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Dark Accounting Matter

Harvard Corporate Governance

The S&P 500 currently trades at a price to book value of 4.2, suggesting that book value accounts for less than 20% of the S&P 500’s market value. The remaining 80%, appears nowhere in these firms’ balance sheets—it is invisible to contemporary accounting techniques and constitutes “dark accounting matter.”

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Good (Bad) Banks and Good (Bad) Investments: At the right price.

Musings on Markets

Consequently, you can only value the equity in a bank, and by extension, the only pricing multiples you can use to price banks are equity multiples (PE, Price to Book etc.).

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A Follow up on Inflation: The Disparate Effects on Company Values!

Musings on Markets

Following that rule book, I looked at the effects of inflation on the levers that determines value, in the graph below: Put simply, the effects of inflation on firm value boil down to the impact inflation has on expected cash flows/growth and risk.

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Japan Megabanks’ Strategic Share Sale Marks Big Priority Shift

Global Finance

With the Japanese economy sluggish, Wu points out, the TSE has become concerned about the low price-to-book ratios of its listed companies, including banks; half of Prime members traded below book last year. Now they’re thinking more strategically about how to allocate capital.”

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The Importance of (and challenges with) Valuing Intangibles

IVSC

Searching for stocks with low price-to-book ratios was a good indication of a potential bargain. This makes the task of valuation much more difficult, but also a lot more interesting. In the past, market valuations often mirrored the reported balance sheet.

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Analyzing MetLife Stock: Is Buy Strategy the Right Move?

Benzinga

Valuation Price-to-book (P/B) is one of the multiples used for valuing insurance stocks. The consensus mark for 2025 earnings is pegged at $9.83 per share, suggesting an improvement of 13.4% from the 2024 estimate. The same for revenues is $76.5 billion, hinting at a 4.6% increase from the 2024 estimate.

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Data Update 3: Inflation and its Ripple Effects!

Musings on Markets

I also looked at how inflation plays out on equity sub-groupings, on two dimensions, the first being market capitalization and the second being price to book, with the former becoming a stand-in for the vaunted small cap premium and the latter for the value versus growth question.