What's the connection between P/E ratio and growth?
So, the price-earnings ratio is price over earnings, easy enough. But obviously earnings are not static. In the case of a growing company, the earnings will be higher in the future. There will be extra earnings, above and beyond what the stock has right now. You should consider the future earnings in your estimate of what the company is worth now. One snag: Those extra earnings are future money. Future-money is an interesting thing, it's actually worth less than present-money- because of things like inflation, but also opportunity cost.  So if you bought $100 in money that you'll have 20 years from now, you'd expect to pay less than $100. (The US government can sell you that money. It's called a Series EE Savings Bond and it would cost you $50. I think. Don't quote me on that, though, ask the Treasury.) So you can't compare future money with present-money directly, and you can't just add those dollars to the earnings . You need to compute a discount. That's what discounted cash-flow analysis is about: figuring out the future cash flow, and then discounting the future figuring out what it's worth now. The actual way you use the discount rate in your formula is a little scarier than simple division, though, because it involves discounting each year's earnings (in this case, someone has asserted a discount of 11% a year, and five years of earnings growth of 10%). Wikipedia gives us the formula for the value of the future cash flow:  essentially adding all the future cash flows together, and then discounting them by a (compounded) rate. Please forgive me for not filling this formula out; I'm here for theory, not math. :)
"Pump-and-Dump strategy is happening everywhere. Less so in developed market. I can tell an experience from Emerging Market perspective. Usually several securities brokers work together to pump several ""penny"" stocks (5 - 7 stocks). They conspire together and searching for several investors, who have money and willing to participate in this scheme. These investors will then agree to invest (usually with Margin from securities) to start pumping the stocks. The stocks will be pumped until several Research Analysts take interest in it. Once the news were spread out regarding these highly speculative stocks. The investors gradually dumps the stocks (with help of their brokers). The things that you need to keep an eye for: - Low trading volume in the previous 3 - 6 months (relative to their peers) - Low P/E ratio with unremarkable earning growth - No positive catalyst or material news regarding the company - Stocks have high momentum (observe on weekly rather daily returns) Pump-and-dump usually last between 3 months to 6 months." I have a hard time giving them a P/E higher than 25 on the absolute top end. Given current numbers, that takes another ~60% off their share price putting them right around $10. Now... that's my top end estimate, I'd probably be willing to buy right around $8.  In order to support the IPO price, the models I've seen come in at projecting an average growth rate of 40% YoY for the next 5 years. If FB pulled that off, they'd be growing ~5X over the next 5 years (once compounded). As it stands, they've got 900B+ users. Doubling that would require a significant number of new people to start coming on line - 5x that would be impossible.  So... next option... They figure out how to monetize existing users/traffic better. It's possible - they don't do a very good job with this as it stands, but they've got a fine line to walk. They need to pull it off without driving users, or advertisers, away.  Suppose they were able to double their user base. They'd still need to do ~2.5x better per user to make the numbers. This doesn't take into account that the next billion users are significantly less valuable as an audience than the first billion. (Not in human terms, but in financial/marketing terms.)  I'm willing to give them a 20% growth rate for the next 5 years. That'd put them at a bit better than 2.5x over that time. It's still a stretch. That should put them in the same P/E range as GOOG (currently trading at a P/E of 17ish).  Any price higher than $10/share at this point is gambling on their ability to crack monetization. The higher you go, the higher you think the odds are.  One last thing I'd keep in mind. Most of the early employees with options are locked out of selling for the first 6 months after the IPO. There's a fairly large number of shares that will become available when that time is up. I'm curious to see how many of the early employees call in rich and go start new companies. (Think about what happened to paypal after being sold to ebay - yelp, youtube, and others all came out of the early employees.) I'd be watching the quarterly reports through the quarter ending 12/31. The numbers at that point will give a better gauge of a proper valuation. I absolutely wouldn't hold shares of FB during the period when employees first have their chance to cash their lottery tickets. "It's been said before, but to repeat succinctly, a company's current share price is no more or less than what ""the market"" thinks that share is worth, as measured by the price at which the shares are being bought and sold. As such, a lot of things can affect that price, some of them material, others ethereal. A common reason to own stock is to share the profits of the company; by owning 1 share out of 1 million shares outstanding, you are entitled to 1/1000000 of that company's quarterly profits (if any). These are paid out as dividends. Two key measurements are based on these dividend payments; the first is ""earnings per share"", which is the company's stated quarterly profits, divided by outstanding shares, with the second being the ""price-earnings ratio"" which is the current price of the stock divided by its EPS. Your expected ""yield"" on this stock is more or less the inverse of this number; if a company has a P/E ratio of 20, then all things being equal, if you invest $100 in this stock you can expect a return of $5, or 5% (1/20). As such, changes in the expected earnings per share can cause