Us Corporate Profits : What Are Equity Prices Discounting? Essay

Swan-Davis, Inc. (SDI) manufactures equipment for sale to large contractors. The company was founded in 1976 by Tom Stone, the current chairman, and it went public in 1980 at $1 per share. The stock currently sells for $15, Stone owns 14 percent of the shares, and other officers and directors control another 13 percent. The industry is cyclical, and competition is strong, so profits are some-what unstable. Tables 1, 2, and 3 provide historical balance sheets, income statements, and ratios for the company for the period 1994–1996, Table 4 provides industry average data for 1994-1996, and Table 5 provides one security analyst’s forecasted data for the company based on assumptions

When analysts question a firm’s earnings quality, it raises concerns regarding under or over aggressive accounting practices that may be allowing the firm to manipulate the earnings. Earnings quality is defined as the strength of the current earnings in being used to predict future earnings and cash flows. Since earning quality is indicative of future performance, analysts are more likely to address issues that have substantial impact on the earnings quality. An issue arises when the nature of the earnings is questioned. While permanent earnings are part of normal operations, any irregular, one time earnings can skew the earnings, making the firm look more profitable than it is. This is due to the inability to recreate similar one-time transactions that will give rise to such numbers. Investors prefer predictable

Such an intense focus has been placed on quarterly earnings as an indication of a company’s success by everyone from analysts to executives that ethics have for the most part been thrown out the window, sacrificed to the all important number, i.e. earnings per share. This is the theory in Alex Berenson’s book “The Number: How the Drive for Quarterly Earnings Corrupted Wall Street and Corporate America.” This number has become part of a game to be played, a figure to be manipulated – beat the number and Wall Street all but throws a parade, miss it and a company’s stock may be abandoned. Take into account the incentives that executives have to beat the number and one can find plenty of reasons to manage earnings.

Investors often come to believe that a stock is undervalued or overvalued compared to other stocks in its industrial group. To calculate an alternate target price for the current and next fiscal year based on those beliefs, investors can apply the average PE multiple for a company 's industrial group to the average professional analyst 's earnings estimate for the company in those periods. Valuation using the industry 's

If earnings' growth rates are often used as estimated of dividend growth rates. However, these forecasts

Macy's operates primarily in the retail industry with operations globally. As a retail franchise, the performance of the stock can be attributed to shopping behavior within the broader economy. Currently, the economy is revering from the greatest recession since the great depression. As such, consumers are slowly purchasing luxury and higher margin items from Macys. This indicates a shift in consumer sentiments, which I believe, will prevail long after the futures contracts become due. In fact, as the economy recovers, Macys will benefit in two profound ways. First, its earnings will increase substantially as consumers begin to purchase more products. Furthermore, the valuation placed on those earning will increase. This valuation can be attributed to the P/E ratio mentioned earlier. If this

Using a sample data comprised 297 NYSE and American Stock Exchange companies for 1977 to 1980-time period, indicating twelve quarterly announcements for each of the company. MacKinlay (1997) utilised 30 companies which comprised into Dow Jones Industrial Index, as a sample to test the impact of quarterly earnings announcements to stock prices. The researcher examined totally 600 quarterly announcements, thus MacKinlay (1997) obtained stock price response separately to bad news, good news and no news cases of earnings per share (EPS) announcements.

The earnings per share of the common stock is a financial metric for a business' net income believed to be available to reward the common stock shareholders. The ratio is usually calculated by dividing the difference between the net after-tax profits and dividends attributed to preferred shareholders with the average number of outstanding common shares. Significantly higher earnings per share imply that the business is capable of paying reasonable dividends to the common shareholders while a low ratio indicates a reduced ability for the entity to declare and pay reasonable dividends to its common shareholders. From the comparison, Nike has a higher EPS ratio at 1.05 compared to 0.98 for Under Armour. This implies that Nike is performing better than Under Armour and that Nike could be either making increasing earnings or repurchasing its stocks while Under Armour is performing dismally. This low ratio for Under Armour is an

