MSFT — All updates

Most of you probably don't know that Microsoft just kind of secretly or tried to be a little secret about it, kind of sweeping under the rug, changed their accounting techniques.

It says the accounting change adjusted the software giant's CapEx expectations to about 175 billion down from 190.

This article from the Wall Street Journal details how Microsoft is making it difficult for investors to understand what they're actually doing, what their CapEx costs are, what their financing costs are.

This one is from The Wall Street Journal. They say that Microsoft is leaving investors flying blind on its AI business across three critical drivers of the AI future, cloud computing, capital expenditures, and its relationship with OpenAI.

The company disclosures fall well short of what investors need.

What's interesting is we can see Microsoft came in at number one. Now, Microsoft over the last five years has grown earnings at a high rate with a EPS CAGR of above 18%. And what you'll notice is they're trading quite a bit below their four-year average PE multiple.

So, if we look at Microsoft here on Forecaster, there's a couple of different things worth pointing out. If we look at sales over the last five years, we can see it's grown substantially.

And along with it, the share price has climbed higher. But what you will notice is if you look in the last year, they're down by 3%, but the share price has been incredibly choppy, particularly from around April to really around current day.

The stock went from trading as high as $541 a share all the way down to 356, climbed back up to 460, and then quickly fell all the way back down to 352. And then after the recent earnings report, peaked at about $506 a share. That is a lot of volatility.

Now, after that, we have Microsoft. Microsoft is number eight. It's a $104,000 position. $50,000 of that being gains, and it's a 7% weighted position. For Microsoft to get that $10,000, I will need it to drop down to $400 per share from the $490 that it currently trades at.

After the last earnings report, Microsoft shot up around 25%. It went up like crazy. And before that, it was at $400 per share. So, if Microsoft simply gives up the gains of its last earnings report bump, then this will be the one that gets that $10,000.

We can assume a modest 12.4% EPS growth rate over the next 5 years. With that, I believe that Microsoft's appropriate EPS multiple quite high given the moat and the structure of the company, I think it should trade at a 28.

And with those assumptions, buying it at $400 per share gives us a compounded annual growth rate of 16.8% over the next 5 years, which I believe would soundly outperform the market.

I like Amazon long a lot. Jeff Bezos has been on the offer that's been driving this thing down, but I like this Amazon and Microsoft were the best two earnings reports out of the mag seven stocks.

So, I do think that these are stocks that you can still own at this point.

Path one is you own Microsoft, let's say. You sell a call, you collect premium, assignment happens and you're out. Stock runs another 20% and you collected your premium. You're up 18% total. Not bad. You move on to the next stock.

Moving on to Microsoft, started the week at 489, shares were down by 1.2% finished the week at 483. Just chilling at an elevated technical level. Video game sales are under pressure.

We saw that with Apple with their App Store, we've seen it with Apple Lovin's share price, but also just hardware sales that were down 10% year-over-year to $4.5 billion in July.

If you're a gamer, let me download down in the comments what you think about this. What do you think the cause is? Is it that everybody's waiting for Grand Theft Auto? Are we Were we just kind of like fatigued from the video games?

Is there's nothing new out there? I don't know. I don't game and maybe that's part of it as well. I mean, you know, there's this trend. People aren't drinking alcohol, people aren't, you know, wearing Nikes anymore, people aren't smoking cigarettes as much.

You know, there's these things that come in trend and out of trend and maybe it's just video games are just out of trend right now. I don't know. If you're more of a gamer, I'd love to hear your opinion on that.

Well, we got a request to do Microsoft next. So, how about we do that? Um I think even last time we talked a bit about Microsoft. Uh just when we cover the MX7 to me it's like the one Mac 7 company where I feel like I I just don't have a strong opinion like it probably if I would look at Amazon I have a pretty strong opinion if I look at you know Google or Alphabet I have a strong opinion not so much the case for Microsoft

All the major tech companies are now spending more than they make combined. They're spending more on AI than their whole cash flow, which is why they're borrowing.

Because if Microsoft builds a data center, that's a huge expense on their financial statements and their stock will go down. Microsoft just signs a contract promising to rent it for the next several years.

And that promise is what makes this whole thing financable.

Massive tech companies like Amazon, Google, McDougall, Meta are borrowing heavily to build data centers and finance artificial intelligence infrastructure.

Nvidia, Apple, Mr. softy Microsoft, Amazing Zon, Google, McDougall, SpaceX, Broadcom, Meta, Tesla, Masla, Micron, and Walmart, right? Those 11 companies right there.

So, what we'll do today, um, we have a tier list prepared. We actually have two tier lists. So, for one, we will talk about um the max 7 companies as you can see here. Plus, we have some extras.

So, we will talk about the Max 7s like you know, Meta, Google, Microsoft, those those sorts of companies.

I uh I looked at um Microsoft's earnings yesterday and an absolute strong strong um quarter.

All right, Microsoft revenue 90 billion up 18% year-over-year. Uh, that was a beat. Adjusted earnings per share $4.74. It's a beat over 421.

Um, they have a nice size investment in Anthropic, which um, I wasn't I'll go back to full screen which I wasn't aware of. I didn't know Micros I knew Microsoft had invested in Open AI. I did not know they also invested in Anthropic.

So before working with TIP, I actually used Canva kind of all the time to help make images for use on Twitter and Substack. And you know, it was super easy. was super intuitive and I didn't have to spend really any time trying to figure out how to use it.

It was just that easy. But I must admit, I haven't used Canva in years. And once I could use AI to generate images, I was less and less likely to use it over time. So yeah, there's often this kind of disconnect in the software world between products that engineers build and then what is actually most useful to customers.

And the vast majority of users, for example, they don't really need complicated software services to file taxes that know, you know, every single line of the tax code to a te. They just need something that's well intuitive, something that's basic and something that's good enough for 95% of the people out there.

You go look at Microsoft and Meta and Amazon. They're importing hundreds of billions of dollars of semiconductor equipment and telecom equipment and things of that nature. But Microsoft just posted $90 billion in quarterly revenue.

Their cloud business just hit a hundred billion in annualized revenue.