Amazon as a $4 trillion company. iPhone X preview. PLUS Republicans vs big tech?
Here’s part 2 of 3 from the transcript to this week’s Trading With Cody Interactive Live Conference Call.
Q. Hey Cody, Are you thinking any about this Silicon Valley faces a dangerous political shift, also covered here There’s Blood In The Water In Silicon Valley. This seems to generally be building against our largest positions. Thanks.
A. I didn’t click on these articles yet but I’ve been seeing them too. I know what they’re about. It’s about the perceived liberal, certainly Democrat- leaning tendencies of the hundred-billion-dollar-plus tech titans. Google considered very liberal, certainly Democrat versus Republican. Same thing with Facebook; same thing with Apple. And in case you weren’t aware, we seem to have a Republican Administration and Republican dominated Senate and House.
Now to be clear, I don’t consider anything that those guys are doing to be actually “conservative” by my definition from classical liberal conservatism. Classical liberalism…which used to be conservatism….which underscores the power of the whole propaganda thing from the Republican Democrat Regime and how hard it is to keep your political stances and definitions straight and why I reject all of that stuff to try to stay objective.
Going back to the question, as objectively speaking as I can be then, Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon (Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post as Trump reminds people often) — these giant global tech corporations (many of which we have owned and made hundreds or thousands of percent gains on over the last many years that we’ve done this) are very Democrat-leaning versus being Republican-leaning. So, will they be in the crosshairs of the Republicans versus the Democrats in power? Sort of, but really, the answer is no. I think so much of the fear of any crack down on global corporations by the Republicans or Democrats, as I often tell you guys, is a bark with no bite.
The Republicans still depend on Google, Apple, Facebook and like companies for major donations. The Republican Democrat Regime and the people who are elected inside of that regime are driven first and foremost by that big money. And that’s just something that we have to accept and realize. We can fight to change it, but that’s not the scope of today’s question.
The scope of your question is what, if any effect this should have on our Trading With Cody and and our money. So let’s check our biasedness; check your partisanship at the door when you’re thinking about your money and your markets and your portfolio. So, let’s do that. Sure, there’ll be some fury and noise about these so-called “liberal” Democrat-leaning technology corporations that we own. Maybe there will be a little bit of a hit. Maybe some compression to their multiple will come into play, as the negativity and propaganda around them being targets by the government come into play.
But there won’t be much bite to those barks. The Republican-led or Democrat-led government rarely does anything to hurt global corporations that are worth hundreds of billions of dollars. Both Republicans and Democrats do the exact very opposite as we know and have seen and have profited from because we position ourselves for that. Even as, in my political life, I fight that stuff and I hope you do too.
It’s sort of fun talking into the camera again. I feel like I’m on TV. Thanks for the love. Now hop in here and ask me a question on TV. Let’s take advantage of this interactive live feature people. You’re watching me on the app. I’m inviting you to chat.
Cody: Alright, here we go, Joe from Arizona is joining me now on this Interactive Live Stream.
User: Cody, what do you think of Amazon as an investment?
Cody: Hello sir. Thanks for being a subscriber and it’s great to see you. You know it’s fascinating that the first person that’s going to ask me a question on my IAm interactive app is; may I ask your age? I see you at the MoneyShows all the time and I’m a big fan of yours in the crowd.
User: I’m only ninety.
Cody: Joe, ninety years old and you’re the first guy to ask me an interactive live stream question on The IAm Cody Willard App. You are living in the future Joe. I’ll get back to your question on Amazon in a second. I just did also want to note, ironically, the first celebrity we had an IAm App for is the one and only the great Carl Reiner and he’s ninety-five years old. He’s got you by five years Joe.
So, the answer to your question is Amazon I love. I think Jeff Bezos is a genius. I think he is the equivalent of Steve Jobs from ten years ago, twenty years ago. The one thing with Amazon is that it’s not cheap. The $500 billion dollar market cap, half a trillion is basically what that company is being evaluated at right now when it’s around a $1000 dollars a share. It’s down from that a little bit right now. I’d love for it to come down to about $850 and I would actively buy more. I trimmed some recently the first time it got to $1000 a few months ago. I would be very interested in buying more if we get the opportunity at $850 or less. Which I do think we’ll get in the next year. Maybe cause the Republican side of the Republican Democrat Regime is pretending that they’re going to go after Amazon for antitrust things or whatever as we discussed earlier. But they won’t actually do anything to Amazon and I’ll get the opportunity to buy cheaper because everybody’s worried that they are going to do something to Amazon. That would be great.
What I’m really trying to minimize my risk and maximize my returns over the next five, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years. For Amazon to go up tenfold here it would end up being a four trillion dollar company. $4,000,000,000,000. That sounds and looks wacky. It seems inconceivable.
