Really you could apply this to any stock recommended by anybody. It’s great to get stock tips because it gives you a place to look. But you don’t invest without diving into the data. So let’s look at Paypal…
Paypal has a good cash position and little debt. We know this because the current ratio is greater than 1 and debt to equity is less than 1:
Price to earnings (P/E) is low and a lower number is good. I would say that it’s in line with a mature company:
Return on equity is 22% and sales growth is 8.7% per year. Paypal doesn’t pay a dividend. I’ve seen better for a smaller big company. Paypal has a market cap of $74 billion. For me, these numbers would disqualify the company without looking any further:
As a comparison, this is what Microsoft’s Return on Equity and Sales Growth look like:
Back to Paypal, revenues and profits are consistent from year to year right? Revenue looks like it consistently grows:
But profit is all over the place:
By the way, income after tax does the same thing. So really you don’t know what you’re going to get from year to year.
This is pretty typical of companies right? Again, here is Microsoft’s income before tax for the past 5 years:
You can get lots of cash, low debt, good growth, low p/e, and excellent return on equity from a few companies. And all you need is a few. Why would you settle for less? Yes, you can find as many as 10 companies that qualify.
Note that I have made mistakes. I bought Oracle thinking their numbers were similar to Apple. But they had quite a bit more debt. And you don’t need a company leveraged to the hilt. I dug deeper into Oracle’s income statement over time and balance sheet over time and found out why the had the debt, and sold the stock shortly after.
Don’t think you deserve sub-standard companies, you deserve the best. Before we go, let’s take a look at Nvidia’s numbers.
You probably know that some great things make some poor things forgivable.
One thing I may not have said already is what Warren Buffett says about the market: In the near term, the market is a voting machine, but in the long term it is a weighing machine. Meaning that the market will catch up with the performance of the business (good or bad) in the long term, but in the short term the market can be all over the place.