Don't buy now. CGNX is a leader in machine vision, an amazing technology that enables automation. Automation equipment gets installed only when machine tool orders are rising--that's the problem. Those orders are poor now. CGNX has sort of held its revenues given automation in warehousing and the drug industry, but without any major changes in machine tool orders and in making smartphones, it will be hard to grow revenues. Watch CGNX closely, if a 5G iPhone get made in Sept. 2020, and Apple is a customer of Cognex.

ING vs. HSBC Neither. He won't touch any European bank given negative interest rates. Period. HSBC does a lot of international lending and international flows aren't well-received by regulators; and they lend to the Far East. HSBC isn't a leader in many categories. ING, at least, leads in online banking in Europe, but they have loaned heavily to energy.

What metric did you use to buy this? He bought this in Q4 2008. It wasn't a bargain, but actually went up that year. He bought it because he expected them, as they grew revenues, to eventually get gross margin from merchandise and not only memberships. This took three years to happen and have been making money this way since. They keep growing customers, because they have the lowest mark-ups on Earth. The risk is that Millennials prefer a competitive price vs. the lowest (Amazon) price. Will this switch when they age? COST also owns real estate in wealthy areas, and they run a pristine balance sheet. Workers own a lot of the company stock too. Incredibly managed.

MSFT vs. Amazon No, they don't compete with each other. Amazon is the best cloud host, but not for small/medium-sized businesses. Instead, MSFT fills this gap very well, at they collect recurring revenue doing this, like a utility. This stabilizes their margins and increases MSFT's growth.