I can't help but wonder whether most people get so carried away...

I can't help but wonder whether most people get so carried away with hype that they forget the most basic underlying financial valuations.

I don't profess to know too much about NRT but I do know a little about underlying financial performance and having been involved with biotech startups before (not that NRT is a startup) I can tell you that I would be vary wary before investing in a biotech.

Typically, these companies have squillions of losses on the balance sheet, usually through their startup phase. They also tend to "capitalise" a lot of costs and certainly R&D associated with product development. This is atypical of these stocks - audited as well. These capitalised costs are then drip fed into the P&L over time as they start commercialising their products. Now, I'm not saying that some products could be huge and far outweigh capitalised costs, but one must take notice of these issues before trying to analyse what a company is worth.

Secondly, these companies are typically very low taxpayers and in Australia paying tax gives you franking credits - a prize for a lot of funds and serious investors. I'd hazard a guess as to say that if these companies ever do become yielding, their yield is very minute and usually unfranked and if they are trading at sky high prices you get a very low divvy yield which would not appear on any serious investor's screen.

I think what you see now is pure speculation. IMO only the most successful of these stocks go on. Not saying NRT could not be one of those, all I'm saying is that one needs to way up the pros and cons of it all. To me, there are more cons at this stage.