What Gives a Stock Value
A stock is considered a value stock when the share price is underpriced compared to the fundamentals behind the business such as revenue, earnings, and dividends.
Some investors only invest in stocks under their worth or current price in comparison to their NAV, this is called value investing. These investors simply only buy stocks that are trading below their fundamental worth. This strategy relies on the possibility that later on the stock will be priced according to the company’s true worth or higher.
This is primarily because value investors believe the market is inefficient, which essentially means that the market underprices or overprices certain stocks, industries, and sectors at specific periods over the years. These underpriced moments allow a window of opportunity for value investors to snatch some long-term investment bargains.
It all begins with understanding what makes a stock an underpriced stock worth less than its total value.
The Scope
Finding value stocks all starts with looking for the fundamentals or financial ratios attached to a company.
Low price-to-book (P/B) and price-to-earnings (P/E) multiples are key signs when finding potential value stock investment opportunities as it demonstrates the multiple at which the business is trading at the current market price.
Want to learn more about Value investing and add another skillset to your trading arsenal? Check out the Book “The Intelligent Investor”. You can get your copy here.
Most value stocks are less volatile than growth stocks, primarily because the companies are more mature, have proved it’s business model, or offers dividends.
Investors who only invest in value stocks are also likely receiving more passive income as these more matured companies often pay out dividends to their shareholders. You can find quality dividend value stocks by using the P/S and P/E ratios along with searching for a high dividend yield, typically 3% or higher.
These value investments are meant to be held over the long term as they tend to slowly appreciate while reducing volatility. Investors who seek higher returns in a short amount of time should look at growth stocks, granted this means higher volatility.
The Filtration Process
Filtering out all of the value stocks is very time-consuming, however, there is an automated way to make this process much faster.
Yahoo Finance offers a completely free stock screener that filters out any unwanted companies that don’t match the criteria of what you’re searching for. You can search by financial ratios, revenue growth, price, and more.
This stock screener will save a lot of time and make it easier to choose value stocks that match your investment criteria.
In some cases, there may be a hidden reason as to why a more mature company is trading below its true price because of debts on the balance sheet, declining revenues, or industry disruption. This would make these companies appear to be worth less when they aren’t.
Sometimes, a missed quarterly result or unfavorable short-term financials can dramatically impact the price of stocks. In a good quality business, this should be recognized as a temporary result that may not last forever. This is what may compel some to buy the stock since it may have become undervalued.
As important as having low P/B and P/E ratios are, you’ll also want to make sure the other business fundamentals are suitable over the long term.
Closing Thoughts
Value investing is a very compelling investment strategy as investors can find undervalued companies. Dividends are also a very common occurrence in the more matured companies.
The best part is that any investor can find their favorite stocks by using the Yahoo Finance stock screener which is completely free. This can level up your ability to pick the winning value stocks over the long term as you can filter out the unwanted stocks to improve your investment returns.
Overall, in today’s investing environment, it’s never been easier to find winning value stocks that investors can buy and hold over the long term by using simple financial ratios and automated stock screening applications.
Enjoyed reading this article? Click HERE for more just like it. Also don’t forget to subscribe to our Weekly Newsletter and never miss a publication!
Action To Take
This is not intended to be investment advice. As always do your own due diligence and invest based upon your own risk appetite and consult your own financial advisor for the right investment strategy for your specific needs.
Enriching yourself with knowledge that you can apply in the future will be the best investment that you ever make in your life. All stocks have some level of value, its just perceived in a different way. After all its human emotion of fear and greed that drives an assets price in the stock market. If you wanted to get started in identfying stockes that are undervalued, I would start applying some of the principles in this article.
Make Yahoo Finance a favorite in your web browser. Visit regularly and review some of the financial metrics of companies that you consume. That is an important principle that I was taught early on, learn to invest for ownership of the things you regularly consume. For example I love my Chevy Impala, and I own shares of GM. I look into the company’s financials see how much revenue they are making, how much profit they are making, compare that to the industry standards or metrics to get a baseline.
Owning stocks under their worth is along term strategy, you have to not only understand what they are worth now but also understand what they could be worth in the future.
