Earnings Power Value - EPV

  

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

00:00

Finance Allah shmoop What are valuation analysis formats and ratios

00:11

It's a thing dot com It sells Who's ima wa

00:15

s Okay but investors want to know what percentage of

00:17

the company there ten million bucks will buy So somebody

00:21

has to know what it's worth and why There has

00:24

to be some exercise here which delivers an actual number

00:27

that says at this moment it's a thing dot com

00:30

is worth X Well in real life the most sophisticated

00:34

valuation format lives in applying a discounted cash flow analysis

00:38

model Yeah go watch are most excellent video directed by

00:41

Martin Scorsese on that topic If you haven't seen it

00:44

it won the Golden Mullah Award back in two thousand

00:47

eighteen Well if you haven't seen it the notion is

00:49

that company's heir valued as a stream of their cash

00:52

profits like into the future Cash profits Five million next

00:55

year Ten million The next eighteen million accents sold for

00:58

one hundred million the next Then all those cash flows

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or discounted back or divided by one plus the risk

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free rate I'ii uh you know the rent You could

01:07

get on your cash just by investing in U S

01:10

Government bonds plus risk Got it So that is risk

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that the ten million of cash profits doesn't in fact

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happen in real life like you're taking more risk than

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you are investing in government bonds when you invest in

01:22

equities like this right So if the risk free rate

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is in a three percent like a five year T

01:27

Bill or something like that then you might pile risk

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on top of that of saying six percent or ten

01:32

percent or twenty percent a year And the certainty of

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that ten million box in profits in two years changes

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a lot and then that hundred million at the very

01:40

end Well it might have huge discounting like be divided

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by one plus the risk free rate plus a huge

01:47

risk premium act on in the denominator making one hundred

01:50

million a very small number like it's very risky So

01:53

maybe that discount rate ends up being I don't know

01:55

say thirty percent added to the risk free rate and

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it's four years out So it's taken to the fourth

02:00

power Yeah a lot of discounting that it looks like

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this You got one point Oh three plus point three

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Oh it's one point three three then to the fourth

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power that you're going to divide into one hundred million

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and give that a huge haircut But okay okay this

02:13

is a sophisticated Wall Street e way of valuing companies

02:16

There are simpler methods Multiples of sales is another one

02:19

that while people use And yes of course we have

02:21

an entire video on that one as well A company

02:24

has highly volatile profits like this is kind of company

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that would use a multiple of sales valuation positive twenty

02:30

percent margins in great times negative fifteen percent margins in

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bad times and an average over a decade of statement

02:37

of ten percent margins So on five hundred million of

02:39

sales it might on average have fifty million in net

02:42

profits and the average grows over time But the company

02:45

quote should unquote trade at a market multiple minus two

02:48

turns or something like that Or set another way if

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the S and P five hundred straining at sixteen times

02:53

earnings well then maybe this crappy company that's highly cyclical

02:56

should trade it fourteen times Well fourteen times fifty is

02:59

seven hundred and note that that's about one point four

03:03

times sales Wealthy calculation then revolve around sales instead of

03:07

profits usually since year after year profits are yeah all

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over the place where sales are relatively steady like they'll

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go up three percent in Goodyear and down to percent

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of badly or something like that So that's a multiple

03:19

of sales valuation format It's often used for early stage

03:23

companies who really don't have profits and would reinvest all

03:26

their free profits or cash into growth anyway So you

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can imagine the same system applying to things like multiples

03:31

of gross margin for multiples of operating margin like pre

03:34

tax profits With the basic idea being that the closer

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you get to the top line sales number usually the

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less volatile those numbers on a year in year out

03:43

basis are and then the easier the valuation remains to

03:46

dial in structurally well cash flow multiples are good delimit

03:50

er zzzz Well think about how quote phantom depreciation unquote

03:53

works in clouding the true earnings Pictures of things like

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a factory that cost a billion bucks to build and

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is being depreciated to zero over ten years might carry

04:02

an earnings hit to the income statement of well a

04:04

hundred million bucks a year in straight line appreciation It

04:07

takes the eighty million in profits the company is making

04:10

toe being an accounting loss of twenty million dollars So

04:14

how does that work Well you thought you were making

04:16

eighty million in net profits but it turns out you've

04:20

got to depreciate one hundred million for that factory You

04:22

lavished Tobi right Well the cash the company produces is

04:26

its cash flow like from progressive Yet you know her

04:29

and backing out that appreciation gives a much clearer picture

04:32

of the company's expected profit ability in the future i

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e Its value meaning you pay a whole lot more

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attention to that eighty million dollars in profits Then you

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do the twenty million in losses But this valuation method

04:43

becomes extremely useful in cases where that factory being appreciated

04:46

to zero in ten years will in fact last more

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like forty years and even then not be worth zero

04:52

So we have discounted cash flow We have multiple of

04:55

sales We have multiple of cash flow And then of

04:57

course the stalwart multiple of earnings or price to earnings

05:01

ratio as a basic valuation format or racial or structure

05:05

that drives the lives of oh so many investments P

05:08

ratios are probably the most common evaluation metric Whatever dot

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com will earn after everything appreciation included a dollar next

05:16

year a dollar twenty the following year and a dollar

05:18

forty the next It trades this moment for twenty bucks

05:22

a share or twenty times this year's earnings That's twenty

05:24

over one point two times next year's earnings twenty over

05:27

one point four times at the following years And yet

05:30

you get the picture It looks like that Well the

05:32

price to earnings multiple usually goes down over time because

05:35

well most companies actually grow their earnings over time The

05:39

Gatun here is that companies often carry cash and or

05:41

debt So if a company has ten dollars a share

05:44

in debt and four dollars a share in cash well

05:46

then its price to earnings ratio is while still twenty

05:49

But it likely has Mohr volatilities in its movements as

05:52

the debt is well kind of like gasoline on a

05:55

fire when things go well or poorly So yeah those

05:57

were the most common methods of assessing the value of

06:00

a company or a stock and you've got to take

06:03

all of them with many grains assault Although uh well

06:05

It's much easier if you just have one of these 00:06:07.671 --> [endTime] things to assess

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