FR: Get All Your Financial Solutions From One Company

Article: Get All Your Financial Solutions From One Company

My final “Fool Revisited” piece for the week is a look at financial company Intuit (Nasdaq: INTU). I’m almost positive this was another sector piece, though it could have easily been based on a recent earnings result or news that Intuit was now paying a dividend. Hard to say for sure these 6+ years later.

Intuit really is a leader in financial software for both companies and individuals. This time of year, they are probably best known for TurboTax, the software that allows millions of people each year to file their own taxes. They also produce professional tax solutions for paid preparers – ProSeries and Lacerte, as well as small business accounting leader Quickbooks. Finally, up until its sell to private equity in 2016, they also made Quicken, which has allowed people to track personal banking and investments for over two decades, though the hip people these days have moved on to things like Mint, itself another Intuit product (which it acquired in 2009).

I know that you want to see it, so here is the old tweet of the article from back in the day:

Though the introduction of its dividend may have been the driving force behind the initial publication of the article, the stock has actually done quite well since article publication. (Its dividend hasn’t been much help, though it has increased by 160% itself.) Using the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) and total growth, an investor would have been happy with an investment in Intuit, which nearly doubled the S&P 500 publication (October 3, 2011) through January 26, 2018:

Source: Yahoo! Finance & author calculation; Stock prices include dividends & stock splits

Would I be an investor in Intuit now? I’d have to look beyond past performance to see if they still have the same moat that it seemed they had in the past. There was a time when I did own shares of Intuit, though I don’t remember why I ended up selling. It could have been related to their lobbying efforts surrounding the ease of tax preparation; Intuit and compatriot H&R Block have long lobbied Congress to make taxes more difficult in this country, which is expected based on how they make their money. Either way, while the company probably stands to benefit going forward from yet another round of tax reform, I just feel that there are probably better options for my investing dollar.

Until next time…

Disclaimer: I do not personally own shares of the companies mentioned here, and I have no plans to purchase shares of any company mentioned 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.