Why Investors’ Perception Affects Your Bottom Line
Back in November, I told you about a great company called Omniture Inc. (NASDAQ/OMTR). This company is in the business of selling online business optimization software. This is a great business to be in, as many companies and organizations are putting a lot of resources into their online presence.
Omniture’s software helps customers collect, automate, and analyze information that is generated through Internet sites. The company was previously known as SuperStats.com Inc., then changed its name to MyComputer.com Inc. in 1999. Finally, the company changed its name to Omniture Inc. in 2002.
The company’s software, which it hosts and delivers to its customers on-demand in real-time, enables customers to capture and analyze all the information generated by their web sites and other sources. When you visit a company’s web site, it collects a lot of data about you and your computer. Remember, nothing is for free, even on the Internet.
This company went public and listed on the NASDAQ stock market in late June of last year for around $7 per share. Like most IPOs, the stock didn’t do too much initially.
When I wrote about this company in this column this past November, the stock was trading at just under $10 per share. Now, it just hit a new record high of $18.75 per share and $20 seems like an easy target.
Omniture as a business is generating impressive growth, but this is only part of the reason why this stock is going up. It is generating impressive returns for stockholders because the marketplace just
“gets” the story. Everyone knows that the Internet is growing and that statistical data collection from web sites helps companies with online advertising.
Investors have rallied around this stock because the whole package just makes sense. The business is growing and the industry in which the business operates is growing almost as fast.
Omniture’s success on the stock market is as much about the financial numbers as it is about investor psychology. The numbers always matter, but I find that you can make more money more often by speculating on the psychology of the stock market rather than focusing on a company’s financial data. The stock market is all about perception and relative valuations. There is no one right value for a company — only what a group investors perceive is its value on any given day.