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Comment by danieljacksonno | Hacker News Reader

Punishes? Apple is the most highly valued company of all.

They’re also an outlier and a lot of what they do would be judged more harshly by analysts and activist shareholders if they weren’t so profitable. The question should be how we get more companies like Apple.

I wouldn’t want to invest my money, my retirement funds in companies that don’t strive to be highly profitable. Do you?

The answer to that depends on the timeframe and your risk tolerance: a lot of cryptocurrency people said FTX was profitable, too, right up until it wasn't. When you're talking about retirement funds, the timeframe is long enough that you have to think about how stable something is and whether the profits you're seeing will continue. There isn't a recipe for “highly profitable” and you need to consider both the quality of the leadership and whether they share the same goals you have: there are many companies which were bought by a private equity firm who “improved efficiency” by slashing costs and milking the existing customers for as much revenue as possible. If you're the PE guy who cashes out early in that process, this is highly profitable. If you're the retail investor with some shares in your retirement account, you likely had the opposite experience.

Of course you need to take other things into account as well besides current profitability, such as your trust in management’s ability to steer, for long term product/service foothold, etc.

I was juts making the point that all else being equal, you wouldn’t invest in a company that doesn’t try to make handsome profit, which was the suggestion. And Apple makes handsome profit, and then some.

Right, and they are absolutely an exception.

The general expectation for any company is to milk the daylights out of every quarter they can. Either put your money back into growth or hand it back to investors - cash reserves bad even though they obviously allow you to weather things (like we’re discussing here).

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