Groww’s Valuation conundrum!
Can Albert Einstein help?
There is a famous line often attributed to him, “Make it as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
The original idea, expressed in a 1933 lecture, was far more precise:
“It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.”
Two parts matter here: “irreducible basic elements” and “without having to surrender the adequate representation.” Einstein was reminding us that simplification is useful only until it starts destroying the essence of the thing we are studying.
Now think about valuing a business. In theory, the true value of any asset equals the cash it can generate over its lifetime, discounted at a reasonable rate. In practice, none of us really knows those numbers. Not you, not me, not even the owner. So we fall back on the next best approach, relative valuation.
Imagine you walk into a fruit market. There are imported apples, Kashmir apples, and apples from the North-East. You do not know the true value of any one variety. But by looking at the price of two, you get a sense of what a reasonable price for the third might be.
That is exactly what happens when a company like Groww gets listed. We cannot precisely forecast its lifetime cash flows or the ideal discount rate. So we look around for comparable apples. The closest ones are Zerodha and Angel One. But Zerodha is not listed, so even that benchmark is incomplete. And until we study the quality of the “fruit,” business model, growth levers, ROE, TAM, we cannot confidently place it in the right bucket. So, there’s no shame in saying, “ I don’t know if it's overvalued or not, or even if it is overvalued, I don’t know by what margin.”
What worries me is the way some analysts and investors are handling this. They are adding the market caps of every kind of stock market-linked business, old brokers, merchant bankers, and unrelated financial services companies, and comparing that combined figure with Groww’s market cap. That is not how relative valuation works.
When apple prices rise, you do not add the prices of oranges, bananas, and mangoes to judge whether the apple is expensive.
So the lesson stays the same. Make things as simple as possible, but not simpler.
Thanks for reading.
SEBI RIA Disclosure: No holding, No recommendation