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Now, Amazon isn’t exactly the dazzling newcomer anymore. Over the past five years, its stock hasn’t exactly been shooting for the moon. A mere 35% gain. Which, if you think about it, is roughly the same as the return you’d get from keeping the money under your mattress… and then factoring in the cost of the mattress. The S&P 500, meanwhile, has been doing rather better. But here’s the thing about Amazon: it’s quietly, efficiently, becoming something quite extraordinary.

There is talk of AI, of course. The air itself seems thick with its promise. But promises are fragile things, easily broken by the weight of expectation. The concerns – infrastructure costs, geopolitical tremors – are not phantoms. They are the earth shifting beneath our feet. Yet, there is a peculiar resilience to this company, a stubborn refusal to be wholly defined by the prevailing winds. It is as if the very metal remembers a time before such anxieties, a time of pure, unburdened creation.

It’s not merely missteps, mind you. The world, it seems, has decided to throw a few extra spanners into the works. Unexpected macro-challenges, they call them. As if running a business wasn’t enough like herding cats without the added complication of… well, everything. Let’s see what’s gone awry, and whether this particular griffin might yet take flight.

Now, a whole slew of companies are scrambling to get a piece of this quantum pie, and D-Wave Quantum (QBTS 1.46%) is one of them. But they’re doing things… oddly. It’s like they decided to build a car using only spare parts from a bicycle and a washing machine. And honestly, that’s what makes them interesting. Could this quirky approach turn a modest investment into a fortune? Let’s investigate, shall we? But don’t expect a guarantee. I’m a portfolio manager, not a magician. Though sometimes, the line gets blurred.

Back in late ’22, early ’23, everyone was bracing for the apocalypse, convinced the whole thing was going to collapse. The usual suspects screaming about recession, doom, and the inevitable heat death of the universe. Microsoft took a hit then, too. But they didn’t flinch. They didn’t panic. They kept building. And they’re doing it again now. The air is thick with fear, but the fundamentals… the fundamentals are solid. TOO solid. It’s almost suspicious.

However, MPLX, that rather dependable entity, hasn’t quite joined the party. It’s been exhibiting a most uncooperative tendency to remain, shall we say, stubbornly unmoved. A fractional dip in value, a mere one percent, while others are frolicking in the financial sunshine. A curious state of affairs, wouldn’t you agree? But fear not, for there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation, and it doesn’t involve any sort of financial catastrophe, merely a slight divergence from the prevailing trend.

The Price-to-Earnings ratio. A concept so elegantly simple, it’s almost insulting. It essentially attempts to quantify how much investors are willing to pay for a dollar of accounting profits. (Accounting profits, of course, being a construct of human imagination, and therefore subject to the usual limitations of imagination – namely, that it’s often wildly inaccurate.) By averaging these ratios across the entire S&P 500, one can arrive at a figure that vaguely resembles the market’s overall valuation. It’s a bit like trying to calculate the average temperature of a goldfish bowl – statistically valid, but not necessarily meaningful.

Below, a consideration of four retail entities that, while not guaranteeing prosperity, appear reasonably positioned to endure.

One observes the eager buying, the hurried calculations, and wonders if it isn’t more a matter of desperation than discernment. A longing for simplicity in a world that rarely offers it. It’s not that these companies are inherently unsound, merely that their fortunes are so… contingent. Dependent on factors beyond any single investor’s control. A subtle difference, yet a crucial one.