Lately I've been working hard at dialing in my screening quant so I can be comfortable executing on what it spits out, ie. where should I put my next money?
I give 5% weight to current P/E and 5% weight to forward P/E, with a lower P/E resulting in a higher score. This itself is too black & white but its what I have right now ( I'd much rather be able to compare current and forward P/E's to historical averages but stockrover doesn't currenttly support that )
My question to the group is this: When you see a large discrepancy between current P/E and forward P/E, which current P/E being much higher, what does your gut tell you about that scenario?
My take is that it means one of two things:
1) Current price is discounted quite a bit to future value, accumulate
2) People are willing to pay a lot less for this companies earnings moving forward, hold / re-evaluate
More likely the answer lies somewhere in the middle and the correct answer looks something like "it depends"
Take QCOM for instance.
I have the following inputs:
Price: $73.51
TTM EPS: $4.48
Forward EPS EST: $5.56
Current P/E: 16.4
Forward P/E: 13.2
Last 10 year avg P/E: 23.82
Super rudimentary extrapolation gets us to a $91.18 price point using current P/E * Forward EPS EST ( 16.4 * 5.56 ) and $132.44 using 10 year avg P/E * Forward EPS EST ( 23.82 * 5.56 ). That's a 24% and 80% "discount" respectively.
In the QCOM specific instance the China situation has put a lot of uncertainty on the future there, and at this point we've mostly modeled where future mobile growth using QCOM's chips will come from thus resulting in forward multiples that aren't so wild wild west-y.
Maybe I've just answered my own question and that's all this game is: analyzing risk and placing your bets.
I give 5% weight to current P/E and 5% weight to forward P/E, with a lower P/E resulting in a higher score. This itself is too black & white but its what I have right now ( I'd much rather be able to compare current and forward P/E's to historical averages but stockrover doesn't currenttly support that )
My question to the group is this: When you see a large discrepancy between current P/E and forward P/E, which current P/E being much higher, what does your gut tell you about that scenario?
My take is that it means one of two things:
1) Current price is discounted quite a bit to future value, accumulate
2) People are willing to pay a lot less for this companies earnings moving forward, hold / re-evaluate
More likely the answer lies somewhere in the middle and the correct answer looks something like "it depends"
Take QCOM for instance.
I have the following inputs:
Price: $73.51
TTM EPS: $4.48
Forward EPS EST: $5.56
Current P/E: 16.4
Forward P/E: 13.2
Last 10 year avg P/E: 23.82
Super rudimentary extrapolation gets us to a $91.18 price point using current P/E * Forward EPS EST ( 16.4 * 5.56 ) and $132.44 using 10 year avg P/E * Forward EPS EST ( 23.82 * 5.56 ). That's a 24% and 80% "discount" respectively.
In the QCOM specific instance the China situation has put a lot of uncertainty on the future there, and at this point we've mostly modeled where future mobile growth using QCOM's chips will come from thus resulting in forward multiples that aren't so wild wild west-y.
Maybe I've just answered my own question and that's all this game is: analyzing risk and placing your bets.