A Framework for Better Understanding Equity Valuations
Introduction There is a lot of sentiment online and when I am talking to friends about a certain stock's share price that goes along the lines of, “No way I’m buying Zoom with a P/E of 1,000!”, or “I can’t believe Cloudflare is trading at 50x sales, that's crazy!”. Are these trading multiples outliers, general market euphoria over technology stocks, or are there explainable reasons for these outsized trading ratios? This post intends to provide a few hypotheses and better understand the logic (or lack thereof) for these trading ratios. This analysis started out by pulling standardized financial data from SimFin (no affiliation), removing companies that have less than $100 million in annual revenue to reduce noise in the data, removing companies with incomplete data in SimFin’s database, and only focusing on companies that have their primary stock exchange listing in the United States (Nasdaq, etc.). For the sake of this discussion, I’m focusing on the Application Soft