> you have to invest ahead of the outcome

> this is just classic quarterly public company earnings BS, where public markets dont reward innovation investment

Genuine question; but aren't these treating stocks as speculative and on vibes? One can say that these comments could be true for the first signs of cracking of dot com bubble. Sure, Web eventually succeeded but many tech giants from dot com era (AOL/Yahoo and so many more) eventually went to dust for spending too much time on the innovative bandwagon.

During the Dot-com bubble really tried to give this example but IIRC there were companies like pets.com who lost 2$ for every 1$ of sale so how a company treats its financials do matter a lot.

The market doesn't seem to reward innovation sometimes because there have been times the first persons to innovative have actually really failed to capitalize on that innovation and many extremely innovative businesses like Airlines (We can literally fly speak of innovation!) have been terrible businesses investment-wise generally speaking.