Monday, 1 September 2014

Learn the Art of Value Investing

You might be wondering what is value investing and how is it different from usual investment techniques. Well, it isn’t, except for the approach underlying this concept. Value investors essentially seek to invest in shares which have good potential to perform but are currently undervalued by the stock market in India. This puts them in an advantageous position in the long term and if and when the stock performs well and market realizes its actual value.

However, the big question is, how do you actually find out which stocks are likely to perform well in the Indian stock market in the longer run? This is where value investors adopt a slightly different approach from day traders, short term online traders or investors and even some fundamental stock investors. The first thing they do is look for the price-to-earnings ratio (P/E ratio) which is a valuation ratio derived by diving the price per share by earnings per share.



A higher P/E ratio can denote that the company is performing well and investors are expecting it to perform even better in future. On the other hand, a lower P/E ratio can show that online stock traders have limited growth expectations from the stock. However, a lower P/E ratio can also indicate that the stock is currently undervalued if the fundamentals of the company are good enough and indicate good prospects for growth. Price-to-book value ratio (P/B Ratio) is another valuation ratio often used by stock traders in Delhi to assess the value of a stock.

This is derived by dividing the price-per-share which is market price of a single share by the book-value or shareholders’ equity per share. Value investors would prefer to go for a www.ashlaronline.com company with lower P/B ratio, because in that case it would denote that the stocks are undervalued, given the fundamentals are positive, and present a good prospect for long-term investment. High dividend yields can also attract value investors to a stock but they need to find out “intrinsic value” of a company which is subjective and hence one should be careful with it.