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How about the whole Virgin empire then? Or Reliance industries or Berkshire Hathway ? Maybe Amazon is morphing into a giant holding company over time (industria
by dman 14y ago
How about the whole Virgin empire then? Or Reliance industries or Berkshire Hathway ? Maybe Amazon is morphing into a giant holding company over time (industrial robots, cloud computing, ecommerce, ebooks, games, consumer hardware, video streaming, selling non branded commodity versions of electronics under their own brand (amazon basics sells things like hdmi cables, mice etc))
- rm999 14y agoThose are conglomerates, which are quite controversial in the investing world. They're usually stable businesses, but often come with a "conglomerate discount" that leads to lower investor returns. This is due to increased overhead, murkier financials, and the simple fact that the management can't be as focused. http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.asp http://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/conglomeratediscount.asp
- dman 14y agoThanks for pointing the discount out - I wasnt aware of it. http://www.google.com/finance?catid=59360336 http://www.google.com/finance?catid=59360336 does indeed confirm that over long periods of time conglomerates appear to perform poorly when compared to the S&P.