Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by BobbyJo 5 days ago
P/E is price to earning. Price to revenue is P/S. AER's P/S is like 3, so the discrepancy is much worse than you think.

Sidenote: 3 is actually high. 94 is absolutely ridiculous.

3 comments

The question on my mind is-is this IPO designed to rip off recreational passive investors and those of us that invest in retirement accounts?
With the Nasdaq rule changes, almost certainly.
Those rule changes aren't happening.
My understanding is that the s&p 500 were the only ones unwilling to change their rules.
Why "unwilling"? That's a weird wording. S&P Dow Jones Indices decided to not go through with their rule change after it became a political issue. Obviously they were willing, the proposed rule change originated from them!
Please provide some support that the rule changes were proposed from within. Given the fact they tried pulling this nonsense on 3 indices, it seems very unlikely the rules changes originated from within.
FTSE 100 / Russell: changes happened. 5 days from IPO to inclusion.

NASDAQ 100: Changes happened: a) Allow inclusion in 15 days post-IPO rather than 3 months. b) Allow inclusion of companies with very small float. c) allow valuation (index proportion) to be 3x float rather than enterprise value.

S&P: no changes.

They became effective last month.
How would you "design" an IPO to do that? What exactly is that even supposed to mean?
Passive investors and retirement accounts are heavily in on automatic indexing.

This deal has been pushed hard to be included prematurely in the indexes to the point that Nasdaq changed the rules.

The accusation is that these changes were made so that index funds will buy this stock automatically far earlier than they would have previously. Given the… uh… astronomical asking price, it looks like SPCEX is meant for Elon stans and institutional index investors to be the bag holders.

> retirement accounts are heavily in on automatic indexing

Majority are not. A minority are, mostly towards the S&P. Most assets remain actively managed, including in retirement assets (which covers 401(k)s, IRAs, pensions, et cetera).

Way outside of my area of expertise, but a quick search suggests that exact numbers probably depend on exactly how you define the question, but it would be broadly reasonable to say that the balance is about 50/50 +/-5%, and trending towards the passive side over time.

Would you agree with that?

Yes. But I’d caution to not conflating passive investing with indexing to a popular index. They sound similar. But most passive assets index to one of a variety of indices, many of them built in-house by various asset managers. (Vanguard, for example, is famous for doing this.)
You use your back channels and good ole boys club connections to try getting the rules for inclusion changed. Maybe collude would be a better verb than design? Is that your objection?
Can you share any credible reporting substantiating this theory?
Common sense and rationality says that you cant motivate rules changes simultaneously across 3 independent indices without outside pressure. Can you provide some reasoning why this wouldn’t be the obvious situation?
Common sense and rationality go out the window in corrupt, unregulated environments with perverse incentives.
> Sidenote: 3 is actually high.

Do you mean low? AAPL has a ps of 10.

Generally < 1 is low, between 1 and 3 is in the middle ground, and > 3 is high. However, that all depends on margins, which is why people generally use P/E or forward P/E rather than P/S to compare multiples. Issue here being that P/E is nonsensical for unprofitable companies or companies with very low margins. Spacex's P/E after Google pushed them into profitability by a slim margin would look absolutely stupid.

I would also like to point out, that on a forward P/E basis, AAPL is quite overvalued compared to historical norms, but basically every tech company is right now.

Most companies have a P/S of 1 or 2, almost all have it bellow 4.

A few segments of the economy are known to have low revenue/investment ratios, and companies there get P/S up to 7 or so.

Then, very few companies have people betting on their growth so much that their P/S get as high as 15.

And then you have literally about half a dozen exceptions on the ones S&P tracks that get higher than that.

Nothing about Apple is representative of a normal business.
It’s an interesting phenomenon: being Apple is one of their key sales drivers. The brand is worth more than the business itself.
You're arguing with people who have no idea what they're talking about.
Who's arguing?
Number like this might appear when a company is expected to create a revolutionary thing that upends multiple markets. I would consider a number much larger than 3 in SpaceX’s case, but 94 feels, indeed, excessive.

It’s almost like the future we were promised in the 1960’s would immediately materialise the moment launch costs drop. Starship will be revolutionary if it pans out the way we expect (as the shuttle would have been, had it kept the low cost promise), but that’s not enough to warrant that 94 number.

SpaceX may well revolutionize multiple markets. But I really don’t see the sub-business of building large datacenters and leasing them out, hopefully at a profit, as revolutionizing anything. Also, SpaceX has no particular competitive advantages here — the list of competitors is huge.