Blog Posts by Henry Blodget

Facebook posted good fourth-quarter results yesterday.

Facebook is a great company, with a great management team, and a big long-term opportunity. Facebook is growing at a very healthy rate, especially relative to most big companies. And Facebook still has lots of "platform" opportunities that may lead to big revenue opportunities in the future.

If investors are willing to bet that, at some point, those platform opportunities will unlock a huge revenue engine that will cause Facebook's revenue and earnings to skyrocket, then investors can certainly buy the stock at this price (just north of $30).

But, otherwise, there's just no obvious reason to do it.

Yesterday, after reporting good Q4 results, Facebook announced that expenses will grow much faster than revenue in 2013.

Translation?

Facebook's profit margin will drop.

As a result, Facebook's earnings will grow at an even less-compelling rate this year than analysts were previously expecting them to grow.

If Facebook's stock were

There has been much frustration and outrage among two groups of investors in recent days--Apple bulls and Amazon (AMZN) bears.

Apple (AAPL) reported a quarter that beat Wall Street's printed expectations--and the stock tanked.

Related:Apple Succumbs to the $500B Market Cap Curse

Amazon reported a quarter that mostly missed Wall Street's printed expectations--and the stock soared.

Meanwhile, Apple's stock is trading at low multiple of 10-times earnings, and Amazon's stock is trading at an "infinite" price-earnings ratio.

So what gives?

Have investors gone insane?

Only the future will tell us for sure whether the prices investors are currently paying for Apple and Amazon (and every other stock) are reasonable. And, unfortunately, no one yet knows what the future holds.

But!

We can at least review the stories that some sophisticated investors are telling themselves as they sell Apple and buy Amazon.

The bearish Apple story is this:

• The company is already so huge that the days of rapid

Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman has argued clearly and consistently over the past five years that U.S. government spending is critical to our economic recovery and that cutting spending now to reduce the deficit would be a disastrous mistake.

Related: U.S. Still Suffering Depression Conditions: Paul Krugman

For taking this position, Krugman has been castigated by those who blame the depression on fiscal irresponsibility and runaway government spending. The way to fix the economy, those folks argue, is to immediately slash government spending, reduce the deficit, and restore "confidence" among the country's business leaders.

In the early years of the recovery, there was widespread support for the latter view. But in the past few years, as countries like the UK and Greece have tried the "austerity" remedy, it has become clear that this only compounds the problem. By reducing government spending, country's reduce employment and GDP. And by reducing employment and GDP, they

Apple analyst Brian White of Topeka Capital Markets made headlines last year when he jacked his price target for the stock up to $1,111.

That target was the highest on Wall Street. And its numerical symmetry gave it a "cartoon" quality that had people chattering about it. The target also highlighted the general arbitrariness of price targets in general, which are highly subjected.

Like a lot of other Apple bulls, White has had to temper his optimism this year in the face of Apple's new reality--the stock is doing nearly 40% from the September peak and now trades below $450. But White is still fantastically bullish on Apple. He cut his price target from $1,111 to the equally memorable $888, which would represent a double from today's price.

So, why does White think Apple's stock is going to double in the next 12 months?

And what has to happen for that to happen?

First, White thinks Apple will decide to give more of its massive $135 billion cash pile back to shareholders, in the form of

Ben Horowitz, a founding partner of Silicon Valley powerhouse venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, made an interesting point at the DLD conference yesterday.

Horowitz was running through the factors that make a great investment.

One of those factors is "the team"--or, more specifically, the entrepreneur.

Horowitz says the entrepreneur is vastly more important than the idea--because if an idea is lousy, a great entrepreneur will see that quickly and then change the idea. Horowitz ran through several examples of this, which included PayPal, Google, and other massive home runs.

Great entrepreneurs, Horowitz said, have two key qualities:

* Brilliance

* Courage

The reason for the first one is obvious.

The reason for the second one, Horowitz says, is that the other virtues that everyone wants to see in successful people--honesty, integrity, etc.--all flow from courage. And if you don't have courage, in times of stress, honesty, integrity, and other virtues can quickly go by the wayside.

Now that President Obama has proposed a slate of gun-control measures, those who oppose gun control are mobilizing to stop them.

So it's worth stepping back again and reviewing the points that are often made to support the idea that there should be no gun control in America.

The no-gun-control folks, who never seem to be the parents or relatives of people killed by gunmen (or are remarkably undisturbed by this), make the following points:

• The Second Amendment gives us the right to own guns (at least in the service of a "well-regulated state militia," a seemingly important qualification that always appears to be ignored).
• Guns don't kill people--people kill people.
• There are ~300 million guns in this country, so we need guns to protect ourselves from all the guns.
• If the shooter hadn't used a gun, he'd have used a bomb or fire or knife or some other weapon.
• Gun control won't stop people from going crazy: We need more focus on mental health, not guns.
• If we allow the government to limit

Lance Armstrong has finally confessed to doping during the years he was winning the Tour de France, according to reports about an interview that Armstrong just gave with Oprah Winfrey.

The interview, which will air on Thursday, is already getting huge promotion. And even if all the details of Armstrong's confession are leaked before the interview airs, millions of people will likely watch just to see whether the confession--and Armstrong's apology, if any--seems genuine.

That Lance Armstrong doped is, at this point, no surprise.

The information turned up by years of investigation, and the extraordinary amount of evidence released by the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency last summer, made that all but a certainty.

The only questions that remained were whether Armstrong would confess to doping, and, importantly, whether he would apologies to the many former teammates and friends he attacked over the years for telling the truth about him. The first question has now been answered.

For many

Apple's stock is down 25% from its peak.

Many factors have contributed to that drop. But none is more important than this:

Apple has lost its edge.

What does that mean?

It means that Apple is no longer the clear product leader in several categories in which it has dominated the world in the past five years.

Now, of course, Apple is still the most valuable and profitable company in the world. And its product design, manufacturing, and distribution is still remarkable. And it's still a great company. So, let's be specific.

For most of the past five years, Apple has led the world in the following key areas. In the past couple of years, however, Apple has lost its lead. And in some areas, it has actually fallen behind:

• Smartphones. Apple reinvented the smartphone category with the launch of the iPhone in 2007. For the first five years of its existence, the iPhone was unequivocally the best smartphone on the market. Now, many people consider other new smartphones to be better than the