Welcome to the Tunji Letter, Edition #45.
// Weekly Motivation
"Simple investment strategies often beat complex ones."
Make investing simple for yourself. There is no need to do complex or time-consuming financial modeling unless you want. For the most part, focusing on fundamentals such as a company's business strategy, profit drivers, market risks, leadership, and economic moat will be a good enough base for your investment strategy. From there, you can build upon your base by looking for increasing growth rates for key financial values for a company, such as revenue, earnings-per-share, and free cash flow. You can then build upon that by doing technical analysis to better understand the company's price action by using technical indicators such as moving averages, Bollinger Bands, and RSI.
Alternatively, if you do not want to do any of that, you can simply deploy a dollar-cost averaging strategy where you will invest a consistent amount on a monthly or weekly basis into low expense ratio ETFs such as VOO and VGT.
// Amazon Earnings
For Q1 2021, Amazon had earnings of $15.79 per share vs. $9.54 per share expected and revenue of $108.52 billion vs. $104.47 billion expected. The company smashed expectations. Outside of its core retail business, Amazon's cloud computing business has been leading the way for the major growth the company has been experiencing. Amazon Web Services saw net sales of $13.5 billion during the quarter, up 32% year over year.
Amazon has also experienced strong growth in its streaming business, with over 175 million Prime members streaming shows and movies. Streaming hours are up more than 70% in the past year for the company. The only key area of Amazon's business that saw a decline is in its physical stores, which include Whole Foods and other brick-and-mortar offerings such as Amazon Books. Revenue was down 16% for physical stores.
Amazon still has a lot more room for growth. With Jeff Bezos stepping down and Andy Jassy eventually becoming the CEO of the company in Q3 2021, the company will continue to be in good hands in terms of leadership (Andy Jassy is currently the chief of Amazon Web Services). One thing investors were hoping for was the company announcing a stock split. With Amazon's stock trading at $3,467.42 as of April 30th, 2021, it is pricy for most retail investors. Maybe when the stock hits $4,000, the company will consider a stock split.
// CardMatch
What is CardMatch? CardMatch is a tool by Creditcards.com that takes some of your personal information and then matches you with current credit card offers that you prequalify for. Prequalifying means you meet the basic criteria to be considered for a credit card. It is important to note that CardMatch does a soft pull on your credit, meaning that it does not affect your credit score.
So, what kind of personal information is CardMatch collecting? You will be asked for your name, mailing address, employment status, estimated annual income, monthly rent or mortgage, last four digits of your social security number, and your email address.
With the click of a few buttons, you will see the potential credit cards you could likely get if you were to apply for them. Will the credit cards be what you are looking for specifically? They may or may not. Results will vary, which is why I still recommend doing your research and due diligence to make sure you end up with the credit card or credit cards that you truly want for yourself and that fit your spending habits.
// Latest Articles
Check out my latest articles:
· What Does It Mean for a Company to Sandbag?
· 2 Quick Points to Simplify Fund Flow
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Thank you for reading!
Tunji
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