Apple meanwhile has a P/E ratio of 14. The S&P 500 has a ratio of 21. According to finance 101, P/E is a measure of expected growth. What it means is the market is telling us that it expects Apple—a company that grew 70% last year and is wallopping the competition in gigantic markets where it’s just getting started—to grow much slower than the average of the biggest (ie slowest growing) companies in America.We’ve been spending the past few months debating whether there’s a “tech bubble.” This debate got us so irritated, because it’s so indisputable that there’s no tech bubble, that we wrote an exhaustive 6,600 word post about it.
But it occurs to us that the bubble debate is a sideshow, or rather just a manifestation of something much broader and real, and it’s that everybody hates tech.