Making Cents Sense

Market data and valuation figures are as of July 21, 2026. For years, Alphabet was the Big Tech stock investors described as “cheap.” Not cheap in the traditional sense, of course. Nobody looked at a trillion-dollar technology company and confused it with a clearance-bin toaster. Alphabet was cheap only by the peculiar standards of Big Tech, where a company could dominate global advertising, generate tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow, own several of the internet’s most valuable properties, and still trade at a lower valuation than another company selling phones, software, or artificial intelligence dreams. I understood the argument. Alphabet owned Google Search, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Google Cloud, and a collection of other products that billions of people used while occasionally claiming they wanted less Google in their lives. The company produced enormous profits, maintained a fortress-like balance sheet, repurchased stock, and eventually began paying a di...

All financial figures and market data are current as of July 20, 2026. I have a complicated relationship with Nvidia stock. Every time I look at the valuation and decide the market has finally become too enthusiastic, Nvidia reports another quarter that makes my concerns look like they were prepared using a calculator from 1997. Revenue rises. Data-center demand breaks another record. Management raises the bar. Analysts revise their estimates. The stock climbs. Then someone announces that Nvidia is obviously overvalued because it has already gone up, which remains one of the financial world’s favorite ways to confuse price movement with business analysis. Still, I cannot ignore the question. Nvidia shares recently traded around $203, giving the company a market capitalization of approximately $4.96 trillion. That is not merely a large valuation. It is the kind of number that causes me to check whether I accidentally leaned on the keyboard. At nearly $5 trillion, Nvidia is no longer an ...

Fund data and portfolio figures are current as of July 2026. This article is general analysis, not individualized financial advice. I have spent enough time around investors to know that comparing SCHD with the S&P 500 is never merely a comparison between two investments. It becomes an argument about identity. One side wants dependable dividends, established businesses and the reassuring sight of cash arriving every quarter. The other wants broad exposure to America’s largest companies and sees no reason to place an artificial ceiling on growth merely because a company has not joined the dividend-distribution club. Before long, everyone begins defending an exchange-traded fund as if it raised them. I understand the emotional attachment. SCHD and the S&P 500 represent two different ways of thinking about long-term investing. SCHD emphasizes established companies with durable dividends and strong financial characteristics. An S&P 500 fund owns a much broader collection of lar...

I'll admit it—Walmart isn't exactly the kind of stock that gets people rushing to YouTube to watch a thirty-minute breakdown. Nobody is making dramatic thumbnails with glowing arrows pointing toward a shopping cart and screaming, "This Changes Everything!" Walmart isn't flashy. It isn't chasing the next artificial intelligence breakthrough. It isn't promising to reinvent an entire industry before next Tuesday. And honestly, that's part of the reason I keep paying attention to it. The stock market has a funny way of making boring companies look... well... boring. Investors love excitement. They chase momentum, obsess over the latest technology, and convince themselves they've discovered the next company that will change the world. Meanwhile, companies like Walmart quietly keep selling groceries, household essentials, clothing, prescriptions, and just about everything else people buy regardless of whether the economy is booming or falling apart. That...

Part 1: The Company I Can Never Quite Talk Myself Out of Buying Every few years, Wall Street falls into the same trap. It discovers a new technology, gets wildly excited about it, bids every related stock into the stratosphere, and then suddenly develops the attention span of a goldfish. The narrative changes almost overnight. Yesterday's revolutionary company becomes today's "overvalued dinosaur," and investors begin asking whether the best days are already behind it. I've watched this movie more times than I can count. It happened with personal computers. It happened with smartphones. It happened with cloud computing. Now it's happening with artificial intelligence. And somehow, Amazon always finds itself standing in the middle of the argument. The company is either too expensive, spending too much money, investing too aggressively, or supposedly losing its edge. Then a few years pass, Amazon reports another monster quarter, expands into another industry, an...