When I first started paying serious attention to Microsoft as an investment, I still thought of it as the company behind Windows, Word, Excel, and the little Teams notification sound that somehow creates anxiety before I have even read the message. That version of Microsoft still exists, of course. Windows remains deeply embedded in personal and corporate computing. Microsoft 365 remains one of the most powerful collections of productivity software ever assembled. Millions of employees continue to spend their days inside Outlook, Excel, Teams, PowerPoint, and Word, occasionally pretending they did not see the meeting invitation that arrived five minutes before lunch. But when I look at Microsoft as an investor today, I do not begin with Windows. I begin with Azure. Azure is Microsoft’s cloud-computing platform, but that definition does not fully convey what it has become. Calling Azure a cloud platform is a little like calling an airport a collection of runways. Technically correct, bu...
Broadcom has spent the past few years doing something Wall Street finds irresistible: producing numbers so large that perfectly rational investors begin behaving as though disappointment has been permanently removed from capitalism. Revenue is surging. Artificial intelligence semiconductor sales are accelerating. VMware is producing mountains of recurring software revenue. Free cash flow is pouring in. Management is forecasting growth rates that sound less like mature-company guidance and more like the early stages of discovering electricity. Naturally, the stock market has responded by attaching a heroic valuation to the business and quietly assuming that nothing inconvenient will ever happen again. That leaves me with a deceptively simple question: Can Broadcom continue outperforming the largest technology companies, or have investors already paid for several years of perfection in advance? I can build a powerful argument on either side. The bullish case says Broadcom occupies one of...