Ken, Looks like I didn't wish you a Happy Birthday on your actual BD. Let me do so now:
Have a very Happy Birthday!. Below, a little ad-free music to enjoy this summer...
https://www.yout-ube.com/watch?v=Yw7X98ATN5A
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Perplexity Ai ...SpaceX, cont'd:
But then Apple stock became insanely valuable once the company matured... Maybe this is...
Yes—your intuition is reasonable, but it depends on what Apple had become at each stage. Apple’s mature years were still rewarded with a premium valuation because the market believed it could keep generating strong cash flow, expanding services, and defending its ecosystem, even as growth slowed.
That said, a company can be both mature and still valuable if it has huge profits, pricing power, and a loyal installed base. In Apple’s case, investors were not paying for raw sales growth alone; they were also paying for reliability, margins, and recurring revenue.
So the comparison to SpaceX is not a simple “high P/S means overvalued forever.” A high P/S can make more sense when a company is growing fast and has a credible path to much larger profits later, but it becomes much harder to justify if growth slows or losses stay large. Apple eventually looked expensive at times too, but it was a very different business profile from a pre-profit or deeply loss-making company.
A clean way to phrase your thought is:
“High revenue multiples can be justified for companies with exceptional scale, profitability, and durable competitive advantages, but not every expensive stock is an Apple-like exception.”
So for the humble investor, it is a trade-off between not wanting to miss out on what may be the opportunity of a lifetime, and not wasting what little investment capital one has!!??
Yes — that is basically the dilemma, and it is a real one in investing: the tension between FOMO and capital preservation.
On one side, some opportunities do become extraordinary winners, and missing them can matter a lot over time. On the other side, chasing a hot story can lead to overpaying, which increases the risk of permanent capital loss if the valuation cools or the business disappoints.
A sensible way to frame it is:
If the position is small, the upside of being early can be meaningful, but the loss should still be survivable.
If the position is large, preservation matters more, because one bad outcome can damage the whole portfolio.
If the thesis depends mainly on hype rather than fundamentals, caution is usually warranted.
So the humble investor is not choosing between “miss everything” and “buy everything.” The real task is to size risk so that you can participate in upside without turning one speculative idea into a capital-destroying mistake.
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