6 Stocks Super Investors are Buying!
Listen closely because I'm about to let you in on one of the biggest secrets when it comes to investing. If you want to know what stocks you should be buying, pay attention to what the greatest investors are purchasing for their own portfolios. Investors like Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Bill Ackman, Manish Pabri, the list goes on. These are some of the best minds in the world when it comes to investing; they have literally dedicated their lives to finding undervalued stocks. So, naturally, looking at what these guys are buying is a good place to start for your own portfolio.
Thankfully for us, every three months, these large investors are required to release what is called the 13F with the government. This document details what stocks an investor has been buying and selling. Here's a list of six stocks that super investors have been buying recently. Number three, MLS, is my personal favorite, so make sure to stick around to the end of this video because this is a great way to learn about investing.
Number six on our list is the Walt Disney Company, ticker symbol DIS. The company has a market cap of 170 billion dollars and the stock trades at a trailing P/E ratio of 38 times. Disney did 83 billion dollars in revenue over the past year, with 4.5 billion in profit. Disney is a household name throughout the entire world; however, what's less well-known is how exactly Disney makes its money. Disney splits its business into two main parts: there is Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution, which makes up 75% of the company sales. There's also Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products; this group makes up the other 25%.
Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution is where the company's TV channels sit; these consist of ABC and ESPN, just to name a few. Additionally, the sales that Disney gets from its movies are also included here. These titles include Star Wars and Pixar. Arguably most important, Disney's rapidly growing streaming service is also part of this division, but more on that later.
Disney Parks, Experiences, and Products consists of Disney's famous theme parks throughout the world. Also, when someone buys Disney-branded merchandise at the store, this is also included as part of this division. Disney's stock price is down 40% over the past year, having gotten absolutely crushed recently. The biggest reason for this is the company's streaming service, Disney+. When Disney's stock was trading at its all-time high back in 2021, investors were super excited about the streaming business. Streaming was the next hot thing in the stock market, with stocks like Disney and Netflix soaring.
However, things have changed drastically. Now investors are questioning whether these streaming services will ever be profitable. It seems like now investors are realizing that the average consumer doesn't want to be paying monthly fees for seven different streaming services. Consumers have started to show signs of pushing back. Investors pay close attention to the number of subscribers streaming companies like Disney are able to get. For the first time in nearly a decade, Netflix, Disney's biggest competitor in the streaming industry, actually lost subscribers over a three-month period in early 2022. This sent shockwaves throughout the entire streaming industry; shares of Disney and Netflix plummeted.
Whether Disney's stock will be able to return to its all-time highs anytime soon will be dependent on the company's ability to grow its streaming service profitably. Given that this stock is one of the most heavily bought stocks by our list of super investors, it seems like some very smart investors are betting that Disney will be able to do it.
Number five on our list is alphabet, ticker symbol G-O-O-G-L. Alphabet has a market cap of 1.1 trillion dollars and trades at a P/E ratio of 18 times. The company had 282 billion dollars in revenue and 68 billion in profit over the past year. For those of you who may not be familiar, alphabet is the holding company of Google and YouTube. Alphabet has three main segments. The first is what the company calls Google Services, accounting for roughly 90% of the company sales. This is where the Google search engine business and YouTube sit.
Alphabet is a digital advertising company. Think of Google as a middleman between companies and potential customers. In order for a company to get new customers, they need to advertise. As people spend more and more time online, companies are increasingly using the internet to advertise and get new customers. Digital advertising companies like Alphabet are big winners. Take YouTube for example; when you're watching YouTube, every so often, you'll see an ad pop up. The company that is running that ad is paying Google a very small amount of money to get that ad in front of you. Something like a cent. Well, for one person that's a very small amount; you can see how this can quickly add up when hundreds of millions of people are using YouTube at any given moment. As more people watch YouTube for increasingly longer periods of time, there are more opportunities for Google to place ads in front of viewers.
Alphabet's stock is down nearly 40% over the last year, as some investors are worried that a slowing economy will hurt the advertising business. At its most basic level, Alphabet's revenue equation is something like this: the number of ads they are able to show multiplied by how much they can charge advertisers for each ad that is shown. Alphabet's goal is to increase each part of this equation. The company can increase the number of ads that are shown in three main ways: increasing the number of people that use its services, getting each person to use the service for longer amounts of time, or by showing more ads to each person for a given amount of time.
The way Google can increase the other side of the equation, how much the company can charge for each ad, is by increasing how effective the ads are and getting the advertisers new customers. As ads are more effective at getting customers to buy things, advertisers will naturally be willing to pay more. This equation is very important for investors in Google. Here's how the company did it in 2021: as we can see here, Google was able to show 2% more ads in 2021 compared to 2020. However, Google was able to increase how much they charged for each ad by a whopping 35%. Google has been one of the best performing stocks of the past 10 years, and whether it will be one of the best stocks over the next 10 years will be dependent on the company's ability to manage both parts of this equation.
