Intuitive Surgical

I have a question about valuation.

How much should you or are you willing to pay for the quote best companies in the world? Not sure what companies you put in that basket, but I would say Hermes, Intuitive Surgical are at the S tier.

I think the problem for me here is I'm willing to buy now.

Maybe it's a shorter window of opportunity, but I see so many I think could work better because of price.

This is a fascinating question because there are some businesses in the world.

I would put Hermes and Intuitive Surgical in there.

Where the quality is extremely high.

Costco could be put in there.

Okay, let's take a look at some KPIs here.

This is kind of right out of the intuitive surgical playbook right here.

Sell the system and then charge for the consumables.

Every procedure, you have the handpiece or other items that need to be utilized for that procedure.

That's great.

We like that.

It's worked very well for companies like Intuitive Surgical, where they have this recurring revenue based on that installed base.

And now let's take another look at a metric that we use a lot for intuitive surgical.

Got it.

I have former colleagues, I don't know if I mentioned in our discussion, but I used to work at a company called Intuitive Surgical, which was the pioneer of robotic surgery, and our initial founder and former CEO just recently stood down after many, many years, 25 plus years at Intuitive.

But he started at Stanford SRI, a research institute.

So I do ha- I have him in common and then a few others that actually have been clients of mine from Stanford as well.

If oil prices do come back down, that's a huge tailwind for the stock market.

So to us, this is almost a time to get even a little bit more risky in certain parts of your portfolio, maybe sell some defensive areas that have not done very well and buy some more of the growth areas, like, for example, Intuitive Surgical is a new name we bought to add to our higher growth robotic AI theme in our portfolio.

Oh, that's interesting.

So you're looking here now for the names that have opportunity.

You mentioned intuitive surgical.

What would you say are some of the parameters or metrics or even names and names or sectors that you find attractive?

Well, it's interesting.

And thankfully, That has actually worked out very well the past few months with IG up to $110.

Like drug development?

Yeah, or an intuitive surgical, like using existing data to better optimize its tool, better optimize training for physicians, for surgeons.

I think, yeah, the market is very focused on the companies like the Pure AI plays, the LLX side of things.

Yeah, the ones that are providing the infrastructure.

The sector has been sold off pretty much since COVID.

It has not been very popular at all.

No, I mean, Intuitive Surgical, one that I own and I bought not too long ago, I mean, it's trading at its cheapest valuation in like a decade, basically.

Yeah,

All right, we got two biomedical device-related questions and comments here.

So, Gitav4875, who I don't believe I've seen here before, so welcome, says, Procept Biorobotics, ticker is PRCT, surgical robotics, similar to intuitive surgical, expanding gross margins, sitting around 200 EMA, and possibly free cash flow positive in coming quarters.

You might want to take a look.

So I did look at that one just now while Jason was talking and looks interesting.

The link will be in the show notes.

I want to sit on this one for a second here, Jason, and get your thoughts too.

Out of those three, Medtronic, ResMed, Intuitive Surgical, I know Medtronic the least, but I'll say this about ResMed.

I used to own ResMed when I was a baby stock investor.

But at the same time, investors were selling a lot of the expensive AI hardware stocks that they already own.

So among the big semiconductor names under pressure today were Cambricon, Huahong and GigaDevice.

We also saw investors rotating out of some of those hardware names I've just said into AI application stocks.

Things like the wonderfully named Mango Excellent Media, which rose about 5.5% today, but was up 20% a couple of days this week.

It's going to be a full day of kind of hands-on skills for the mentees, focusing on things like stop the bleed certification, suture skills, leadership skills, and also a pig dissection lab.

We'll be able to travel over to the exhibit hall to work with Intuitive Surgical on robotic training.

So it's really a fun day for both the mentees and all of the facilitators.

So if anyone's interested in participating in that or in our ongoing virtual curriculum, they can look up how to contact us on our page on the AAST website.

Okay.

Well, let's dive a little deeper into the names that you've mentioned, uh, with your picks, and that is Abbott Laboratories and Intuitive Surgical, two names that you've named, uh, when we discussed this show when, when it comes to healthcare.

What does each company offer investors?

In healthcare, I think one company I find very interesting is, uh, Abbott, ABT.

Um, what I like is that you're not betting on just one technology.

You're getting exposure to diagnostics, medical devices, diabetes management, and cancer screening, all areas where I think aging populations and demand for the earlier, more efficient healthcare are creating structural demand.

So the other example would be the Intuitive Surgical, ISRG.

Mm.