NEW YORK ( TheStreet) -- They grow up so fast. It was only yesterday -- wasn't it? -- that eBay ( EBAY) was a cute toddler -- doing all sorts of tricks to make the adults laugh.
Everyone liked to pat it on the head and give it a piece of candy, but a big, serious company with earnings and shares and revenues and growth and all those other grown-up things? Not hardly. That was in the late '90s after eBay was founded in 1995. eBay is a teenager now: 17 years old. My, how it has grown. And like an elderly aunt hugging a reluctant nephew, the market has embraced this once unruly child. eBay today has a market cap of $68 billion. That's almost twice the size of General Motors ( GM). It's like choosing between Peyton and Eli Manning. But in this case, the younger, smaller brother prevails. Despite some skepticism from the Wall Street Journal and other corners, eBay has been able to grow its earnings this year by double digits. So far, eBay makes the grade for performance and valuation. But that is only two out of three parts of the stool. Let's look at the third: The chart.