American Consequences - August 2017

Think of it as "Halloween for Internet Businesses."

American companies are frightened of the boogeyman named Amazon. But that doesn’t keep them from wanting to be like the boogeyman named Amazon... • The company was mentioned 635 times in the last 90 days of earnings calls and corporate events... and 1,800 times in the past year, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. • Jeff Bezos, the company's founder, briefly surpassed Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates to become the richest person on Earth. • And antitrust chatter has started to get more headlines... with pundits speculating on which company will be the next loser as Amazon moves into its turf. Amazon is one of the greatest businesses ever built, founded on the premise that the Internet would replace brick-and- mortar retail. That core foundation remains intact... for Amazon. But the scores of imitation get-big-fast businesses following in its footsteps are costing investors billions.

In the two articles that follow, we show the two sides of Amazon... The first comes from Dan Ferris – a respected financial analyst and editor of Extreme Value. He is skeptical about Amazon imitators... While vision and growth saw Amazon through to profitability, that doesn't mean vision and growth are a substitute for profitability. The odds are way, way against your finding another Amazon. As usual, everybody's looking in the rearview mirror. Our second is from American Consequences regular contributor Dr. David Eifrig. He shares his "buy" recommendation of Amazon, previously published for his paid Retirement Millionaire subscribers... noting that Amazon shares are trading at a high valuation, but it doesn't take much basic math to understand just howwonderful this business is. And if you have a long- term view, he believes it's as close to a guarantee for investing success as you can get.

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