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Comment by camjohnson26 | Hacker News Reader

Respectfully those are meme stock arguments. A company can have all those things and be worth between 0 and 1 trillion, the question is whether the company is valued accurately by the markets and worth the price.

Tesla is valued at what Apple was in 2019, but hasn’t made any profit ever without tax credits. AMD is at $100 billion, which seems high but could be worth it. Doesn’t matter if they mismanage cash and have to be acquired though.

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With AMD you have the clear competitors Intel and Nvidia with their respective market share, revenue and valuation. There was a real world reason for their low valuation (Bulldozer) and a real world reason for there stock to recover (Zen). Intel had been stagnant for years and their 10nm was obviously not working. With AMD's and Jim Keller's track record there was a reasonable case for them managing to catch up and their stock to rise accordingly. If those are meme arguments the whole market is a meme.

No, they're stock arguments. They're "fundamentals". Did I look at their balance sheet, no. But asking questions about their competition and likelihood of being around and healthy in a few years isn't meme.

Even "Hey this has short 140% of float" isn't a meme stock thing.

The definition of "meme" stock is it being a meme - is it getting hyped up on social media and reddit with inside jokes and collective action (as much as they pretend it isn't collective action).

If you didn’t look at the balance sheet I don’t see how you can claim to care about fundamentals. The company’s ability to be in business in a few years depends on how much cash they have and how much they can generate. If the market tanks financing dries up, and if they aren’t cash flow positive then it’s game over.

Whether people like the product or not and how they compare to competition only matters if they have cash figured out. Anybody can sell a dollar bill for $0.80 and have a fantastic product, doing it profitably is the trick. WeWork is probably the best example, entering high risk long term leasing commitments and subleasing that space at a loss. They were bid up to an insane $40 billion valuation based on just this, until they tanked pre IPO. Now with the low probability, high impact risk of a global pandemic coming about, they’re struggling to survive and I’m surprised aren’t bankrupt yet. Still have a better product than the competition though.

> The company’s ability to be in business in a few years depends on how much cash they have and how much they can generate. If the market tanks financing dries up, and if they aren’t cash flow positive then it’s game over.

Sure, and these considerations are all things that are downstream of product, competitive positioning and IP.

>"They're "fundamentals". Did I look at their balance sheet, no."

Please for the love of god tell me you are trolling right now.

Not quite. I looked at a small piece of a picture, and the parent is accusing me of reading a reddit thread and going "ape strong, AMD to the moon".

What I didn’t say that. I said those are meme stock arguments, which they are. Surface level factors that may or may not matter but don’t give the whole picture of cash flow which is ultimately what matters.

No what you don't understand is that no one else in the market had caught on to the fact that AMD was the main competitor to Intel!

If only we had known way back when!

And clearly Intel's products aren't working, can they even make processors?

This is starting to feel like a moral crusade when that investment reasoning is consided meme/speculative arguments. I know retirement planners who manage 200m in asse6s who have been in business for 30+ years who look at the same reasonings as that. You cant really find an undervalued stop without some sort of assumptions. Might as well just buy an index fund.

It is a moral crusade to try to get people to understand risk. I can go all in on TSLA call options and make a killing and think I understand how markets work, but the risk I’m taking on by doing that is ridiculous. I’d like to know how those 30 year experience retirement planners did in 01 or 08. Bubbles happen because investors become comfortable taking huge risks that are unlikely to happen, but when they do they get crushed. Picking up pennies on front of a steamroller.

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