RE: The long and short of it...16 Feb 2020 17:31
Good post alwayswrong - but all backward looking numbers. The market right now just doesn’t believe these figures, and there’s a likely chance atleast some will not be correct.
Remember it’s only a p/e of 8 if the earnings end up being true. They could well be, but it’s likely at best to be partially impaired by all this saga and at worst be a total fraud. In the latter case you need to put some probability on this, even if 10% chance of going to zero that naturally would significantly reduce the weighted average target price.
The biggest mistake “value” investors make is buying stocks that are optically trading at low valuations, forgetting that actually the “E” in P/E might be what’s wrong and not necessarily the “P”... and even if not so stocks can form a new trading range based on new revelations.
For me a long position is in stocks with more certainty. For example I’ve owned MasterCard for a decade now and people always tell me it’s so expensive at 33x current P/E, especially compared to its historic range of 20x P/E but you have to look at the underlying characteristics and changes in a business to see the duration and consistency of earnings growth is just so much better now, and recognise that perhaps it was just too cheap historically. The stock continues to make up 5% of my portfolio and I have another 20% in global payments, wex and visa.