International Investing

I’m an Apple shareholder and a big fan of the late Steve Jobs.  As an Apple investor, I’m in a tricky spot.

After thinking long and hard about this decision, I’ve decided to stay with Apple, although I do realize that there is a downside risk.  Unless things change, however, I do believe that Apple shareholders will be happy they either bought or held onto their Apple shares come 2013.

I’ll list my reasoning in bullet points for why I think it’s still a good stock to own:

• Cash rich and can weather any storm, might offer a dividend at some point.  They certainly could.
• Low P/E ratio considering how solid this company is
• People underestimate the Iphone 4S.  I think it’s a smart move.  It will sell very well in Asia because of prestige alone, and I think Apple will role out a new Iphone 5 that will shock the world come the summer of 2012.  That’s just when the 2 year contracts of the Iphone 4 users of the US run out.  Perfect timing…..

I really don’t think so…  Investing in Microsoft seems like suicide.  I’d rather have my money in a piggy bank.

I’ve owned Microsoft stock and watched it do virtually nothing.  It’s not fun.  For some reason I had this belief that they are going to make a come back.  I highly doubt it now.

To me, Microsoft is running on an old business model and an investment in them seems very risky.  They put windows on every PC and they sell a bunch of software to companies.  Years ago, it worked amazingly well and that’s why it is still such a giant.  I honestly think that Micosoft’s best days are long behind them and they will just be in some kind of unforgettable “tech hall of fame”. They are the tech boys of yesterday who have still yet to retire.

I haven’t seen Microsoft do anything new in a long time.  Their attempt to get into search with Bing has been a major failure.  I think it’s failed far worse than most numbers would have you believe.

I own and operate several websites and I can see where my traffic is coming from.  If I total up all the websites I own, I have over a quarter million monthly visitors.  That’s a fairly big sample size and my websites are across many sectors.  The traffic from Bing is even less than 1% of the traffic from Google.

There is a lot of hype and speculation around the Facebook IPO set for sometime in late 2012.

I personally think that over the next 5 years or so, Google will be a much better investment than Facebook.

First of all, I’ve read that Facebook is targeting between a 63-100 billion IPO.  That is a massive market cap for a company that earns a lot less than Google.

Google Plus is growing quickly and estimated at having over 40 million users and an increase of 30% in just the past 2 days alone.  It’s obviously nowhere near as big as Facebook now, but it will certainly grow in size.  Google launched the product only 90 days ago and opened it up to the public just the other day.  No matter what, Google Plus is going to be a real nightmare for Facebook because it’s going to take people’s eyes and time off the Facebook site.

On the flip side, Facebook doesn’t stand a chance to chip away at Google’s search business.  I just can’t see that ever happening for a variety of reasons…