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Comment by vmception | Hacker News Reader

My personal metric is seeing these publicly traded non-state enterprises catch up to Saudi Aramco!

The American engine is producing awesome results, still a long way to go!

Saudi Aramco 2018 net income was $110 billion Saudi Aramco 2019 net income was $88 billion

Apple 2018 net income was $59 billion Apple 2019 net income was $55 billion

Then I will be really impressed! It is more likely to be an inflection point as incumbent oil producers fail to diversify and revenues go down. But I'll accept either result.

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At that point why not compare Apple to the IRS? Only $3.5 Trillion to go!

Only 30 countries with a larger government revenue than about 100 billion: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governmen...

> My personal metric is seeing these publicly traded non-state enterprises catch up to Saudi Aramco!

Why is this a good metric?

Not the OP, but I think it's an "Interesting" Metric (which is a more easily defensible/explainable term), rather than necessarily a "good metric" (which we'd get bogged down defining because it assumes a specific goal which people are less likely to share).

Maybe because it shows that people value the product more than they value the stock.

Aramco's value increases by convincing people to buy more of its product. Apple's value increases by selling more products, but also from its stock value going up. That second part is important because it could be hype or a bubble or something else. But with Aramco, you know it's all about a tangible product.

My wife has another measurement that she uses. She increased her Apple holdings when the pandemic started purely because of Apple's cash. Her logic is that with all that money to burn, it has a better chance than most of surviving this crisis.

Its a better metric than marketcap. Marketcap is just what a few people are willing to pay for shares, literally the one person at the auction house that bid higher than others and got SOLD to, except in the stock market everyone pretends to multiple that 1 share by the other 4.28billion and act like its an indicator of value.

Whereas net income shows what MANY people bought, and how the company is able to keep a bunch leftover.

And regarding "good", it's a good metric for value creation and the infrastructure for independence, as this has been unachievable before and always required a monopoly on power derived from the entire social contract of society and force. So it is merely interesting for it to occur in the absence of those things. It is not a comment on "good" in terms of society and whether the social contract should include a way to limit them, it doesn't factor that in at all.

It is an excellent indicator of value. Every single share holder could have been the person to have sold the share, but they choose not to. Yes, HOLD is different than BUY, but in terms of what a company is actually valued at market cap is an extremely good source of information. It values in information about future trends from a sea of market participants. There is a reason Amazon and Apple have very different price to earnings numbers.

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