Evaluate Stock Price With ReverseEngineering DCF_1

Post on: 9 Май, 2015 No Comment

Using Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) Analysis to Value Companies and Stocks

Average completion time:

18 minutes

In this article, you will learn:

What is Discounting?

The idea of discounting is a little confusing at first but actually very intuitive once you get the hang of it. This lesson is also the most difficult of the five WeathLift stock investing lessons to understand, so don’t feel intimidated if you need to go over it a few times before you’re comfortable with the ideas in this lesson.

Discounting is simply the idea that $1 given to you today is worth more than $1 promised to you in the future. The longer the time period until the promised $1 is paid, the less that promise is worth today. Again, the concept itself is simply common sense — if I offered you $1000 now versus $1000 a year from now, obviously you would prefer the first option and value it more. Being promised $1000 in a year’s time means you can’t interest on the money in the meantime, and also means that there is an uncertainty in whether or not you’ll actually get the money. Importantly, the promise of $1000 a year from now is worth less than $1000 today. It has a present value of less than $1000.

This concept can be applied in more exact ways using a discount rate. A discount rate is a kind of interest rate which you demand on money promised in the future, because of the very fact that it is only a promise in the future and not an actual payment today. It is calculated as the sum of risk-free interest rate that you could have gotten on your money if you had received it today (which is usually taken as the interest rate on essentially risk-free government Treasury bills) and a risk premium for the uncertainty that the promise will actually be fulfilled and you will get the expected amount after the time period. The risk premium varies depending on the perceived riskiness of the specific stock, but is usually around 6% for safer large caps and up to 9% for riskier small caps.

Discount Rate = Risk-Free Interest Rate on Treasuries + Risk Premium

For example, if the current interest rate on Treasury bills is 4% and we take the risk premium as 7%, we get a discount rate of 11% per year. Once we have the discount rate, we can simply divide any amount of money in the future by this rate raised to the power of the number of years until we receive the money to get the present value of the payment.

Present Value = Payment in Future ÷ (1 + Discount Rate) No. of Years Until Payment

For example, if I am promised $1000 in 5 years and I put a discount rate of 11% on this promise, the present value of that $1000 is:

$1000 ÷ (1.11) 5 = $593.45

As we expect from discounting, the present value of $593.45 is less than the promised future value of $1000. A promise of $1000 in 5 years time means I miss out on getting interest on that $1000 in the meantime, and also that I take on the risk of not actually receiving the money when payment is due. Therefore, I only value the payment at $593.45 today. $593.45 is the present value of the payment, and $593.45 is the most I should be willing to pay to receive this $1000 payment in 5 years time.

How do I use discounting to find undervalued stocks?

The simple examples discussed earlier may seem irrelevant to stock investing, but by buying a stock, you are essentially being promised a number of regular future payments in the form of earnings by the company. The stock price today can therefore be just thought of as a sum of all the present values of all future payments, because the sum of the present values of future company earnings is the most you should be willing to pay for a stock.

Using discounting of future earnings to price a stock is known as discounted cash flow (DCF) analysis. To price a stock using expected future earnings, you would need to discount every dollar of future earnings and add them all together to get the stock price. Doing this is difficult and requires complex annuities formulas which can be hard to work with. Instead, you can simply use the WealthLift Discounted Cash Flow (DCF) calculator below to determine a stock price based on your own earnings estimates:


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