AMZN Priced for Perfection: Should Investors Worry?
Investors are often quick to throw valuation metrics out of corporate windows in favor of "zeal," a quality that flies in and attaches to names such as Chipotle(CMG) or Salesforce.com(CRM) and to a lesser extent virtualization king VMware(VMW) . These are examples, of stocks that by virtue of their enormous trading multiples that fit the description of "priced for perfection."
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As great as it is for these companies to have earned such favor and high praise from Wall Street resulting in high flying stock prices, one misstep can be severe -- if not entirely catastrophic. After all, one cannot spell "perfect" without P/E and several of these names sport ratios that offend value investors -- myself included. As fundamentally sound as e-commerce giant Amazon(AMZN) continues to prove that it is, I have recently decided that by virtue of its P/E of 143 it now merits a ranking among the "perfect." The question is, should there now be cause for concern?
Perfect Problems
Amazon is without question one of the best tech stories today. It is a wonderful company with one of the top three visionary CEOs in Jeff Bezos. But the stock is expensive -- there is no way to spin this. I have never been a fan to the so-called "premium pricing." I will concede that it has never served as an impediment to growth stocks like Amazon. The question for "perfect stocks" has always involved the challenges with growing into the valuation.
