My not particularly original or well-informed two cents (After getting to the end, looks more like a buck-fifty at this point):
Sure, these companies operate in some overlapping areas, but I think grouping them together because some wall-street
performance artist came up with a catchy acronym is short-sighted oversimplification.
Amazon seems to be really good at shipping physical items, with regard to both customer satisfaction and economies of scale.
I find it hard to imagine anyone dethroning them in that regard anytime soon, maybe BABA, or if a bunch of Walmart-type retail chains decided to form a very boring analogy of The Avengers, the barriers to entry seem pretty high.
I think there's still plenty of room in the business of 'selling things to people' to grow in.
I don't think milking the customers for every last cent you can is a good policy, and neither is paying large dividends when there are better things to do with the money, so I like the low profit margin, but hey, I own some TSLA, so what do I know?
On the cloud services side, I guess it's pretty big profit center for them, I don't know enough about it to differentiate it from Microsoft and Google, I guess they'll maintain a balance of power with their competitors.
On the content creation and distribution side, and this is where Netflix and Apple come in, I guess Amazon can be a contender, I don't know, I pirate all that stuff, haven't bought a CD or DVD in maybe a decade.
I guess it depends on who can leverage their users and weight in the industry better, if their exclusives have a significant enough impact on the culture that you can't be part of the conversation during lunch without being a subscriber.
Disney is also entering the market, and yanking their content from their future competitors, and while they might not have the breadth of content of Netflix, they have all the high visibility stuff, the multibilliondollar franchises are all coming together in the Mouse's grabby little white gauntlet.
Apple of course, has their slice of the content distribution pie, their war chest of cash, and their hardware business that supports it, I'm not really a fan personally, not sure how much growth there is in phones or tablets, and they seem to be neglecting the more serious hardware stuff.
They might pull off a self-driving car at some point, or an AR headset that Just Works™ , who knows?
As far as I understand, their phone-based payment system is gaining some traction, which could be pretty big, eating Visa's lunch, but I sort of find that hard to imagine considering it's tied to the hardware of one phone manufacturer.
Alphabet is such an amorphous blob I don't even know how to look at it.
I was quoted once in some journal, I think about a decade, decade and a half ago, commenting how 'Soon you'll be taking your Google to the Google to buy some Google for your Google' and that's not even the half of it.
If anything, I invested in GOOG in spite of their base advertising business.
I work in a field adjacent to advertising, I grew up with popups an banners and embedded ad words, I use ad blockers.
When I do end up seeing ads, usually I just have a blind spot for that part of the page, if it's really intrusive I vow to not spend any money on that specific product, and it it's a good ad, like the ones you see for the superbowl, I just take it as a cute clip with no relation to any particular product.
So while I realize my experience is might not representative of the general public, I still have this suspicion that the ad-based industry bubble is about to pop any minute now.
So for that reason I find it really hard to take Facebook, Twitter, Snap, Bitcoin, et al, seriously.
I'm not doubting the reality of the network effect, people will still be where all the other people are, but it's a shaky ground to build a house on, Myspace, motherf**ker.
I guess Nvidia could also be part of FAANG, depending on how you spell it.
Seems to me Nvidia was mostly inflated on the demand for crpyto mining hardware, which is dying down, and based on the AI buzzword for the auto industry and more generally.
AI is pretty broad and vague, and I guess all these companies are harnessing it to some extent, it's a question of who can use it productively and make money orders of magnitude more effectively than regular 'dumb' algorithms could.
I'm starting to see some practical applications trickling down into the industry I'm in (Graphics) like render denoising, face replacement, frame interpolation, visual style transfer, etc.
On a related note, it seems everyone is having problems with their semiconductor fabrication processes, Intel doesn't have as much of a lead as they once had, the hard limits of physics are getting nearer, it would be interesting to see who can develop new directions in that field, other materials than silicon, quantum computing, etc.
I guess that's all I have to say about that.
Turned out into a bit of a rant without any particular direction.
I guess the appeal of picking specific stock is developing some hypothesis about how the world works, how it will work in the future, and putting your money where your mouth is, being rewarded or punished for your perceived understanding of global processes.
My personal bet is on Tesla, and it's quite a big one, but I have no family obligation, not particular interest in early retirement, no financial needs beyond part of what I make, so it's mostly a game for points, maybe I'll buy a ticket to Mars some day.
