Amazon.com Inc. Message Board

The problem is that WS has tranformed capitalism into a consumption ponzi. Growth at any price. Wrong objective function...

Once:

It's hopeless to educate those who are true believers. Never mind that Facebook truly does have network effects where Amazon's core business does not. FB and Google invest strategically in high ROIC assets. Amazon is rewarded for doing the opposite...

This trading scam will be exposed in time... can't fight the diminishing true FCF and simultaneously increasing leverage into a weakening consumer for much longer. If not for the $3B in Q4 (on the back of less than forthright disclosures), Amazon would already be in trouble.

BS market is more accurate. The only dire situation is anyone holding a large illiquid long position here...

Kenji

It will fall and very hard. None of the analysts on Wall street can see it coming because they themselves live in a bubble. But, the fundamental economics that will govern the future do not favor Amazon's model.... it was better suited to 1998 than 2013...

If anyone has a copy of the Buy note, please send it to me. I'm keeping a record of all analysts calls for posterity's sake (and to make it easy for people to ask hard questions of those perpetrating this scam in the future).

I really wish these crooks had to put 50% of their wealth behind their collective calls. Not one would have buy here.

Follow the changes in cash balance over the past few years by quarter. Check out the growth in days payable. Between increase in days payable and increase in gift cards, Amazon's has inflated its cash by about $2.7B. Should the economy materially weaken (especially if we did have a shock), the unwind of that $2,7B would be rather difficult right now (pushing current ratio below 1...). If all the gift cards / accrued liabilities were to be redeemed, Amazon would need to have a distressed offering... And all this despite raising $3B in LT debt in Q4 (which puts debt to book equity at industry norms).

This scam is running out of cash to perpetuate itself... No cash for buybacks makes the frontrunning float jam games harder....

Kenji:

The martket multiple was WAY higher. You didn't have companies like INTC trading at 5X EV EBITDA, especially in a ZIRP environment... Same for AAPL.

Where's NASD and Geeg to bash my long Google call? I remember them talking lots of smack back when Google got hit after earnings. Yet, here we are and all of my predictions about Google's strategic moves are bearing out, laying the foundation to lay waste to Scamazon's only profitable businesses...

For the record, GLD short interest shot up and well. Now 8% of float.

The market will come back into balance. Given that it is already trading at very high cyclically adjusted multiples, it is likely to come back into balance on the downstroke.... AAPL, INTC, GLD etc have all been frontrun down. Someday, they'll catch the crooks behind all this manipulation.

As I said, there is a concentrated, planned, collusive effort to use infinite leverage to take out weak longs in real investments and to take out weak shorts in scams. IMHO, the correlation between POMO (including as a function of daily size) and the divergence between fundamentals and reality (with shorts piling on fundamentally strong companies and covering scams) is just a little too high...

I knew that it was going to get crazy in the last throws. This is the desperation of a system nearing catastrophic failure... The bond squeeze has been underway. It will fail. People like my parents are happy to see capital returned and hold TBills.

It looks to me at this point that it be gold that leads to the systemic crisis because the FED and TBTF/SIFI/BB continue to try to break it down when trust in those institutions is GONE.The games taking place right now demonstrate why no one trusts the financial sector anymore, making gold an essential asset in the portfolio. Physical demand is not abating and will not abate. We've already seen technical defaults in gold (settlement with paper rather than bullion). It will get worse... There will either by significant defaults on contracts, or there will be a reversal and parabolic ascent.

Just wait here. The real economy is not strong. Amazon will see its gift card redemptions accelerate and its average order size/shipment decrease, especially amongst "Discount/Value Prime" (the new cohort which is joining Prime based upon multiple stacked loss leader versus "High Value / High Purchasing Power Prime" which joined because they would save money on large volumes of purchases). The profitability will drop even more, especially if/as gas prices remain elevated from geopolitical risks.

The entirety of this scam will see light of day...

Hedge funds have apparently also given up on fundamentals since they've been pounded by the collusion over the past few years... The anti-fundamental trade hit a feverish pitch today that smacked of desperation... AAPL shorts are stacking up... They even brought out some jacka$$ today who said AAPL should be at $240 (humorous given its cash position) based upon ROIC analysis (gotta love it when analysts are penalizing companies that deliver high ROIC by investing only in truly strategic assets and capabilities rather than taking Amazon's approach of investing in redundant distribution infrastructure in a manner that does not materially change the cost to serve).

Anti-AAPL, anti-gold, anti-intc... non stop propaganda from CNBC and other financial media sources to bash anything that looks like a reasonable valuation on fundamentals. Cheerleading for what are unquestionably trading scams (like Tepper, there are a lot of people who have to get out of these scams while the getting is good...).

The AAPL/AMZN divergence is back up to record levels... All it takes is one enterprising fund to literally dominate performance and crush everyone else's in one fell swoop. There aren't often opportunities to realize huge gains while dramatically reducing LT risk in the portfolio....

The first day this sees the kind of short pressure that AAPL has seen relentlessly for half a year, this drops 5%. And another 5% every day that week...

Then you are in big trouble because before a Venusian day is complete from now, this will have permanently broken below $200. Cash position and TRUE FCF are going to make it near to impossible to maintain the PONZI.

Probably would do the inverse for Amazon and assume that it gets to 10 ROIC and should be one million per share...

Our PhD's focus on glorified theft instead of addressing energy, water or food challenges. Should make for agreat future...

They are using infinite leverage to trade against fundamentals on each side. Long/short anti-fundamental pain trade. And you ca demonstrate it by grouping classes of stocks into cohorts (MOMO, beta, value, etc) and looking at the non QE versus QE (and even as a function of POMO size) divergences in multiples that ABSOLUTELY CANNOT be explained by revenue growth earnings growth or any fundamental measure.

What is going on will make Enron look like childs play. It is concerted. It is collusive. And, it has started to reverse because it is so aburdly overextended that it cannot support its own weighsaid differently the entropy bill has gotten too high). The gold crush backfired and may well cause a catastrophic crisis of confidence in banking/finance sectors.