Pro forma earnings are earnings which often exclude non-recurring items and are defined by each individual firm rather than under the general accepted accounting principle (GAAP). Pro forma earnings reporting is commonplace in the U.S. (Doyle et al. 2013; Bentley et al. 2016). Items such as nonrecurring gains and losses, depreciation and amortization expenses, write-downs, restructuring and merger costs, stock compensation expenses, and interest expenses are often excluded in pro forma earnings figures. Since many of these exclusions are likely to be transitory in nature, pro forma earnings can be viewed as a better measure of permanent earnings and have received increasing focus recently. Research studies found that pro forma earnings are more value relevant, informative, and better associated with stock prices than GAAP earnings (Bradshaw and Sloan, 2002; Bhattacharya et al.,2003; Brown and Sivakumar, 2003; Entwistle et al., 2010). However, exclusion of the non-recurring items is completely discretionary (Doyle et al., 2013) and managers may use the flexibility to opportunistically influence the market’s perception of the firm’s recurring earnings (Dechow and Schrand, 2004). Managers may have strong incentives to manipulate the reported pro forma earnings to influence investors’ perceptions about the

Baruch Lev and Feng Gu authors of “The End of Accounting and The Path Forward for Investors and Managers” indicate that over the past 110 years, the structure and content of financial reports has not changed, and that the role that these reports play in influencing the decisions of investors has greatly diminished. Lev and Gu make a case that non-transaction events that are not captured by the financial reports such as those disclosed through 8-k filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission (“SEC”) have a greater impact on stock prices, and thus more useful to investors. In addition, they suggest that one of reasons for the decline in usefulness of financial reports stems from the increase of estimates that has made its way into these reports (Lev and Gu 2016).

In 2008, share prices dropped mainly due to the US sub-prime crisis, which started in 2007 (Lixi, 2008). This had a huge impact on the P/E ratio for 2008, which is slightly below the threshold of 10 times. The P/E ratio for ANZ was higher than NAB in 2009 and there was lesser fluctuation in ratio. Share prices tend to rise with improved economic conditions, and with stimulus packages being distributed all over the world, there was uplift in the global economy, hence driving share prices (Larsen, 2012). However, falling earnings over 2009 caused both P/E ratios to rise. NAB’s P/E ratio increased a significant amount and overtook ANZ’s. Over the 5 years, NAB’s P/E ratio fluctuation is observed to be consistently higher than ANZ’s. Moreover, NAB’s higher P/E ratio might be due to investors’ high expectations, which were not supported by earnings.

their earnings did not. On the off chance that present patterns proceed with, the United States may soon

The efficient market, as one of the pillars of neoclassical finance, asserts that financial markets are efficient on information. The efficient market hypothesis suggests that there is no trading system based on currently available information that could be expected to generate excess risk-adjusted returns consistently as this information is already reflected in current prices. However, EMH has been the most controversial subject of research in the fields of financial economics during the last 40 years. “Behavioural finance, however, is now seriously challenging this premise by arguing that people are clearly not rational” (Ross, (2002)). Behavioral finance uses facts from psychology and other human sciences in order to

In the underlying paper the author re-examines the conservatism principle and its asymmetric effects on earnings. With samples consisting of all firm-year observations from 1963 to 1990 with returns data on the CRSP NYSE/AMEX Monthly files and respective accounting data on the COMPUSTAT Annual Industrial and Research files, he formulates and tests four major hypotheses to find evidence for his predictions. At first he chracterizes “conservatism in accounting as the more timely recognition in earnings of bad news regarding future cash flows than good news”.1 In his first hypothesis he predicts a more sensitive response of earnings towards bad news in comparison to good news, proxied by negative and positve annual stock returns. His second prediction is that earnings are more timely than cash flow, indicating a stronger association of accruals to conservative accounting effects. Hypotheses three and four account for a test on the

First time this phenomenon was presented by the economists Rajnish Mehra and Edward Prescott in 1985. They discovered that the return from US equity investments in comparison to the return from a risk free government securities had been much far above during the twentieth century to be interpreted by the traditional economic theories (Siegel and Thaler, 1997).