Number four on our list is Salesforce, ticker symbol CRM. Salesforce has a market cap of 140 billion dollars and trades on a forward P/E ratio of 28 times. The company did 30 billion dollars in revenue and 200 million in profit over the last year. If you know someone who works in sales or customer support, there is a good chance they are familiar with Salesforce. Salesforce is the leading CRM software company. CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRM is a technology for managing all the company's relationships and interactions with customers and potential customers. A CRM system helps companies stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability.
While there are plenty of uses of a CRM system, this one simple example will show why it's so powerful and important to businesses. Let's say we have a salesperson named John. John is interacting with hundreds of customers during any given week. Let's say a customer tells John he doesn't want to buy the product now, but he would be interested in three months from now. Since John interacts with so many customers, there is no way that he could remember that information all on his own. So John puts a note in his CRM to call this customer back in three months, and three months later John will be able to get a notification from the CRM to call this customer back and make the sale. When a company has tens of thousands of customers, you can see why a CRM is so important for managing and growing that business.
Salesforce's stock is down over 50% from its highs back in November 2021, as investors are worried about the future growth prospects and whether the company will be able to hit its profitability targets. There is no debating that Salesforce has a strong competitive advantage or what Warren Buffett likes to refer to as a moat. Investors buying Salesforce stock are betting that that moat will be around a decade from now.
Number three on our list of stocks that the super investors are buying is Amazon, ticker symbol AMZN. Amazon has a market cap of 880 billion dollars and trades on a forward P/E ratio of 33 times. The company had 500 billion dollars in revenue and 10 billion in profit over the last year. Amazon is broken down into three different segments: North America, which accounts for 60% of sales; International, which is around 25%; and then Amazon Web Services, which accounts for 15% of sales. Amazon is by far the world's largest e-commerce company.
At first glance, Amazon's business model seems pretty straightforward. Amazon buys a product from a supplier and then turns around and sells it to you as a customer at a higher price than what it paid. This is how the retail industry has worked for centuries. However, in the case of Amazon, only 50% of their sales are from this model, and honestly, it is the least profitable part of Amazon's business. Over 20% of Amazon's revenue is from what is called Fulfilled by Amazon, or FBA for short. This is where Amazon allows third-party companies to sell on the Amazon website. The customer buys a product on Amazon thinking that they're buying from Amazon when, in actuality, the customer is buying from a third-party company that is using the website to get more sales.
The third-party company ships the products that are being sold to an Amazon warehouse. Amazon then takes care of everything from the delivery of the product to customer service, and in exchange, Amazon takes a big cut of the price that the product gets sold for. Fulfilled by Amazon is actually more profitable for Amazon than when Amazon sells its own products. A big part of the reason why is because Amazon doesn't have to buy the inventory; instead, Amazon just gets to take a cut of the sale price in exchange for allowing a third-party company to use things like warehouses, delivery networks, and customer service—things Amazon has already built to sell its own products.
While Amazon started and made its name in retail, the company's main profit driver is Amazon Web Services, or AWS for short. AWS is the leading cloud computing platform. Cloud computing is the on-demand delivery of IT resources over the Internet with pay-as-you-go pricing. Instead of buying, owning, and maintaining physical data centers and servers, companies can now access technology services such as computing power, storage, and databases on an as-needed basis from a cloud provider like Amazon Web Services. As the Internet becomes more ingrained in society, AWS has grown rapidly, and unlike Amazon's core retail business, AWS is incredibly profitable. So while AWS only accounted for around 15% of Amazon's sales in 2021, it accounted for a staggering 75% of the company's profits.
Amazon's stock has gotten crushed over the past year, down nearly 50%. In 2020 and 2021, e-commerce was booming for obvious reasons; people were stuck at home and were ordering everything online. However, as things started to open up in 2022, e-commerce growth has slowed down dramatically. Amazon realized they had too much warehouse space and too many employees. Amazon has since had to undergo pretty significant layoffs for the first time in its history, and the main questions investors have about Amazon is whether its retail business can ever truly be profitable. If Amazon is able to get its costs under control, the stock will likely skyrocket.
Number two on our list is Microsoft, ticker symbol MSFT. Microsoft has a market cap of nearly 1.7 trillion dollars and trades at a P/E ratio of 24 times. The company did 203 billion dollars in revenue and 70 billion in profit over the past year. Microsoft is primarily a software company. The business has three main business segments: what it calls More Personal Computing, Productivity and Business Processes, and Intelligent Cloud. More Personal Computing accounts for 30% of the company's revenue. This segment includes the Windows operating system, products, devices such as the Surface tablet, phones, PC accessories, and gaming. Microsoft is the maker of the popular Xbox gaming system.
