Stryker's rare double miss looks like quarterly noise, since full-year 2026 guidance is unchanged. Healthcare stocks are widely hated after five years of broken charts from the COVID boom-bust, but fundamentals say otherwise. They are the ultimate safety stocks, and the time to buy them is when no one wants them. 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 

Stryker's soft summer reflects a deteriorating company, not macro weakness. No other device company talked about a soft summer, yet the market reads it as a macro issue and people want to buy Stryker, using it to express a preconceived thematic trade. The macro is fine; Stryker is the problem. x.com  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 

Stryker is a slow-and-steady compounder, leading knee and hip replacement as an aging population spends more on care. People over 65 spend 3x more on healthcare, and baby boomers are turning 65. A three-year FDA head start let Stryker install over 3,000 Mako robots, past 2 million procedures, locking in surgeons and hospitals. Each system drives recurring implant, disposable, software and service revenue AI cannot code away. Sales grow mid-teens, 4% above peers. x.com 

Intuitive Surgical's surgical-robot moat is sturdier than the fear that sent it down about a third this year. The worry is that Medtronic and J&J will finally break its monopoly; maybe eventually, but surgeons train on its system for years and hospitals build workflows around it, so switching is hard. Thousands of placed systems keep generating recurring revenue for years. It's also a genuinely different bet from rates or AI spending. x.com 

Intuitive Surgical is a great company, but 13-15% growth will probably bring the stock under pressure. x.com 

Demographics should offset the risks to procedure growth at surgery-related device makers such as Boston Scientific, CONMED, Edwards Lifesciences and AtriCure for the next five years, though those risks eventually bite. @Borlaug_ argues that falling obesity rates could cut a couple hundred basis points from long-term growth in many procedure categories, with policy the near-term negative. Intuitive Surgical flagged the ACA-sensitive areas well. Within devices, S-curve stories are preferable. … Show more

Intuitive Surgical is a small bullish bet as healthcare and software strengthen and money rotates out of semiconductors. It did well on its last two earnings reports and shows a potential, unconfirmed daily bullish divergence. It then posted a double beat, EPS of $2.50 versus $2.10 and revenue of $2.77B versus $2.61B, but the stock barely reacted because the market's bar is extremely high. A put/call ratio near 0.97 signals excess optimism, and high implied volatility risks a crush. x.com 

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