Amazon on the other hand. Amazon is killing it. In every single field they enter. Nobody can compete with them in any field they decide to enter.
Nobody can compete with them because they are choosing, through their pricing strategy, to make almost no money (relatively speaking). Buying Amazon stock at these valuations is a bet that in the future they will eventually decide to turn some valves to begin diverting floods of profit into their pockets (i.e., your pocket, as a shareholder), or that the stock price itself will be higher in the future for other reasons (i.e., speculation). The big question is whether the mix of "fields they enter" can support profit margins in the future that will be sufficiently large to justify your investment at current prices (low-margin retail vs. cloud services, for example).
Apple, on the other hand, already has those valves wide open, and is gobbling up historic amounts of cash. The mix of fields Apple has entered is well understood; notably, the market wants Apple to define, enter, and dominate new fields, and Apple's opacity in this regard leads to much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. At the same time, would the market also prefer that Apple close those valves a bit (make less money to buy marketshare and customers)? Apple is so big and so widely held that there's a large cohort ready to believe any particular strategy is the wrong one.
Nobody can compete with them because they are choosing, through their pricing strategy, to make almost no money (relatively speaking). Buying Amazon stock at these valuations is a bet that in the future they will eventually decide to turn some valves to begin diverting floods of profit into their pockets (i.e., your pocket, as a shareholder), or that the stock price itself will be higher in the future for other reasons (i.e., speculation). The big question is whether the mix of "fields they enter" can support profit margins in the future that will be sufficiently large to justify your investment at current prices (low-margin retail vs. cloud services, for example).
Apple, on the other hand, already has those valves wide open, and is gobbling up historic amounts of cash. The mix of fields Apple has entered is well understood; notably, the market wants Apple to define, enter, and dominate new fields, and Apple's opacity in this regard leads to much gnashing of teeth and rending of garments. At the same time, would the market also prefer that Apple close those valves a bit (make less money to buy marketshare and customers)? Apple is so big and so widely held that there's a large cohort ready to believe any particular strategy is the wrong one.