The Productivity and Business Processes segment makes up 35% of revenue. This segment consists of productivity, communication, and information products and services. Among the products are the Office suite of products such as Word, Excel, Teams, and PowerPoint. This segment also has Skype and social media company LinkedIn. The third segment, Intelligent Cloud, consists of the company's public, private, and hybrid server products and cloud services.
Microsoft is also a company editor to Amazon when it comes to cloud computing. Microsoft's cloud computing offering, named Azure, competes directly with AWS. As of the making of this video, Microsoft is the third largest company in the entire world based on market cap; only Apple and Saudi Arabian Oil Company Saudi Aramco are larger. Despite Microsoft's large size, the company is still managing to grow significantly. Over the last five years, the company has been able to grow revenue by at least 14% in any given year. What's even more impressive is how rapidly Microsoft has been able to grow its profit. Net income for the company has grown from 24 billion dollars in 2017 to over 69 billion in 2022. This is a compounded annual growth rate of over 24%.
The craziest part of all is that the company is showing no signs of slowing down, as Wall Street analysts are projecting that the company will still be able to grow profit 30% each year over the next two years. Despite this impressive growth and profitability, Microsoft stock hasn't been spared from the sell-off that has hit all technology companies recently. Microsoft's stock is down nearly 30% over the last year due to rising interest rates and concerns about the economy. Investors are using this pullback to buy Microsoft stock, making it the second most bought stock among our list of super investors.
Now, drum roll please! For number one on our list, the most bought stock from our group of super investors is Meta Platforms, ticker symbol META. Meta, better known by its former name of Facebook, has a market cap of 340 billion and trades at a P/E ratio of 12 times. The company did 118 billion dollars in revenue and 29 billion in profit over the past year. Meta has billions of users throughout its Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp platforms. Meta is in the digital advertising business with a fairly simple business model: when someone is scrolling on Facebook or Instagram, every so often an ad will appear. Advertisers pay money to Meta in order to get that advertisement placed in front of you.
Facebook's business model is very similar to Google's, with one big difference. For the most part, Facebook doesn't pay content creators to post on the platform. As a result, Facebook gets to keep nearly all the money it gets from advertisers. Google, on the other hand, pays out a significant portion of advertising revenue to creators on its platforms. Take YouTube for example; for every one dollar of advertising revenue, Google pays out 55% of that to the creator and keeps the remaining 45% for itself. This is how Meta is able to have gross profit margins of 80% compared to Alphabet's of 56%.
Of all the stocks on our list, Meta has had the roughest performance over the past year, down 60%. Investors have sold Meta's stock for two main reasons. The first is competition within the social media space, particularly from TikTok. With its Facebook and Instagram platforms, Meta was the undisputed leader in social media for years, then seemingly overnight, a new competitor popped up with a new way for users to consume content. That competitor, of course, is TikTok.
In order for a social media company to make money, it needs people to be on the platform. As people spent more time on TikTok compared to Facebook or Instagram, this resulted in fewer ads Meta could show users. This meant less revenue for the company. TikTok has also popularized what is called short-form content. Users scroll through short videos as opposed to long written-out Facebook posts and pictures on Instagram. This type of content is dominating social media now, with Instagram creating what it calls Reels and YouTube creating its own version called Shorts.
There's just one issue with short-form content: from a business standpoint, it is still yet to be determined how effectively these companies will be able to monetize views on short-form content. There is a concern that ads will be extremely disruptive to the viewer experience. The more disruptive ads are to the viewer's experience, the fewer ads these companies can show. The fewer ads these companies can show, the less money they can make. While short-form content is becoming increasingly popular, it is still to be determined what this will mean for these companies' business models.
The second reason why investors have been selling Meta's stock has to do with its bet on the so-called Metaverse. If you aren't familiar, in the most basic terms, the term Metaverse is used to describe a combination of the virtual reality world and the physical world accessed through a browser or headset, which allows people to have real-time interactions and experiences across distance. Meta pictures a world where people will be able to sit at home and interact in a virtual world through an avatar.
While this does sound a little strange to some people, Meta is betting heavily that the Metaverse is the future. The company is spending 10 billion dollars a year on the Metaverse. While Meta is bullish on the Metaverse, investors are highly skeptical and think Meta is wasting that money. Investors are pressuring Meta and its founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg to stop investing in the Metaverse and instead focus on the core business of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp.
Only time will tell how this plays out, but some of the most respected investors in the world are betting big on Meta's stock. So there you have it! Make sure to like this video and subscribe to the channel because it's my goal to make you a better investor by studying the world's greatest investors. Thanks for watching, and talk to you again soon.