the share price to rise or fall to maintain a P/E ratio that the pool of buyers are willing to tolerate. News that a company might miss its profit expectations, due to a decrease in consumer demand, an increase in raw materials costs, labor, financing, or any of a multitude of things that industry analysts watch, can cause the stock price to drop sharply as people look for better investments with higher yields. However, a large P/E ratio is not necessarily a bad thing, especially for a large stable company. That stability means the company is better able to weather economic problems, and thus it is a lower risk. Now, not all companies issue dividends. Apple is probably the most well-known example. The company simply retains all its earnings to reinvest in itself. This is typically the strategy of a smaller start-up; whether they're making good money or not, they typically want to keep what they make so they can keep growing, and the shareholders are usually fine with that. Why? Well, because there's more than one way to value a company, and more than one way to look at a stock. Owning one share of a stock can be seen quite literally as owning a share of that company. The share can then be valued as a fraction of the company's total assets.  Sounds simple, but it isn't, because not every asset the company owns has a line in the financial statements. A company's brand name, for instance, has no tangible value, and yet it is probably the most valuable single thing Apple owns. Similarly, intellectual property doesn't have a ""book value"" on a company's balance sheet, but again, these are huge contributors to the success and profitability of a company like Apple; the company is viewed as a center of innovation, and if it were not doing any innovating, it would very quickly be seen as a middleman for some other company's ideas and products. A company can't sustain that position for long even if it's raking in the money in the meantime. Overall, the value of a company is generally a combination of these two things; by owning a portion of stock, you own a piece of the company's assets, and also claim a piece of their profits. A large company with a lot of material assets and very little debt can be highly valued based solely on the sum of its parts, even if profits are lagging. Conversely, a company more or less operating out of a storage unit can have a patent on the cure for cancer, and be shoveling money into their coffers with bulldozers." I found a possible data source. It offers fundamentals i.e. the accounting ratios you listed (P/E, dividend yield, price/book) for international stock indexes. International equity indices based on EAFE definitions are  maintained by Professor French of French-Fama fame, at Dartmouth's Tuck Business School website. Specifics of methodology, and countries covered is available here. MSCI is the data source. Historical time interval for most countries is from 1975 onward. (Singapore was one of the countries included). Obtaining historical ratios for international stock indices is not easily found for free. Your question didn't specify free though. If that is not a constraint, you may wish to check the MSCI Barra international stock indices also. "In the long run (how long?) a shares price always reverts to being its proportional amount of the company's residual equity plus the net present value of its expected future cash flows. Or at least that's the theory. In practice PE ratio is used not as a way of measuring what the stock price itself will do but what the fundamental value of holding that share is compared to its price. It is a way of measuring what a company is worth compared to its price and comparing it against other companies to find companies where the underlying value of the company is underrepresented by the price. Comparing PE ratios within the same industry or sector is the most valid use for this (other than comparing previous years of the same company) and the validity of the comparison drops as the structure of the firm you are comparing with gets more different to that of the company. Each industry has its own ""typical"" average PE ratio and these differ wildly between industries so in a great many cases even comparing PE ratios between similar stocks in different industries isn't valid. Any weird pseudo PE ratio that you create for other instruments will be meaningless. In general the best way to compare investments across multiple instruments is by comparing returns. when comparing stocks to other instruments you may want to use the return on stock price or the return on capital employed (ROCE) depending on whether you want to compare the trading performance or the fundamental performance." "Check your math... ""two stocks, both with a P/E of 2 trading at $40 per share lets say, and one has an EPS of 5 whereas the other has an EPS of 10 is the latter a better purchase?"" If a stock has P/E of 2 and  price of $40 it has an EPS of $20. Not $10. Not $5." I look at the following ratios and how these ratios developed over time, for instance how did valuation come down in a recession, what was the trough multiple during the Lehman crisis in 2008, how did a recession or good economy affect profitability of the company. Valuation metrics: Enterprise value / EBIT (EBIT = operating income) Enterprise value / sales (for fast growing companies as their operating profit is expected to be realized later in time) and P/E Profitability: Operating margin, which is EBIT / sales Cashflow / sales Business model stability and news flow This is a very common misconception. I've been studying equities and credits for a while now, and the simplest way to explain the difference is this:  - Credit is about stable cash flows. Your investment in a bond has almost (read: almost) nothing to do with growth rate. It has everything to do with how stable the cash flows are and interest coverage.  - Equity is about growth. No wonder companies with highly irregular cash flows (e.g., every single young tech company in the history of tech companies) can have the most in-demand equity while few bond investors would touch them with a ten foot pole.