Parsing Microsoft’s Massive 42% Gain In 2013 | Hacker News Reader

Parsing Microsoft’s Massive 42% Gain In 2013

techcrunch.com

14 pointsibsathish11 comments

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=^ixic Bernanke's magic. TC articles should probably be autokilled.

Nasdaq is up 28.07% YTD while Microsoft is up 37% YTD. That's quite an accomplishment and can't be explained by the "rising tide" theory you are putting forth.

Plus keep in mind that Apple is DOWN 4.38% YTD.

http://finance.yahoo.com/echarts?s=%5EIXIC+Interactive#symbo...

Let's try to reconcile your three facts:

  Average is positive.
  Microsoft up a bit more than the average.
  Apple down incredibly more than the average.

If most decent stocks went up by about 40% but a few stocks like Apple actually went down, the average would be somewhere around 30%. This means that Microsoft's stock could stay at par while others went down and Microsoft would beat the average.

Steve leaving probably helped a couple percent, but it's just noise.

As someone that works at an investment bank, your comment makes my head hurt.

The facts you cited aren't my facts; stocks and bonds are indexed to a benchmark made up of their peers. Matching the index is expected, beating it is great and underperforming it is really bad. For Apple and Microsoft, their peers are in the NASDAQ index so that is the benchmark by which they are judged.

Microsoft being up 37% in contrast to its benchmark being up 28% is not "a bit more than the average". It is beating its benchmark by 32% which is an incredibly good performance. Likewise, Apple underperformed its benchmark horrifically.

Think about it this way - $100 invested that returns 37% compounded growth over 8 years is now $1,240.98. However, $100 invested that returns 28% compounded growth over 8 years is now $720.58. Hopefully you can see why your downplaying of Microsoft's accomplishment seems a little silly. Oh, and the same $100 invested in Apple over 8 years would now be $69.88.

Are percentages of percentages a useful thing to talk about? If the index was flat and MSFT was up 1%, I wouldn't learn much from "Microsoft is beating its benchmark by infinity%!"

plot MSFT, AAPL, an SP500 for 24m

They are about the same, all showing mean reversion.

Why are you using one year extrapolated to eight? For an eight year comparison you should compare investing $100 in the two stocks in 2005.

There are websites and whole communities of developers that happily use Microsoft development technologies every day blissfully unaware of the existence of communities like Hacker News.

Hacker News is the mirror image of those communities and as such remains completely baffled by Microsoft's continued success while "nobody uses their products."

Things around here have gotten a little better since I joined HN. I put myself in that camp of developers happily using Microsoft technologies. I've been on HN for over 5 years and I feel the tone has changed a bit.

I was originally pretty surprised at the responses from the HN community when I first shared that my startup was built on .Net and was happy with it. Now I bump into many other startups around here built on .Net too and I'm seeing more and more discussions about Azure and C#.

Intersting premis for a conversation: MSFT up 42%

Not sure the TC article sheds any light on it, though.

True. TC article does not shed any light on this. But, the fact the MSFT failed to see the future in the last decade and becoming complacent about what they had made to the reversal of fortunes. They missed to realize mobile & cloud were multi-billion dollar opportunities. When they tried to make adjustments, it was too late.

Nevertheless, the news of the moving of the man on top gave some cheers to the wall street to go bang it and despite the fact they did not make any noteworthy product in the year in review, the stocks went up 42%.

It deserves a discussion.

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