A ten-year low in forward P/E makes hyperscaler valuations look more than reasonable. Goldman Sachs' chart tracks Amazon, Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft and Oracle as a basket. x.com
Andres Cardenal
CFA, Economist & Financial Analyst, Investment Columnist
Amazon looks cheap against its expected long-term earnings growth if that growth proves accurate. Its five-year consensus growth is the fastest in the Magnificent 7 after Nvidia, while its 0.90 forward P/E-to-growth ratio is the lowest excluding Nvidia. x.com x.com
Alphabet's earnings growth makes its valuation look attractive. It trades at 21x forward earnings and a 0.47 PEG while EPS grows 34% year over year; shares are down almost 9% year to date. Search still grows 12% and Cloud grows 103%, undercutting the concern that Search will sink the business. x.com x.com
Alphabet's core Search growth is slowing while AI spending surges, making the selloff look deserved despite fast Cloud growth. Search growth fell from 19% to 17% to 12% over three quarters; Search now represents just under half of revenue. The stock could fall to $250, though Amazon is the preferred buy. x.com x.com x.com x.com x.com
Alphabet's rapid cloud growth and diverse profit sources make it a long-term buy below 20x forward earnings. Cloud grew 103% this quarter, despite short-term fears about search and heavy spending. x.com
Rapid revenue growth makes the capex bear case harder to justify for Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta and Amazon. Their latest cited growth rates are 18%, 23%, 28% and 16% in Q2, respectively; their scale does not seem to be slowing them as expected. x.com
Amazon, Alphabet, Microsoft and Meta are not getting cheap; their multiples are sliding because separate monopolies are turning into one competitive market. They now spend enormous sums to sell the same AI to the same customers, funded largely by cyclical ads, on unproven returns. Microsoft faces AI eating per-seat licensing, Amazon fights in both retail and cloud, Alphabet's search premium is gone, and Meta keeps going all in for less. Markets can't price not knowing what a business will be. … Show more
Hyperscalers' forward P/E has contracted 20% even as estimates ramped, making it rare to see things get much worse. Rising GPU rents and new lows in availability make the AI fears a fade; hyperscalers should lead. The next two weeks will be gut-wrenching amid the OpenAI raise, Anthropic S-1, Fed, midterms and mutual-fund selling into year-end, but that is the time to buy. x.com
Alphabet's vertical integration and moat make its current valuation attractive. Its forward P/E is 19.78, below the 22.51 median shown since 2019. Alphabet is also valued below Tesla and SpaceX combined, despite the chart showing Google's quarterly revenue far exceeding theirs; that comparison does not add up. x.com x.com
Amazon's weak retail growth has shaken the earlier buy case. Online-store sales rose just 2% year over year, and the retail numbers look so poor that it is no longer clear at what price the shares are a buy. x.com x.com x.com
Combining estimated NTM revenue growth with trailing GAAP EBITDA margin makes Palo Alto Networks, Datadog, JFrog, Rubrik and Snowflake look overvalued against forward EV/sales. Zoom, Alphabet, Oracle, AppLovin, Microsoft, Fair Isaac, Adobe, Amazon and Teradata remain undervalued on this Rule of 40 comparison; Palantir, Cloudflare and CrowdStrike remain overvalued. x.com