How To Read A Google Finance Stock Page
- And What A Beginning Investor Can Extract From It
Lately, I’ve been using Google Finance more and more as a place to keep tabs on individual stocks. It presents the basic information I need in an easy-to-read format on a single page, so I don’t have to click around much to find what I need. Even better: it’s a one stop shop for the basic information that a beginning investor would need when examining a stock. Below is a screenshot of the Google Finance page for Lowe’s (LOW) with some color coding on it so we can walk through the features.
The P/E value is also known as the price to earnings ratio. Basically, it is the result of taking the current stock price (34.04, in this case) and dividing it by the earnings per share most recently announced by the company ($2.03 per share). The P/E ratio is the best number to use to compare stocks to others in the same sector, as this eliminates some of the major variations between companies (i.e., you can fairly compare McDonalds to Burger King using the P/E ratio, but their stock price isn’t a good comparison because one may have more stocks outstanding than the other, for example).
The F P/E value is the forward price to earnings ratio, which is almost the same as above, except it uses projections of the company’s future earnings by stock analysts instead of the company’s announced earnings per share. In this case, the analysts are projecting about $2.11 per share in earnings the next time Lowe’s announces their numbers. Because of this, the forward P/E is lower than the normal P/E; forward P/Es are lower than normal P/Es in stocks where analysts expect the companies to make more money per share the next time they announce their earnings.
The beta is a statistical model that estimates how closely the stock’s performance matches the stock market in general. The higher the beta, the closer the stock matches the general market. Blue chip stocks generally have a higher beta, whereas speculative stocks generally have a lower beta. Often, the lower the beta, the more risky the investment.
http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/beta.asp
beta:A measure of the volatility, or systematic risk, of a security or a portfolio in comparison to the market as a whole.
Also known as "beta coefficient".
Investopedia Says... Beta is calculated using regression analysis, and you can think of beta as the tendency of a security's returns to respond to swings in the market. A beta of 1 indicates that the security's price will move with the market. A beta of less than 1 means that the security will be less volatile than the market. A beta of greater than 1 indicates that the security's price will be more volatile than the market. For example, if a stock's beta is 1.2, it's theoretically 20% more volatile than the market.
Many utilities stocks have a beta of less than 1. Conversely, most high-tech Nasdaq-based stocks have a beta of greater than 1, offering the possibility of a higher rate of return, but also posing more risk.
The earnings per share was mentioned above in the P/E value; it’s merely the company’s last announced earnings divided by the number of shares outstanding. So, if a company makes a million dollars and has a million shares outstanding, their earnings per share would be $1.
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