The path to offshore trading
How South Africans can invest in Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google
First R1m won’t require a tax clearance certificate, and will involve instead a simple transfer into a trading account
The release of Amazon’s quarterly results might have put paid to Jeff Bezos’ brief status as the world’s richest man, but the company’s status in the Fang gang appears to be intact.
The Fangs — Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google (via parent Alphabet) — are greatly responsible for Wall Street’s gains this year, with Facebook up 43%, Amazon up 34%, Alphabet 18% higher and Netflix 44% to the good as of last Friday.
Analysts at Goldman Sachs say "infotech and financials will continue to be the largest contributors to S&P 500 [earnings per share]. We expect both sectors will deliver the fastest earnings growth across the S&P 500 in 2017 and 2018, excluding energy." For RandSwiss portfolio manager Gary Booysen, "these aren’t tech companies in the true sense of the word — they are more the next evolution in media", especially in the case of Google (quarterly profit up 28%, excluding an EU antitrust fine) and Facebook (June quarterly earnings up 71%). And Amazon? "It isn’t really a tech company, it’s a retailer that is using cutting-edge tech to beat other retailers," he says.Amazon and Netflix, however, trade on p:e ratios that hark back to the priciest of the Nasdaq tech bubble darlings: Amazon’s forward p:e is 133 times while Netflix sits at 122. Facebook is comparatively cheap on a forward p:e of 31.2 and Alphabet is positively cut-price, at 26.2. In Amazon’s case, the p:e is (almost) irrelevan...
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