Quotes About Earnings

Of course, [risk] is a two-way street. But look at it this way. As an ordinary tax-hounded, inflation-raddled income earner, carrying much of the rest of the world on your back, you are in pretty sorry financial state anyhow.

Then they would face another day of trying to earn enough for the whole year with the heavy knowledge that they were going to end the season as they started it. Without the money or credit necessary to sustain a family for three months.

guarantee to everyone the free exercise of his industry and the fruits acquired by it.

Thomas Jefferson: "A wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government."1

Since the profits that companies can earn are finite, the price that investors should be willing to pay for stocks must also be finite.

Likewise, investors were delighted to earn 11% on bank certificates of deposit (CDs) in 1980 and are bitterly disappointed to be earning only around 2% in 2003—even though they were losing money after inflation back then but are keeping up with inflation now.

This chapter will begin with two pieces of advice to the investor that cannot avoid being contradictory in their implications. The first is: Don't take a single year's earnings seriously. The second is: If you do pay attention to short-term earnings, look out for booby traps in the per-share figures. If our first warning were followed strictly the second would be unnecessary.

But in other cases, making allowance for conversion rights—and the existence of stock-purchase warrants—can reduce the apparent earnings by half, or more.

Adequate size. A sufficiently strong financial condition. Continued dividends for at least the past 20 years. No earnings deficit in the past ten years. Ten-year growth of at least one-third in per-share earnings. Price of stock no more than 1½ times net asset value. Price no more than 15 times average earnings of the past three years.

The stock market's performance depends on three factors: real growth (the rise of companies' earnings and dividends) inflationary growth (the general rise of prices throughout the economy) speculative growth—or decline (any increase or decrease in the investing public's appetite for stocks)

A comparison of eToys with Toys "R" Us, Inc.—its biggest rival—is shocking. In the preceding three months, Toys "R" Us had earned $27 million in net income and had sold over 70 times more goods than eToys had sold in an entire year. And yet as Figure 17-3 shows, the stock market valued eToys at nearly $2 billion more than Toys "R" Us.

Here are some quick considerations for the intelligent investor: Is the "net pension benefit" more than 5% of the company's net income? (If so, would you still be comfortable with the company's other earnings if those pension gains went away in future years?) Is the assumed "long-term rate of return on plan assets" reasonable? (As of 2003, anything above 6.5% is implausible, while a rising rate is downright delusional.)

Instead, calculate a stock's price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham's formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years.

However, the risk of paying too high a price for good-quality stocks—while a real one—is not the chief hazard confronting the average buyer of securities. Observation over many years has taught us that the chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions. The purchasers view the current good earnings as equivalent to "earning power" and assume that prosperity is synonymous with safety.

Instead, let's tune out the noise and think about future returns as Graham might. The stock market's performance depends on three factors: real growth (the rise of companies' earnings and dividends) inflationary growth (the general rise of prices throughout the economy) speculative growth—or decline (any increase or decrease in the investing public's appetite for stocks)

Growth stocks are worth buying when their prices are reasonable, but when their price/earnings ratios go much above 25 or 30 the odds get ugly:

Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors

Our study of the various methods has led us to suggest a foreshortened and quite simple formula for the valuation of growth stocks, which is intended to produce figures fairly close to those resulting from the more refined mathematical calculations. Our formula is: Value = Current (Normal) Earnings × (8.5 plus twice the expected annual growth rate) The growth figure should be that expected over the next seven to ten years.

The investor should impose some limit on the price he will pay for an issue in relation to its average earnings over, say, the past seven years. We suggest that this limit be set at 25 times such average earnings, and not more than 20 times those of the last twelve-month period.

1970 1969 Share earningsa $5.20 $5.58

In June 1949 the S & P composite index sold at only 6.3 times the applicable earnings of the past 12 months; in March 1961 the ratio was 22.9 times. Similarly, the dividend yield on the S & P index had fallen from over 7% in 1949 to only 3.0% in 1961, a contrast heightened by the fact that interest rates on high-grade bonds had meanwhile risen from 2.60% to 4.50%. This is certainly the most remarkable turnabout in the public's attitude in all stock-market history.

Value = Current (Normal) Earnings × (8.5 plus twice the expected annual growth rate) The growth figure should be that expected over the next seven to ten years.7

Taxes, as I was to learn, were the best source of wealth for men who did not want to work

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