From the Desk of Irwin Michael – October 23, 2015 Over the past year, we have added numerous technology stocks to our five ABC Funds. We particularly like this sector as it contains a number of high quality, free cash flowing and fast growing companies trading at attractive valuations. Two of our holdings in this sector reported excellent results this week and have appreciated meaningfully on their improved performance. Alphabet Inc. (formerly Google Inc.) reported outstanding results, outperforming analysts’ expectations on both revenue and earnings. The company easily beat estimates based on strong gains in mobile search results and YouTube ad revenue in addition to strong growth in paid clicks and improved ad revenue from Google sites. Overall revenue grew 13% year over year. Additionally, the company initiated a share buyback for the first time, commencing with a $5.1 billion share repurchase plan. Overall, we expect to see further price gains for the common stock given a continuation of its strong growth momentum, a powerful balance sheet and the institution of further shareholder friendly policies. Microsoft had an excellent quarter as well, beating both earnings and sales expectations due to solid growth from its cloud services.The Intelligent Cloud segment(covering server products, Azure and enterprise services) performed very well, growing revenues 8% year over year, with the cloud computing platform Azure more than doubling revenue. Furthermore, the company issued strong guidance for the next quarter. As a global leader in cloud computing, we expect Microsoft to perform well into the future. Irwin A. Michael, President I.A. Michael Investment Counsel Ltd.
