At some point (perhaps now) Amazon growth is predicated on cannibalizing other companies. After all, the broad market can't exceed the GDP generally for the long term.
My primary point here is not to argue about investment concepts, merely to state a concern about the artificiality of it all. Financialization is real and rather spooky.
Most PROFESSIONAL stock pickers don't beat the market. And those that do, a tiny fraction can do it consistently over a 5-10 year time frame.
This is backed up by decades of data. But we still have millions of people who apparently think they are smarter than the thousands of professional stock-pickers who have MAs, PhDs and years of experience and do it full-time and still don't beat the market.
And sure, many average joes were wildly successful with GME or whatever the latest meme stock is. Just as many people made a ton of money in the last tech bubble. Check back in 5-10 years...
I'm counting on being luckier than those guys more than anything.
Any yes, what people on WallStreetBets are doing is gambling. Which is perfectly fine, I just wish more would acknowledge it.
From a valuation perspective, what's so wrong about that? You want to be on the side taking over the world. Otherwise you're on the side that's getting taken over, and the value of your equity logically trends toward zero.
They have a decent position in online retail, but they are very far from owning all of retail.
https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/KO/cocacola/pe-rat...
There are two ways that a P/E can return to a quasi-normal value. Either the price can go down or the earnings can increase.
The mean and median values, since 1880, are about 15.
"This time, it's different" https://www.multpl.com/s-p-500-pe-ratio
KO has excellent margins - last time I looked they were around 60%. That means prices * sales only has to increase by 5x to bump earnings up 3x. Food prices have been inflating at 10-15% recently; 15% inflation over 11 years will get you there, and that doesn't include any growth in sales at all. These aren't unreasonable assumptions, given the macro environment: another 1970s inflationary episode would do it. (Indeed, Warren Buffett made a lot of his money investing in Coca-Cola and See's Candies during the 1970s.)
I am not sure about the logic (are you assuming marging expansion?) but probably you are trying to say something else than revenue has to increse "only" five-fold for earnings to triple.
> Food prices have been inflating at 10-15% recently;
Sure.
This thoughtful Quora post claims that Buffett made his first purchase of KO at a P/E of 29.
https://www.quora.com/What-was-the-P-E-Buffett-paid-for-Coca...
However, I'm not pulling out because realistically, there's no other asset that's safer in the long run. Interest rates are close to zero so returns in bonds are low, inflation will eat away money held in cash deposits and don't even get me started on cryptocurrency, rare sneakers or other "alternative investments". I started investing in stocks in 2017, even then people were warning that we were in a bubble that was bound to burst at some point. Not investing would have missed me several years of above-average returns.
But today, there seems to be a bubble on everything after all the money printing. So I'll keep investing in good, underhyped and stable companies and try to weather whatever storm, good or bad, will come in the next years.
This is the obvious strategy, reduce your risk tolerance and go with proven companies. Put your money (fresh from your bank account, not from your portfolio) into moonshots when you can afford to lose them, after that put the moonshot money back into your boring but relatively safe investments. There are low volatility or stable dividends ETFs that specialize in this.