Market data and valuation figures are as of July 21, 2026. For years, Alphabet was the Big Tech stock investors described as “cheap.” Not cheap in the traditional sense, of course. Nobody looked at a trillion-dollar technology company and confused it with a clearance-bin toaster. Alphabet was cheap only by the peculiar standards of Big Tech, where a company could dominate global advertising, generate tens of billions of dollars in free cash flow, own several of the internet’s most valuable properties, and still trade at a lower valuation than another company selling phones, software, or artificial intelligence dreams. I understood the argument. Alphabet owned Google Search, YouTube, Android, Chrome, Gmail, Maps, Google Cloud, and a collection of other products that billions of people used while occasionally claiming they wanted less Google in their lives. The company produced enormous profits, maintained a fortress-like balance sheet, repurchased stock, and eventually began paying a di...
All financial figures and market data are current as of July 20, 2026. I have a complicated relationship with Nvidia stock. Every time I look at the valuation and decide the market has finally become too enthusiastic, Nvidia reports another quarter that makes my concerns look like they were prepared using a calculator from 1997. Revenue rises. Data-center demand breaks another record. Management raises the bar. Analysts revise their estimates. The stock climbs. Then someone announces that Nvidia is obviously overvalued because it has already gone up, which remains one of the financial world’s favorite ways to confuse price movement with business analysis. Still, I cannot ignore the question. Nvidia shares recently traded around $203, giving the company a market capitalization of approximately $4.96 trillion. That is not merely a large valuation. It is the kind of number that causes me to check whether I accidentally leaned on the keyboard. At nearly $5 trillion, Nvidia is no longer an ...