Analyzing Valuation Measures: A Performance Horse Race over the Past 40 Years

摘要

In this article, the authors compare the investment performance of portfolios sorted on different valuation measures. They find that EBITDA/TEV has been the best performing metric, historically, and outperforms many investor favorites, such as price-to-earnings ratio, free cash flow to total enterprise value, and book-to-market ratio. The authors also explore the investment potential of long-term valuation ratios, which replace one-year earnings with an average of long-term earnings. They find that in contrast to prior empirical work, long-term ratios add little investment value over standard one-year valuation metrics.