Article: Best Buy Plays Copycat
Up next in my “Fool Revisited” series was an article that appears written when we covered the retail sector. I wrote about a retail company – Best Buy (NYSE: BBY) – that seemed to be copying a lot of its competitors in order to stay relevant. This was at a time when Best Buy was struggling to stay relevant because of Amazon (among others), and a little before they almost went private because of poor performance.
This article didn’t have a whole lot of real substance; you can definitely tell it was just a quick take about a sector without a whole lot of in-depth research.
Here’s the ancient tweet announcing my article back in the day:
Had an investor purchased and held onto Best Buy after the publication of my article – which was a soft “watch list” recommendation – they would have done pretty well against an S&P 500 index fund. The compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and total growth of Best Buy easily outpaced the S&P 500 from article publication (September 9, 2011) through the end of December 2017:
| Stock | Start Price | End Price | CAGR | Total Growth | Value of $10,000 |
| Best Buy | $19.93 | $68.47 | 21.58% | 243.55% | $34,355 |
| S&P 500 | $1,154.23 | $2,673.61 | 14.23% | 131.64% | $23,164 |
Source: Yahoo! Finance & author calculation; Stock prices include dividends & stock splits
Best Buy seems to have turned the corner a bit in the six-plus years since I wrote about them for the first time, but it’d be hard to say if that is a product of better performance or simply a frothy market. Every time I make a visit to a Best Buy, I feel like the store remains stuck in the past, without much differentiating it from other similar retailers. Nevertheless, before I could make a solid recommendation on the company these days, I’d have to dig a little deeper. I’m personally not super high on retail outside of Amazon and super niche store, but a closer look might be able to convince me otherwise, especially if their past performance was because of a new direction or change in philosophy.
Until next time…
Disclaimer: I do not own currently own shares in Best Buy, and I shop there pretty infrequently as well. I also have no plans to purchase shares within the next 60 days in any account in which I manage investment funds. You can read a little about my personal investment philosophy here.
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