Musings on Markets

MAY 7, 2023

An investor who buys a good bank at too high a price, given its goodness, will underperform one who buys a bad bank at too low a price, given its badness. Consequently, you can only value the equity in a bank, and by extension, the only pricing multiples you can use to price banks are equity multiples (PE, Price to Book etc.).

Banking 63

Banking Price to Book Dividends Book Value 63

Musings on Markets

MAY 20, 2022

Historical Data: 1930-2019 To see how this framework works in practice, let's start by looking at the performance of US stocks, across the decades, and look at the returns on stocks, broadly categorized based on market capitalization and price to book ratios.

Price to Book 96

Price to Book Dividends Beta Equity 96

Musings on Markets

JANUARY 19, 2022

In a post at the start of 2021 , I argued that while stocks entered the year at elevated levels, especially on historic metrics (such as PE ratios), they were priced to deliver reasonable returns, relative to very low risk free rates (with the treasury bond rate at 0.93% at the start of 2021). The year that was.

Risk Premium 80

Risk Premium Risk-free Rate Start-ups Equity 80

Musings on Markets

JANUARY 9, 2021

The second was that, starting mid-year in 2020, equity markets and the real economy moved in different directions, with the former rising on the expectations a post-virus future, and the latter languishing, as most of the world continued to operate with significant constraints.

Risk Premium 52

Risk Premium Market Capitalization Equity Start-ups 52

Musings on Markets

JULY 17, 2023

At the start of the year, the consensus of market experts was that this would be a difficult year for markets, given the macro worries about inflation and an impending recession, and adding in the fear of the Fed raising rates to this mix made bullishness a rare commodity on Wall Street. That pessimism was not restricted to market outlooks.

Marketability 95

Marketability Risk Premium Start-ups Treasury 95

Musings on Markets

JANUARY 6, 2023

In my last post, I talked about the ritual that I go through every year ahead of my teaching each spring, and in this one, I will start on the first of a series of posts that I make at the start of each year, where I look at data, both macro and company-level. That is not true!

Risk Premium 52

Risk Premium Dividends EBITDA Start-ups 52

Musings on Markets

FEBRUARY 4, 2023

The Lead In As noted in the introductory paragraph, I start from a position of ignorance about the Adani Group, and it thus made sense to fill in that gap. First, they are infrastructure businesses , requiring large up-front investments and having long gestation periods, with regulatory and government oversight.

Start-ups 100

Start-ups Market Capitalization Equity Marketability 100