Our recent piece on water IoT stock Xylem (XYL) looked at the wide differences in which the finance community defines a growth stock. Usually, this involves looking at earnings growth which doesn’t work so well for disruptive growth stocks which typically don’t have positive earnings. That’s why revenue growth becomes such an important metric for disruptive tech stocks. It’s a proxy for how fast market share is being captured. In the same manner, a disruptive tech firm that stops growing is no longer disrupting. It’s merely existing, and that’s what Protolabs stock (PRLB) seems to be doing these days.
The Rona card has already been played, and now it’s time to get back to growth. We’ll check in a year from now to see if that growth has resumed.
Nanalyze on Protolabs, April 2021
Protolabs’ Revenue Growth
In looking at Xylem, we noted how changing time frames can produce dramatically different compound annual growth rates (CAGRs). Professional investors do this all the time to sugarcoat their performance numbers, and it’s something we refuse to do when considering our