A couple thoughts on why this isn’t a fair comparison:
- Goldman is profitable but the employees extract most of it via compensation.
- Goldman has to rewin their business every year. Very little recurring revenue and they are one recession from imploding.
- You can’t really compute valuation on a very small investment. It’s not like the entire float is trading, and the small investment (relative to valuation) can have all kinds of liquidity preferences and special rights.
Privately traded companies and publicly traded companies use different terminology for the same things.
In the private markets "valuation" is a term that just means "someone bought a couple shares at this arbitrary price, here are the value of the other millions of shares at that same arbitrary price". Although the effects on all shareholder's balance sheets are real and useful, it is just broadcasted for marketing and hype.
In the public markets "marketcap" is the same term.
And finally, older public companies have low price to equity ratios because the hype has fizzled and they are predictable. It doesn't mean anything. Its not enough inputs alone for you to decide what the rest of the market will do.
I dunno man.