Stock prices are set by the market, supply and demand. They are generally based on a company's financials (how well its business is doing, how much profit it earns, etc.), but the influence is indirect. Moment to moment, prices gets set by the action of buyers and sellers.
Because of this, stocks sometimes get pumped up by unrealistic hopes, or held down by specious concerns. The prices get out of whack compared to the actual financials the company produces.
“This new web browser may have 0.1% market share now, but someday it will bury Google!” “This new smartphone may only be available in Lithuania now, but once it launches in the U.S., bye-bye iPhone!” And so forth.
Created by investor and Columbia professor Bruce Greenwald, Earnings Power Value attempts to discover the fair value for a stock based on its current earning power. Not the hope of business bloggers or the dreams of a fast-talking company CEO, but what the firm's financial statements say now.
In its most basic form, EPV represents the ratio of a company's earnings to its cost of capital. It answers the question: how efficiently does the company turn invested money into profit?
In practice, the math to calculate EPV can get complicated. The actual formula divides adjusted earnings by the weighted cost of capital, or WACC.
There's a long process of finding an adjusted earnings figure...the core profit a company earns without things like interest, taxes, amortization and one-time charges. It also looks at an average over a long period of time to get rid of the regular fluctuations of the business cycle.
A similar series of mathematical maneuvers turns cost of capital into weighted cost of capital. Once all the arithmetical gymnastics are done, you can use the EPV number to compare the intrinsic value of the stock with the market value.
You can see whether the stock price is low compared to its current earnings power (suggesting the stock is undervalued and will eventually go up) or whether it is too high (suggesting the stock is overvalued and will eventually go down).
Related or Semi-related Video
Finance: What are Valuation Analysis, Fo...4 Views
Finance Allah shmoop What are valuation analysis formats and ratios
It's a thing dot com It sells Who's ima wa
s Okay but investors want to know what percentage of
the company there ten million bucks will buy So somebody
has to know what it's worth and why There has
to be some exercise here which delivers an actual number
that says at this moment it's a thing dot com
is worth X Well in real life the most sophisticated
valuation format lives in applying a discounted cash flow analysis
model Yeah go watch are most excellent video directed by
Martin Scorsese on that topic If you haven't seen it
it won the Golden Mullah Award back in two thousand
eighteen Well if you haven't seen it the notion is
that company's heir valued as a stream of their cash
profits like into the future Cash profits Five million next
year Ten million The next eighteen million accents sold for
one hundred million the next Then all those cash flows
or discounted back or divided by one plus the risk
free rate I'ii uh you know the rent You could
get on your cash just by investing in U S
Government bonds plus risk Got it So that is risk
that the ten million of cash profits doesn't in fact
happen in real life like you're taking more risk than
you are investing in government bonds when you invest in
equities like this right So if the risk free rate
is in a three percent like a five year T
Bill or something like that then you might pile risk
on top of that of saying six percent or ten
percent or twenty percent a year And the certainty of
that ten million box in profits in two years changes
a lot and then that hundred million at the very
end Well it might have huge discounting like be divided
by one plus the risk free rate plus a huge
risk premium act on in the denominator making one hundred
million a very small number like it's very risky So
maybe that discount rate ends up being I don't know
say thirty percent added to the risk free rate and
it's four years out So it's taken to the fourth
power Yeah a lot of discounting that it looks like
this You got one point Oh three plus point three
Oh it's one point three three then to the fourth
power that you're going to divide into one hundred million
and give that a huge haircut But okay okay this
is a sophisticated Wall Street e way of valuing companies
There are simpler methods Multiples of sales is another one
that while people use And yes of course we have
an entire video on that one as well A company
has highly volatile profits like this is kind of company
that would use a multiple of sales valuation positive twenty
percent margins in great times negative fifteen percent margins in
bad times and an average over a decade of statement
of ten percent margins So on five hundred million of
sales it might on average have fifty million in net
profits and the average grows over time But the company
quote should unquote trade at a market multiple minus two
turns or something like that Or set another way if
the S and P five hundred straining at sixteen times
earnings well then maybe this crappy company that's highly cyclical
should trade it fourteen times Well fourteen times fifty is
seven hundred and note that that's about one point four
times sales Wealthy calculation then revolve around sales instead of
profits usually since year after year profits are yeah all
over the place where sales are relatively steady like they'll
go up three percent in Goodyear and down to percent
of badly or something like that So that's a multiple
of sales valuation format It's often used for early stage
companies who really don't have profits and would reinvest all
their free profits or cash into growth anyway So you
can imagine the same system applying to things like multiples
of gross margin for multiples of operating margin like pre
tax profits With the basic idea being that the closer
you get to the top line sales number usually the
less volatile those numbers on a year in year out
basis are and then the easier the valuation remains to
dial in structurally well cash flow multiples are good delimit
er zzzz Well think about how quote phantom depreciation unquote
works in clouding the true earnings Pictures of things like
a factory that cost a billion bucks to build and
is being depreciated to zero over ten years might carry
an earnings hit to the income statement of well a
hundred million bucks a year in straight line appreciation It
takes the eighty million in profits the company is making
toe being an accounting loss of twenty million dollars So
how does that work Well you thought you were making
eighty million in net profits but it turns out you've
got to depreciate one hundred million for that factory You
lavished Tobi right Well the cash the company produces is
its cash flow like from progressive Yet you know her
and backing out that appreciation gives a much clearer picture
of the company's expected profit ability in the future i
e Its value meaning you pay a whole lot more
attention to that eighty million dollars in profits Then you
do the twenty million in losses But this valuation method
becomes extremely useful in cases where that factory being appreciated
to zero in ten years will in fact last more
like forty years and even then not be worth zero
So we have discounted cash flow We have multiple of
sales We have multiple of cash flow And then of
course the stalwart multiple of earnings or price to earnings
ratio as a basic valuation format or racial or structure
that drives the lives of oh so many investments P
ratios are probably the most common evaluation metric Whatever dot
com will earn after everything appreciation included a dollar next
year a dollar twenty the following year and a dollar
forty the next It trades this moment for twenty bucks
a share or twenty times this year's earnings That's twenty
over one point two times next year's earnings twenty over
one point four times at the following years And yet
you get the picture It looks like that Well the
price to earnings multiple usually goes down over time because
well most companies actually grow their earnings over time The
Gatun here is that companies often carry cash and or
debt So if a company has ten dollars a share
in debt and four dollars a share in cash well
then its price to earnings ratio is while still twenty
But it likely has Mohr volatilities in its movements as
the debt is well kind of like gasoline on a
fire when things go well or poorly So yeah those
were the most common methods of assessing the value of
a company or a stock and you've got to take
all of them with many grains assault Although uh well
It's much easier if you just have one of these 00:06:07.671 --> [endTime] things to assess
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