Musings on Markets

JANUARY 10, 2025

Thus, as you peruse my historical data on implied equity risk premiums or PE ratios for the S&P 500 over time, you may be tempted to compute averages and use them in your investment strategies, or use my industry averages for debt ratios and pricing multiples as the target for every company in the peer group, but you should hold back.

Risk Premium 119

Risk Premium Dividends Start-ups Corporate Finance 119

Equidam

APRIL 26, 2025

Key value drivers include intangible assets like intellectual property, the strength and experience of the founding team, the perceived size of the market opportunity, network effects, brand recognition, and, critically, the projected ability to generate significant cash flows in the future.

Discounted Cash Flow 59

Discounted Cash Flow Terminal Value Book Value Beta 59

Musings on Markets

JANUARY 5, 2024

Beta & Risk 1. Equity Risk Premiums 2. Standard Deviation in Equity/Firm Value 2. Book Value Multiples 3. EBIT & EBITDA multiple s 5. Return on Equity 1. Debt Ratios & Fundamentals 1. Debt Details 1. Dividends and Potential Dividends (FCFE) 1. Buybacks 2. Return on (invested) capital 2.

Dividends 106

Dividends Risk Premium Equity Book Value 106

Musings on Markets

JANUARY 6, 2023

By the same token, it is impossible to use a pricing metric (PE or EV to EBITDA), without a sense of the cross sectional distribution of that metric at the time. For example, I have seen it asserted that a stock that trades at less than book value is cheap or that a stock that trades at more than twenty times EBITDA is expensive.

Risk Premium 52

Risk Premium Dividends Start-ups EBITDA 52

Musings on Markets

JANUARY 31, 2024

In my last three posts, I looked at the macro (equity risk premiums, default spreads, risk free rates) and micro (company risk measures) that feed into the expected returns we demand on investments, and argued that these expected returns become hurdle rates for businesses, in the form of costs of equity and capital.

Equity 82

Equity Book Value Start-ups Corporate Finance 82

Musings on Markets

FEBRUARY 15, 2023

One is to compute the taxes you would have paid on operating income, if it had been fully taxable, to get after-tax operating income and margin , and the other is to add back depreciation to operating income to get EBITDA and EBITDA margin.

Start-ups 52

Start-ups Equity Risk Premium Risk-free Rate 52

Musings on Markets

FEBRUARY 27, 2023

An Optimizing Tool In my second and third data posts for this year, I chronicled the effects of rising interest rates and risk premiums on costs of equity and capital. The market debt ratio, in contrast, uses the market's estimate of the value of equity, i.e., its market capitalization, as the value of equity.

Equity 52

Equity EBITDA Start-ups Net Debt 52