Bes Stocks To Buy 2014, Best Stocks For 2014: AMZN too risky a buy at current sky-high valuations

Saturday, March 3, 2012

AMZN too risky a buy at current sky-high valuations

The nattering and chattering over Amazon‘s (NASDAQ:AMZN) foray into the tablet field with the Kindle Fire — a product that costs more to produce than the company is selling it for — is ultimately just a lot of smoke.

Yes, absolutely, Amazon is risking short-term profits and margins. So what? CEO Jeff Bezos always has managed the company beyond the quarterly demands of Wall Street’s expectations. Amazon’s razor-thin margins always have been under close scrutiny, and any time they come up short, investors punish the stock.

That’s fair enough — at least for traders and short-term players. At a scant 2%, Amazon has a lower net profit margin than Wal-Mart (NYSE:WMT). When you’re running a retailer that lean, a few hundredths of a percentage point pop in the cost structure can easily flip a net profit into a net loss.

More important is that the company’s strategy is sound. Amazon is an online retailer, and the new frontier in e-commerce is the tablet. If the company needs to start with a loss leader to get customers in the door, so be it. Supermarkets have been doing this for decades. Those overabundant displays of fresh produce that greet you upon entering your local supercenter? Most of it spoils and is thrown out at a loss. The vine-ripe tomatoes are window dressing. The profitable products are the ones in the aisles.

But most important is that all this fretting over the Kindle Fire — and the breathless, incomplete data on how holiday sales might have fared — obscures a far more critical fact about Amazon’s stock: It looks very, very overpriced.

If you have Amazon in your portfolio, what you decide to do with that position depends on your initial cost basis, as well as other considerations, such as your investing horizons and other holdings. Amazon is by no means an automatic sell, if only because it has proven agai! n and ag ain to be a core, long-term holding. InvestorPlace contributor Kevin Kelleher is right when he says Amazon investors should wait out the storm.

However, I sure wouldn’t be comfortable initiating a position at these levels. Here’s why: Based on the stock’s own five-year averages, it currently trades at enormous premiums to its trailing and forward price-to-earnings ratios. That’s to say, through good markets and bad, by both actual and estimated earnings, investors are paying historically out-of-whack sums for each dollar in earnings.

Amazon’s forward P/E currently stands at 87 vs. a five-year average of 56, according to data from Thomson Reuters. By trailing, actual earnings, Amazon’s P/E is a whopping 92 vs. a five-year average of 71. Clearly investors have been willing to pay big premiums for Amazon’s growth, and they’ve been rewarded in kind. The stock is up 340% during these past five years.

But valuations, like so much in investing, have a nasty habit of reverting to the mean — especially when investors get hinky about bold, new (and expensive) initiatives.

Shares in Amazon sold off ahead of the market’s New Year’s break after Goldman Sachs warned that fourth-quarter sales could miss Wall Street forecasts. It sure wouldn’t be the first time that’s happened. Amazon has missed analysts’ average top-line estimate in two of the past four quarters. It also has blown the Street’s bottom-line forecasts in two of the past four quarters, and three of the past eight.

So although Amazon’s strategy is sound, the stock simply appears too pricey at current levels. When it comes to long-term investing, valuation is (almost) everything. With a history of missed expectations, Amazon likely will offer investors a more attractive entry point in the not-to-distant future.

As of this writing, Dan Burrows did not hold a position in any of the aforementioned stocks.

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