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Microsoft CorpMSFTDON'T BUYMay 02, 2017Stock price when the opinion was issued
As of Aug 28, 2026. Market Open.
Thinks this name, as well as a lot of the big tech names (perhaps with the exception of GOOG), will go sideways for the next several years. Highs of $500-550 are what we'll get. He loved it in the last 6 months. Now he's out. Thinks you'll get a chance to buy again at $400 or below.
Likes it at 20-25x PE, but not at 30-35x. It's that simple. Too expensive for what it's likely to deliver.
(Note the short timeframe.) Market's been hating these companies due to uncertainty about capital spending. Revenues are accelerating, yet market's ignoring that. Continues to buy more. FCF should become much higher in late 2028. Topline is growing faster than expenditures, and will overtake them at some point.
Since reporting last week, they've rallied almost 130 points. MSFT is at the epicenter of the software (SAAS) socks and ultimately is where you'll make money as these models as these models commoditize. MSFT said, this capex spending is here to stay, but software isn't going away. She didn't sell it before earnings (it had been lagging all year), because she firmly believed in the CEO who did a great job of reading the room, of not doing what Google's doing. They said they will have free cash flow and won't go to the debt market (MSFT and JNJ are the only triple-A companies). Cloud revenue beat and guided upward. Still gotta see what they're spending on capex, but they're monetizing cloud. People are looking at this in a new light as it is re-rated.
Was the most impressive stock this quarter. He was pounding the table on it before the quarter. It's not a software stock, but a utility. Everyone uses their products every day. MSFT has Co-Pilot, LinkedIn, Word, Teams and more. Operating margins are huge, still robust. Balance sheet is solid. Their RPO is north of 650 billion. Great managers. But the stock has run up a lot so mind the gap with the valuation.
They reported a clean top and bottom line beat today and he thinks it can bounce, They reported a big earnings beat and Azure's growth accelerated to 43%, the fastest pace in 4 years. Free cash flow was positive. They're spending big on data centres, but not spending beyond their means. Their Co-Pilot reached 30 million paid users up from 20 million just three months ago.
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.