The reason to buy any individual stock is you believe it will outperform the market as a whole over N years. If you think all the growth has been captured already and Anthropic will stay below opening price + market growth forever then of course you shouldn’t buy it. But plenty of people don’t think that.
But why would we expect Anthropic to outperform the market over N years when they're opening at such a high valuation? It feels like most of the potential future growth short of world domination is already priced in.
The stock might just appreciate at 10perc YoY. Thats enough to outperform the market. What will almost certainly be true however is that there is going to be a lot of volatility.
Besides the financials I do think there is merit to consider what you do as an investor. You make it easier for the company you invest in to access capital and in such a capex heavy world that is actually meaningfull. So if you believe anthropic is creating more long term benefit for the world than say Google, you might want to buy regardless of direct financial expectation.
This is nonsense.
Only the investment management business cares about alpha.
Individuals pick stocks because they believe they can generate the greatest absolute returns.
You live in dream land if you think the average trader even knows what cost of equity is.