Intuitive Surgical is a high-quality business near its 200-week moving average, the entry point Charlie Munger said would beat the S&P 500 by a wide margin over time. At the cutting edge of robotics and soon AI in healthcare, with no competition, very high barriers to entry and huge switching costs, it deserves a premium. At 34x forward earnings it is expensive but tolerable; about 30x is close to fair value, 25x is cheap and 20x a slam dunk. x.com  x.com  x.com 

Intuitive Surgical's share repurchases add capital return to its case as one of the highest-quality compounders in medical robotics. It bought back $4.45B of shares in the first nine months of 2026, including $2.94B in Q3, while kicking off an early Stage 2 uptrend after reclaiming its 200-day SMA. x.com 

Intuitive Surgical's valuation has become much more reasonable but is still a little too expensive with growth slowing. At its highs it traded at about 18x next-twelve-month revenue, which was nonsense. x.com 

Intuitive Surgical has fallen about 34% from its high and trades at 35x forward earnings, a drawdown that puts it on a list of names alongside Kinsale Capital. x.com 

Intuitive Surgical controls over 80% of installed soft-tissue surgical robots worldwide, and every da Vinci procedure consumes proprietary instruments only it sells. The system is the razor and the tools are the blades, so procedure volume compounds annuity revenue from an installed base hospitals already paid for. At $441.58, forward EPS of $11.79 at 40-50x implies $470-590 over three years if procedure growth holds; pullbacks are buying opportunities. x.com 

Intuitive Surgical is worth 30 times earnings at most, below where it trades. Judged purely on its financials, without knowing what the company does, even 30 times would be too high. x.com 

Intuitive Surgical ranks eighth on a list of stocks, following Microsoft. x.com 

Robotics is the next leg of AI, and its component suppliers can benefit as the buildout scales. Elon Musk expects at least a billion robots in 10 years; Morgan Stanley sees a $5 trillion market by 2050. Tesla can build Optimus at million-unit scale. Ouster's LiDAR revenue rose 56% to $55M; Intuitive Surgical's procedures grew 16%; NXP is reportedly in talks to buy Ambarella for about $3.3B; Cognex posted a record $291M quarter, up 17%; AMETEK supplies motors, actuators and sensors. x.com  x.com  … Show more

Intuitive Surgical does not look cheap at the current price, contrary to the view that it is very tempting, though something could be missing. x.com 

Intuitive Surgical sits at multi-year-low forward valuations, at times below its 2022 trough and late-2010s lows over the last six quarters, though cheap can get cheaper, as it did after earnings. The concern with higher-cost exposure is China, not competition from J&J's Ottava or Medtronic's Hugo. The stock is tricky to read through sector correlation because it straddles medical devices, the Nasdaq 100 and momentum. x.com