Bezos no. 2 / make that no. 1

[7/22/18] Just as Prime Day is kicking off, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on Monday reportedly became the richest man in modern history.

According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, which tracks the net worth of the 500 richest people in the world , Bezos is now worth $150 billion. The staggering number is more than Bill Gates was ever worth, even during the height of the dot-com boom, Bloomberg reported. 

After adjusting for inflation, Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates was worth $149 billion in 1999. 

Bezos and Gates have been duking it out to be the world's richest person for the last few years, but it's worth noting that Gates has donated a sizable part of his fortune to charity — primarily to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Right now, Gates has a net worth of $95.5 billion, almost $50 billion less than Bezos.

[1/9/18] Bezos made $6.1 billion in five trading days in 2018.  Now worth more than Bill Gates was ever worth.

[7/27/17] Bezos passes Gates this morning to become the richest man in the world.  Asking for ideas on philanthropy.

[7/24/17] For the 30 years FORBES has been tracking global wealth, only five people have ranked on our annual compendium of wealth as the richest person on the planet. At least one other person held the title, but so briefly (just two days), that he never appeared at that rank on FORBES’ annual list of World’s Billionaires.

Now, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is poised to join this exclusive single digit club, as Amazon stock continues to soar. The online retailer’s shares climbed 1.3% on Monday, adding $1.1 billion to Bezos’ net worth. Bezos is now a mere $2 billion from assuming the No. 1 spot on FORBES Real-Time Billionaires List, which would put him in the company of an exclusive group of billionaires who have held the title. Bezos has a net worth FORBES estimates at $88.2 billion as of the close of markets on Monday, while Microsoft founder Bill Gates holds the top spot on the list with a $90.1 billion fortune.

[3/30/17] Jeff Bezos has leapt past Amancio Ortega and Warren Buffett to become the world’s second-richest person.

Bezos, 53, added $1.5 billion to his fortune as Amazon.com Inc. rose $18.32 on Wednesday, the day after the e-commerce giant said it plans to buy Dubai-based online retailer Souq.com. Bezos has a net worth of $75.6 billion on the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, $700 million more than Berkshire Hathaway Inc.’s Buffett and $1.3 billion above Ortega, the founder of Inditex S.A. and Europe’s richest person.

Amazon’s founder has added $10.2 billion this year to his wealth and $7 billion since the global equities rally began following the election of Donald Trump as U.S. president on Nov. 8. The rise is the third biggest on the Bloomberg index in 2017, after Chinese parcel-delivery billionaire Wang Wei’s $18.4 billion gain and an $11.4 billion rise for Facebook Inc. founder Mark Zuckerberg.

Buffett, who’s added $1.7 billion in 2017, has shed $4.7 billion since his fortune peaked at $79.6 billion on March 1. Ortega is up $2.1 billion year-to-date. Bezos remains $10.4 billion behind Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, the world’s richest person with $86 billion.

*** 5/15/17 ***

Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon, is one of the most powerful figures in tech, with a net worth of roughly $82 billion.

Today, his "Everything Store" sells more than $136 billion worth of goods a year.

Here's how the former hedge funder got his start and became one of the world's richest people.

Peter Lynch

[7/18/18] Robert Abbott reviews One Up on Wall Street:
Introduction - The Power of Common Knowledge
chapter 1 - Great Investors are not born
chapter 2 - The Wall Street Oxymorons (professional investing)
chapter 3 - Speculating or Investing?
chapter 4 - The Mirror Test
chapter 5 - Is this a good market? (don't ask)
chapter 6 - Stalking the Ten-Bagger
chapter 7 - 6 Categories of Stocks
chapter 8 - Finding Companies
chapter 9 - Places to avoid
chapter 10 - It's all about earnings
chapter 11 - the two minute monologue
chapter 12 - getting the facts
chapter 13 - Ratios and Data
chapter 14 - Three phases of a company's life

[7/18/18] You have plenty of time

[6/18/15] 20 Golden Rules

[12/24/14] Stocks to avoid.

[12/24/14] The Perfect Stock

[5/19/14] Picking Stocks Like Peter Lynch (1:10:06 video from gurufocus)

[4/2/14] The Peter Lynch Portfolio 29 (only $79/year from gurufocus)

[6/7/09] Peter Lynch videos (John Templeton and Louis Rukeyser too)

[8/27/07] On market timing: ""I don't remember anybody predicting the market right more than once, and they predict a lot," Lynch said in a PBS interview several years ago. He also likened investing in stocks with a one- or two-year horizon to "betting on red or black at the casino," adding, "What the market's going to do in one or two years, you don't know. Time is on your side in the stock market."

Asked in that same PBS interview whether average investors should follow a "buy-and-hold" strategy, Lynch responded, "They should buy, hold and when the market goes down, add to it. Every time the market goes down 10%, you add to it, [and] you would have better returns than the average of 11%, if you believe in it, if it's money you're not worried about [in the short term]."<! forbes article via russ ->

[8/22/06] Since I am looking at this review of Beating the Street, I figured I'd collect some of the other links to Lynch sprinkled among this blog.

The Wit and Wisdom of Peter Lynch

The different kinds of companies

The Peter Lynch approach to 'Understandable' Stocks

Peters's 21 Principals

Fast grower or low p/e?

Don't invest like Peter Lynch

[9/6/06] Review of One Up on Wall Street

[9/26/06 from mia notes from 3/31/01] Perhaps the most important thing I've learned from Peter Lynch is (to paraphrase) if the earnings keeps growing, the price will eventually follow. ... I'm trying to look up the exact quote and the closest I could come is this paragraph from One Up On Wall Street, Chapter Ten entitled Earnings, Earnings, Earnings:

... it always comes to down to earnings and assets. Especially earnings. Sometimes it takes years for the stock price to catch up to a company's value, and the down periods last so long that investors begin to doubt that will ever happen. But value always win out ...

I'm now looking at the April 1999 Worth and Lynch is featured in an ad for Fidelity Aggressive Growth. Here's his quote,

Despite 9 recessions since WWII, the stock market's up 63-fold because earnings are up 54-fold. Earnings drive the market.

[My question isn't why the correlation, but why the disparity? At first it seems way off because I thought 55-fold would be double of 54-fold. But actually 108-fold is. 63-fold is only 17% higher than 54-fold.]

Here's some more from the Legg Mason Semi-Annual report (6/30/05). Stocks rise with earnings. "Stock prices are highly positive correlated (over 0.90) with the direction of profits, not their rate of group."]

[2/11/13] Here's another similar quote from One Up On Wall Street

"You can see the importance of earnings on any chart that has an earnings line running alongside the stock price. On chart after chart the two lines will move in tandem, or if the stock price strays away from the earnings line, sooner or later it will come back to the earnings." Peter Lynch - 'One Up On Wall Street”

On the other hand, Keith Wibel observes that "Over 10-year periods, the major determinant of stock-price returns isn't growth in corporate profits, but rather changes in price-earnings multiples. The bull market of the 1980s represented a period when multiples in the stock market doubled- then they doubled again in the 1990s. Though earnings of the underlying businesses climbed about 6% per year, stock prices appreciated nearly 14% annually."