about 0.0% chance of Amazon taking a 25% loss on every Kindle sold.

Because you don't want to admit that you either misread or deliberately misrepresented the work you cited.

His insights apply to investing generally, but the key point that apparently completely eludes you is that they have nothing whatsoever to do with the argument you were trying to make. They have nothing to do with the rationality of markets. They have nothing to do with fear-greed forces.

Contemporary, meaning in the current day. Dictionary definition.

I humbly apologize for the typo. Now it's your turn to apologize for being wrong. I have a feeling that the earth's crust will cool sooner.