*"In July 2010, Microsoft announced record fourth-quarter revenue of more than $16 billion. Quarterly earnings totaled $4.5 billion - a third again as much as Apple, more than twice as much as Google. Yet the company's stock price remained flat, as it has for years. With a price-to-earnings ratio of around 12, it traded at a lower valuation than General Mills or Proctor and Gamble. No matter how much money Microsoft mints, Wall Street has declined to price in any future growth beyond the Windows 7 upgrade cycle"\**
In the book from which this was extracted, Paul Allen (RIP), co-founder of Microsoft, comes across as a very nice, genuine, and cool guy. This is one of the few paragraphs in his book where there is a tiny hint of bitterness (quite understandable) toward the stock market.
It's amazing that \[at the time of writing\] Microsoft would have still been the de facto operating system and office productivity software provider for most of the world's governments and multinationals.
Would I be right in saying that a company's "future growth" is one of the most weighted factors in determining stock price? Or, to put it another way, do stock markets like Wall Street have an obsession with future growth?
*(\*extracted from* Paul Allen Idea Man: A memoir by the co-founder of Microsoft *2011* paperback ed *pp181)*