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Technology Stocks : Semi-Equips - Buy when BLOOD is running in the streets! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Gottfried who wrote (9736)	4/18/2001 9:01:08 AM
From: Q.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 10921

Uh, no, you don't want to average the p/e calculated separately for each year. You want to average the eps, and then calculate the ratio. Not the same thing, because the eps is in the denominator. In a 10k, you can find a "Selected Financial Data" table that includes eps and other selected financial parameters going back 5 years or more. To find it, open a 10k, and search for the word "selected." You can try it on AMAT's 10k: edgar-online.com More convenient is Market Guide's historical eps table, which you can find at Yahoo. It would take you maybe a minute to load the page and calculate the average and the p/e based on the average. You could repeat this for several stocks, if you liked, to find the best value. One thing I noticed a year ago is that at the peak of a cycle, the stock with the lowest p/e on TTM is actually more expensive when you compute the p/e with an eps averaged over several years. The disadvantage of Market Guide's data is that only 3 years are shown, although for a sector with as much secular growth as semi-equips, that might be enough. Here's MarketGuide's table for AMAT: yahoo.marketguide.com