well, with some companies, you absolutely get a piece of the cash flows. usually mature companies that aren't putting all their cash back into the business. but, no, ISRG doesn't pay a dividend. and i'm glad they don't. i'd rather they stay focused on growing the business. the business that i own a (very, very, very) small piece of. and, sure, something crazy could happen and suddenly the company folds and my stock is worthless. the chances are remote, but not zero. but, for now, i own a piece of an income-producing business. the value of which will continue to rise for many years, because they are going to keep making profits. of course the stock price won't be a straight line. wouldn't be much of a market if it was. but it would take something extreme for ISRG not to be worth quite a bit more 10 years from now than it's worth now.
that said... yeah, the current P/E is certainly high. even for them. but i'm not buying today. and great companies rarely look super cheap. looks like their highest P/E was 9/29/04, when it reached 154.7. that's insane, and it quickly dropped back down. but if you bought at the closing price that day, you'd be up over 11,000%. not bad for an overpriced stock. anyway, the P/E was around 50 back when i bought it so many years ago, and it was around 50 when i added some on last year.
anyway, before we get way too far off topic, i just wanna make two points about your last line. 1) if stocks really consistently behaved based on trends, everyone would be rich, nobody would ever lose money in the stock market because we'd all know what was going to happen in the future and 2) if ISRG drops back to $200, which is absolutely 100% possible, i'll be ecstatic and first in line to buy more. because, barring a complete collapse of global healthcare, ISRG is probably going to be very, very profitable for the foreseeable future. which means, in the long term, the stock price will move accordingly.
