By
Dave Mock
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September 19, 2008
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No matter what's going on in the market or a specific company's history, there are always reasons to consider buying shares in a business. After all, some of the best opportunities in stocks are born from historically bloody times.
Motley Fool CAPS hosts a boatload of opinions from more than 115,000 members on more than 5,500 stocks, giving good reasons to own -- or sell -- a stock.
In the case of Internet services provider Akamai (Nasdaq: AKAM ) , a total of 2,289 members have given a bullish or bearish opinion on the company. Scouring the detailed information packed in pitches and other comments on the company, here are three of the reasons motivating investors to buy Akamai today:
- Leading technology. Akamai's private network of servers, which it recently expanded by 30%, uses a patented algorithm developed at MIT that delivers fast Internet content estimated to carry more than 20% of the Web's traffic. This technical edge helps to deliver high-bandwidth video efficiently, high volumes of corporate data and enable e-commerce for customers like Best Buy (NYSE: BBY ) and Overstock (Nasdaq: OSTK ) .
- Solid financials. Despite slowing growth, free cash flow more than tripled in the first half of 2008 compared with the first half of 2007, and Akamai's balance sheet remains strong. It has $287 million in cash and short-term investments and $453 million in long-term securities, giving it a much stronger position than competitors like Level 3 (Nasdaq: LVLT ) , which has loads of debt.
- Growing client base. Akamai doesn't just scrape the lower part of the customer pool -- it continues to fight off competition and win business from mega clients such as Microsoft (Nasdaq: MSFT ) and Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL ) . And as a leader in content delivery, it was selected to deliver the Beijing Olympics over the Web along with AT&T (NYSE: T ) and Limelight Networks.
Of course, there's a lot more devil in the details of these buy-side opinions, which is why CAPS is such a great resource to check and balance your own analysis. You can read the bullish and bearish sides to Akamai and every other stock. To see what the very best CAPS members are saying now about Akamai, just click on over to Motley Fool CAPS and have a look -- it's all free, and your opinion's welcome, too.
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