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Entry Criteria: Valuation and P/E Ratio
#1
With dividend growth investing, the focus is on generating a steadily growing income stream by purchasing stocks that pay an increasingly large dividend each year. In this series of posts, I have focused on many of the important factors to consider in evaluating such stocks, including the number of years the company has raised its dividend, the current dividend yield and dividend growth rate, the payout ratio, and the rate of earnings growth. So if you found a stock that scored highly in every single one of those categories, it would be a great buy, right?

Not necessarily. It is possible to overpay for even the best company or for the most robust and growing income stream. How much you pay for a stock is a critical determinant of whether the investment will turn out poorly or well in both the short and long term. There are two primary reasons to look for quality dividend stocks that are also trading at a good value.

The first reason is that when a quality dividend stock is trading at a lower value, you have a chance to buy the stock’s dividend at a higher yield. A company’s stock price constantly fluctuates, both before and after you buy your shares. But the share price at the moment of purchase determines your yield for that stock. If you buy one share of a company for $100, and that company currently pays $3.00 in dividends annually, your share yields 3.00 percent. If you bought that share on a dip to $90 instead, the same $3.00 dividend would translate to a yield for you of 3.33 percent. If you bought the share on a spike to $110, your yield is only about 2.73 percent. Those may not seem like big differences, but over a long time period, they can be truly huge.

The second reason is that when you buy your shares at a lower price, you improve your chances of enjoying significant capital appreciation. While a solid dividend stream can cushion the blow of a declining share price, it is far better to enjoy that dividend stream on top an increase in the underlying share price. (Although there is room here for a lengthy discussion about whether you should root for stock prices to increase or decrease during your accumulation years, I’ll save that for another thread.)

There are many ways to measure the value of a stock. And smart people argue all the time about whether a particular stock is overvalued, undervalued, or properly valued. It can be maddening, unless you understand that there truly is no “right” or “correct” price for a stock. If it were easy to determine the “right” price for a stock, there would be no trading and no market – who would pay more or less for it? Instead, we have countless opinions about a stock’s worth that fluctuate over time, and people who think that a stock is overvalued at the current price sell their shares to people who think it is a reasonable or good buy at the current price.

The 800-pound gorilla in the valuation conversation is the P/E ratio, which is simply dividing the current price by the earnings. While the current price is easy enough to ascertain, earnings can be more slippery. Not only are earnings somewhat subjective, depending on how the company calculates and reports, but you must also decide which earnings to use. Last full calendar year? Trailing twelve months? Projected? Personally, I look at all of these to get a rough sense of where the P/E number is and where it might be headed. People will argue, perhaps correctly, that there are many more sophisticated ways to measure the value of a stock (price to sales, price to book, historical price and moving averages, technical, etc.). My opinion is that P/E works well enough in providing a rough idea of the valuation of a stock, especially when used in conjunction with the other entry criteria we’ve been discussing.

So what is an appropriate P/E ratio? As usual, it depends. “Typical” P/E values differ from month to month, from industry to industry, and from stock to stock. When the economy is booming and stock prices in general are rising, P/E ratios are higher than when the economy is stalling and stock prices are down. Stocks in mature, slow-growth industries (such as oil companies) tend to have lower P/E ratios than stocks in exciting new growth areas (think internet stocks back in the late 1990s). And a blue-chip stock that has steadily growing earning and dividends, a premium brand name, and that is not very volatile will generally have a higher P/E ratio than its lesser-regarded industry peers.

When assessing valuation, it is good to get a feel for how a particular company trades over a long period of time. If a stock usually trades around a P/E range of 12 to 15, but currently has a P/E of 9, it pays to understand why. If the company’s fundamentals are sound and the price is down primarily because of broad economic conditions, it might be a great time to buy. If the reasons for the P/E drop are specific to the company, the lower P/E could be a red flag.

Many dividend growth investors will not buy a stock with a P/E ratio above 20. While I don’t believe in hard and fast rules of this sort, I don’t think that I own any stock with a P/E of 20 or higher, and I prefer a P/E of 15 or lower. But again, this is only a guideline, and only one of many factors to consider.

In the next, and final, installment of this series of posts, I’ll talk about various intangible factors that I consider before investing in a DG stock.
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#2
I have done a lot a thinking about valuation. A good book on the topic is The Little Book of Valuation. I think the best technique for valuing dividend stocks is the perpetuity. All the other techniques are either too sensitive or too rigid. For example, the Gordon Growth model is unstable.

