1/ I've Valued 150+ companies using the Discounted Cashflow (DCF) Model. Far be it for me to say I am an expert. But if you've done this as much as I have, you start noticing certain patterns.

Here are 10 lessons I've learned from using the Discounted Cashflow Model.

2/ Every investment decision you make follows a Discounted Cashflow calculation.

You let go of X today to earn Y in the future. You wouldn't do that if you didn't expect to earn an expected amount of returns (r).

Nobody wants to let go of X and get back X years down the line.

3/ When you invest in a company, you hold claim over the Assets and the Profits of a Company. Without diluting your ownership, Assets and future Profits are generated out of one thing and one thing alone: Free Cash Flow to Firm.

FCFF is the treasure at the end of the rainbow!

4/ Combining the above two observations, a company may not always make Profits in the present. In fact, if it's a young company or in a new market, losses are a given.

Eventually though, future profits should be large enough to offset or overtake all the past losses in PV terms.

5/ For most companies, generating Returns falls in a spectrum: Have high Margins and generate lower Sales in relation to Capital Employed Vs. Turn Assets faster but have low Margins (Or somewhere in between).

For Indian context, compare the Business Models of D-Mart Vs. NESCO.

It's the weekend!

Grab a cup of coffee, in this thread I will explain

1. What are Valuation Ratios?
2. What ratio should be used when?
3. Why one standard ratio like a PE doesn't work all the time?

Lets dive right in.

Valuation Ratios are a subset of ratios within the broader family of Ratio Analysis.

It is in this segment of Ratio Analysis, that you will find ratios like Price to Earnings, Price to Book, Price to Cash Flow, Price to Sales and many more.

Together these ratios help an investor understand if a company is valued cheap or expensive.

A novice investor tends to use Price to Earnings (PE) for everything - yet it is only one of the many ratios that should be used to judge the current valuation of a company.

1/

Get a cup of coffee.

In this thread, I'll show you how the P/E ratio of a portfolio is related to the P/E ratios of its individual stocks.

The math here is beautiful. It involves harmonic means and a super elegant theorem known as the Cauchy-Schwarz Inequality.

2/

Earlier this week, I conducted a poll where I asked this question about P/E ratios.

Over 6,000 people responded.

Unfortunately, most of them got the answer wrong.

That's why I'm writing this thread. To (hopefully) correct some of the misconceptions that led people astray.

3/

To answer questions like this, it's always a good idea to go back to first principles.

In this case, we should ask ourselves: what exactly does a P/E ratio capture?

4/

We know that the P in P/E stands for Price. In other words, the amount we need to pay to acquire an asset today.

And the E stands for Earnings. The amount earned by our asset in the last 1 year.

5/

Note: P/E ratios come in more than 1 flavor.

For the E part, some people use earnings during the *last* 1 year. This is called the *trailing* P/E ratio.

Others use an estimate of earnings during the *next* 1 year. This is called the *forward* P/E ratio.