 |
Submitted by Janeane Carnagie
| RSS Feed
| Add Comment
| Bookmark Me!
The mechanism of buying and selling is quite easy. It is as easy as pressing a button in front of your computer screen. The question of when investors should buy and sell warrant a more detailed analysis.
When to sell: Ideally, we should sell when a stock reaches its fair value. There are 9 other reasons to sell but I won't cover it here. So, what is a stock's fair value? I have covered this plenty of time. But, in general, a stock reaches its fair value when it is yielding 3% above the current free risk interest rate. I am using 10 year treasury bond as a proxy for free risk interest rate. Currently, the 10 year bond is yielding 4.46%. Fair value of a stock is therefore when it is yielding 7.46%. Inverting yield, we then got the widely used Price Earning Ratio. Yield of 7.46% corresponds to P/E ratio of 13.4
When to buy: This is an easier question to answer. We, of course, should buy stock lower than we sell. If we sell the stock at a P/E ratio of 13.4, then we should buy it when the P/E ratio is less than 13.4. How much lower ? It depends on how much return you aim for. If, say, you are aiming for 50% return, then your buying price is when the stock is trading at a P/E of 8.93. If you are aiming for a 34% return, then your buying price is at a P/E of 10.
In short, we should buy at a P/E of 8.93 and then sell at a P/E of 13.4, correct? Yes, but with a lot of caveats. I've covered those caveats in 5 common misuse of P/E ratio. To emphasize, the P/E ratio used here is not trailing P/E ratio, does not ignore the value of cash in the balance sheet, does not ignore one-time event and does not ignore the change in interest rate. At this point, I am ignoring earning growth simply because the fair value calculation is for a company with 0% growth.
You might be wondering where you might find stocks that are trading at a P/E of 13, let alone 8.93. Here is a few candidates to help you getting started. Seagate Technology (STX) has a forward P/E of 7.5 and $ 2.30 per share of net cash in the balance sheet. Western Digital Corporation (WDC) has a forward P/E of 9.75 with $ 2.65 per share of net cash. OmniVision Technologies Inc. (OVTI) is trading at a forward P/E of 10.3 with $ 5.30 per share of net cash. Magna International (MGA) is trading at a forward P/E of 9.72 with $ 4.58 per share of net cash.
Please note that this is not a buy/sell recommendation. You would do very well if you do your own homework.
|
|
|
|
|
LinkedIn Recommendation:
 Jamie Pratt - Market Developer at Turboware - Teo helps me with the daily management of my customers' social media accounts. He has an entire system dedicated to social media management, and it is easy to use, provides easy reporting and allows me to communicate with my customers through the system - they can log in and participate. I haven't seen anything else like it on the web. It's not available to the general public, yet - I was one of the beta testers, but if you need something like this, just ask Teo and I am sure he will send you some details. Great system! - March 19, 2012, Jamie was Teo's client |
|
Featured [Investing] Articles:
|
|
