#valuation

Semis ripped in the first half of 2026 and then late June cracked. The honest answer is that AI demand is real and Nvidia is no longer the trade. Those two sentences are not a contradiction, and most coverage refuses to hold both.

Market cap is the number everyone quotes, but it answers a narrower question than people think. Enterprise value is what it would actually cost to buy the whole business, debt and cash included. Two companies with the same market cap can have wildly different real price tags.

Dot-com companies had no profits. Nvidia earned $120 billion of net income on a 56% margin and trades at 20 times earnings. So the lazy bubble comparison fails. The real risk is somewhere else entirely, and it's more interesting.

A DCF says a stock is worth all the cash it will ever produce, discounted back to today. Four inputs move the answer, and one of them, the discount rate, swings 'fair value' by 40% on a change you could defend either way. Here is the whole method with a per-share worked example.

The price-to-earnings ratio is the most quoted number in investing and the most misunderstood. It looks like a measure of cheapness. It's actually the market's bet about the future, packaged as a single number. Here's what it hides.