But I remember when I moved to wall street back in 1996, there weren’t very many $100 billion companies. I remember when Cisco became the first half a trillion dollar company in 1999 and soon thereafter was worth less than $50 billion dollars. Cisco fell 90 percent from its highs within eighteen months. Hundreds of billions of dollars is what these companies are worth already.
And that’s a lot, but in another ten or twenty years will a trillion dollar company be that rare? Could there be ten, thirty, fifty United States-based trillion dollar companies? And if China grows (communist rule / capitalist rule or whatever the regime is that’s there — nthe model that they’re also using is driven by giant corporate profits, and yearning for profits) couldn’t there be trillion dollar companies in China? Yes. And Europe? Yeah. The United States? Absolutely. And Amazon will be one of them. I do believe that. I don’t know if it will have another 1000% gain on it. That’s what a tenfold increase would be. But yeah, I think it could be worth trillions of dollars twenty to thirty years from now. Joe, we’ll see if I’m right when you’re 120, I guess. I hope you’re subscribing and listening to me at 130 and rocking and rolling out there with me at my speeches. Joe, thank you for the question. I’m really excited about the irony that a ninety year old subscriber was my first, who had the guts and technological wherewithal to figure out how to interact with me on my new app’s live stream.
Cody: Inviting more users to talk now that I know how it works.
Cody: Oh dear, oh dear. It looks like it’s my wife trying to chime in with a question. Chief legal counsel as I like to call her.
Cody’s wife: Yes. Hi.
Cody: Hello.
Cody’s wife: Baby Amaris has a question.
Cody: Baby Amaris, as you might know, is my two year old daughter. She is on her way to Albuquerque right now for a check up. That is our medically equipped RV and my lovely wife and wonderful mother-in-law, M-I-L “Mil” as I call her, travelling. Hello and welcome. Let’s get an up close of Amaris’ face and let me say hi and get a question from her real quick. You only have 48 seconds left on this. Hi Amaris. What are you doing little baby?
Cody’s wife: She wants to hold the phone. And she wants to know if the new iPhone X is really what it’s all cut out to be?
Cody: All right, great. You can leave the camera on Amaris while I answer her; just give her the phone while I answer. If we lose her it’s ok. That is a cute little girl right there. She’s really taking to holding the phone. I’ve taken to playing my Apple music for her on my phone and letting her hold it and turn it in her hand. I put it on lock; I hit play; shuffle random songs from my thousands of songs I bought from iTunes. Back when I bought songs from iTunes before unlimited Spotify existed. She loves that and listens to the music and taps along.
And that leads me to the iPhone X. It’s great. It’s going to be cool. But it’s not mind-blowing revolutionary. It just, in some ways, catches Apple up with some of the latest features on the newest Android and Samsung phones. The most cutting edge flagship ones, ,like the Samsung Galaxy 26.4 or the Samsung Note 98A-B or whatever they call them. Speaking of which, Apple was really smart when they bought iPhone from Cisco. Do you guys remember that Cisco actually owned the trademark for iPhone? And, when Apple rolled out the iPhone, Cisco sold that name to Steve Jobs and Apple for something like $10 million, I do believe. A gift from John Chambers to Steve Jobs? I don’t know what that was. I’m going to have to ask my contact who was former second in command at Cisco to John Chambers, whom I’ve been developing a friendship with recently as he runs a video app company and I run an app for celebrities. I’ll have to ask him about why they sold the iPhone name so cheaply.
Let me get back to iPhone. So we’re now at iPhone X, iphone 10. It looks great. I’ll be buying it. I want to see if our apps work on it and to test it and to run it and to play with it. But, the iPhone X not going to change your world like the iPhone did versus a flip phone or the iPhone did the old Blackberry’s around in 2006 that were “cool.”
The iPhone X’s bigger screen; the no home button; facial recognition so you don’t have to put your thumb on it. That stuff’s great for my mother-in-law or for Joe, the ninety year old subscriber out there watching. I’m sure they hate putting your thumb on their phone to get it to open and then swiping it over and then hitting an app icon and then finally getting into the app.
That stuff is dying. Voice recognition and facial recognition is indeed the future. You’re going to have to devices like the Alexa Amazon Show and new smartphone interfaces that are all like, “Hi Alexa. Play some rock ‘n’ roll. We are slowly evolving to a world where we are going to be able to interact with our phones by talking and hand gestures and things like that very soon. The iPhone X is a progression towards that. Give it another two or three years and we’ll have some revolutionary voice features and technologies that we will have evolved too. The evolution of revolution now that I think about it. That’s your deep thought of the day. They are not mutually exclusive, are they — Evolution and Revolution?
Stay tuned for part 3.