Opinions
Gordon Reid
Microsoft Corp
MSFT-Q
DON'T BUY
May 02, 2017
Stock price when the opinion was issued
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Premium contentLikes the stickiness to both personal and corporate clients -- once you get into the network, it's very hard to get out. Cloud business has improved significantly. If quantum computing ever comes to the forefront, MSFT is there.
ROIC is 23% vs. WACC of 9%. This gives them lots of cashflow to pour money into the next greatest thing. R&D development is important, given how fast things are changing these days. Yield is 0.72%.
Excellent company that meets his criteria. If you made him choose one or the other today, he'd have to say META based on valuation (with the assumption that the investor would hold a position for the long run). MSFT trading ~37-38x PE, whereas META is in the mid-high 20s.
One of his top-performing stocks. He targets $514. Very well-run company. Boasts solid moats in enterprise software and operating systems, which ensures recurring revenue and customer retention. Azure Cloud remains second only to AWS. The valuation may be elevated, but MSFT is good now for selling some calls given volatility. Keep the calls pretty sure, writing calls around $490-495.
Premium content
This has been on a valuation ladder. For a lot of years it was the darling as a high, high growth company, and deservedly so with a very high multiple. Then it went out of favour and earnings didn’t grow as fast, and it went down the ladder on valuation, to what would now be described as old tech, trading in a low teen multiple. It is now back up the ladder, but in anticipation of new things happening. Some of those new things are happening, but haven’t shown up yet on the income statement. We are really not seeing earnings growth, the way you would expect for a company trading at the multiple it is trading at. He would step aside on this.