Quotes About P/E ratio

In the previous four quarters, Yahoo! had racked up $433 million in revenues and $34.9 million in net income. So Yahoo!'s stock was now priced at 263 times revenues and 3,264 times earnings. (Remember that a P/E ratio much above 25 made Graham grimace!)5

Lynch calculated each potential stock's P/E-to-growth ratio (or PEG ratio) and would buy for his portfolio only those stocks with high growth relative to their P/Es. This was not simply a low P/E strategy, because a stock with a 50 percent growth rate and a P/E of 25 (PEG ratio of ½) was deemed far better than a stock with 20 percent growth and a P/E of 20 (PEG ratio of

If the p/e of Coca-Cola is 15, you'd expect the company to be growing at about 15 percent a year, etc. But if the p/e ratio is less than the growth rate, you may have found yourself a bargain. A company, say, with a growth rate of 12 percent a year (also known as a "12-percent grower") and a p/e ratio of 6 is a very attractive prospect.

The p/e ratio can be thought of as the number of years it will take the company to earn back the amount of your initial investment—assuming, of course, that the company's earnings stay constant.