The morning started with news that the "US economy added a staggering 353,000 jobs in January, blowing past economists' expectations of 176,500 jobs last month." Also, unemployment has remained below 4% for the 24th month in a row - that hasn't happened since the late 1960s.

“We’re particularly happy to see wages outpacing prices. That’s so important for [middle class] families like the one the president grew up in.” - White House economist Jared Bernstein.

The afternoon ended with the S&P 500 hitting yet another record high, fueled by spectacular earnings reports by Amazon and Meta. These two stocks were up 8% and 20% respectively today. It's clear that they both embarked on a "year of efficiency", e.g, AMZN generated $85B in operating cash flow (OCF) last year.

Speaking of OCF, Jeff Bezos said a long time ago that's his preferred way to value AMZN. "When forced to choose between optimizing the appearance of our GAAP
accounting and maximizing the present value of future cash flows, we'll take the cash flows." he famously wrote in his 1997 letter to shareholders.

andrewmanndotco.files.wordpress.com - Jeff bezos letter to shareholders

Some of you may know Brian Stoffel, who's been working at TMF since 2008. Brian explains beautifully why you should use OCF rather than P/E ratios to value AMZN in this thread:

twitter.com - Brian Stoffel

And speaking of 1997, that's the year that TMF first introduced Amazon to us as a Rulebreaker. Back then, the shares were trading at a split-adjusted price of 16 cents. So $5,000 invested in Amazon when the Gardner brothers first told us about it would be worth $5.3 million today.

The mechanics of investing are easy. It's the emotional component that's hard.