Not only is the perpetuity method stable, but it allows comparison with the corporate bond rate, which is the main competitor to dividend stocks. I use the Bloomberg Investment Grade Bond Index for the corporate bond rate.

The perpetuity method divides an expected return by a discount rate. For the expected return, I use the annual dividend and discount it for the debt per share. The philosophy is that when you buy a share you also take on the debt, so the stock price must be less to compensate.

Expected Return = Dividend x Price/(Price + Debt Per Share)

Bonds must compensate for inflation in their rates; however, the stock price is assumed to rise with inflation, so the expected rate of return is the difference.

Discount Rate = Corporate Bond Rate - Inflation Rate

Similarly, the dividend growth can included by averaging the current and assumed future dividend over a number of years.

I use the current dividend valuation as a screen, while I use the price relative to the future dividend valuation as the primary factor in selecting between stocks.
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#3
Very thought provoking post so far. it goes to prove that valuation as precise as we want to think it is....is still a value with much human interpretation
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#4
Great post, KenBob -- thanks. I'd love to understand your method a little better, any chance you could give an example applying it to some company?

Generally, it sounds like a somewhat complicated approach, though. I fear that models relying on expected return, future inflation rates, discount rates, and the such give a false sense of precision. Of course it can be an illuminating exercise, but it is so nearly impossible to predict those things with any accuracy (in my opinion), especially more than a few months out, that the results seem to me very suspect. Which is ok so long as you are not putting too much stock in them.

Personally, I am much more comfortable using P/E (both current and current relative to historical), but keeping always in the front of my mind that it is a crude tool with several important weaknesses, and that it is only one part of a stock's story.
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#5
I like to look at the P/E to know whether the overall market is pricey, but it has some problems. First, using the P/E is an absolute method, meaning half the time you will be above the average, which means you will be tempted not to invest at these times. I try to avoid timing the market by investing every month. Second, you really need to know the average P/E ratio for each stock, which requires an extensive database. The biggest advantage of the P/E ratio is that it can be used for all stocks.

Using a perpetuity equation, the stock value can be determined relative to its major competitor, corporate bonds. This method can be used in up and down markets and can use readily available data. I have a whole set of stocks on a spreadsheet where the calculations are performed. Since the comparison is done based on income, it works well with moderate to high yield stocks, but it doesn't work well with low yield stocks. I read somewhere (I wish I could remember where) that the Federal Reserve compares the total return of stocks compared to corporate bond yields to determine if the stock market is pricey.

Using KO as an example:

Current Price = 38.35
Annual Dividend = 1.12
Debt to Equity Ratio = 109.37%, Book Value = 7.27; therefore, Debt Per Share = 1.0937 x 7.27 = 7.95
Bloomberg Investor Grade Bond Index Yield = 4.2%
July Annualized Inflation Rate = 2.0%

Expected Return = 1.12 x 38.35/(38.35 + 7.95) = 0.93
Discount Rate = 0.042 - 0.02 = 0.022
Current Value = 0.93/0.022 = 42
This would say that KO is approaching its current value.

Using the method to extrapolate the future value from dividend growth does have some aspects of smoke and mirrors; however, I only use the ratio of price to future value for comparison between stocks that have meet the basic screening criteria of price less than current value, dividend growth rate higher than inflation, and payout ratio less than 0.8. I put more reliance on the current value calculation than the future value calculation.

I use a formulaic approach primarily because I don't believe in the precision of fundamental analysis. Fundamental analysis only looks at the finances. Unless you have been working within an industry and company at least 10 years, you really don't know that industry or company. With a formulaic approach, I can invest in a relatively large number of companies with a reasonable effort.
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#6
Thanks very much for the detailed explanation and example, KenBob! I think I'll have to read it a few more times carefully before I have an intuitive feel for the approach and whether it might have a place in my worldview. Meanwhile, I already feel better about my recent KO purchases!

Kerim
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#7
Chuck Carnevale has an interesting article on Seeking Alpha about stock evaluation. See http://seekingalpha.com/article/1705442-...cks-part-1.

He uses a modified version of a Ben Graham formula, which is basically a PE ratio method with factors for earnings growth and current corporate bond rate. The main advantage of this method is it will work with all stocks, while the major disadvantage is that it doesn't consider debt.

I tried it out on my spreadsheet. The result is highly dependent upon the long term earnings growth rate assumed, so it tends to default to the PE ratio of 15 discussed in the article.
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