When do Stocks look Cheap vs Fundamentals?

Hyper-grower HUBS grew at 40.6% year-over-year in its recent quarter, down a sharp 5.9 points and at 10x LTM Revenue & 75 LTM Free Cash Flow, HUBS hardly looks cheap. HUBS is a great example of one of the quality tech names: high growth & solid cash flow. Now that the stock is down from $800 to $300, its more reasonably valued at 10X LTM revenue and 75 LTM free cash flows. By no means is this a fire sale.

Lets look at some Bellwether stocks to see how "cheap" or rich things are based on P/E ratio:

• AAPL 23x current EPS, cheap at 12X - down 20% from peak

• MSFT 27x current EPS, cheap at 15X - down 27% from peak

• IBM 13x current EPS, cheap at 10X - down 10% from 52 week high

• GOOG 20x current EPS, cheap at 15X - down 26% from peak

• FB 16x current EPS, cheap at 10X - down 50% from peak

• NKE 28x current EPS, cheap at 12X - down 40% from peak

• GS 8x current EPS, cheap at 6X - down 30% from peak

• PYPL 19x current EPS, cheap at 15x - down 76% from peak

Given the across-the-board selloff, a lot of the risk is out of the large cap names. IBM has a shaky balance sheet, but its capitalized cheaper to reflect for the balance sheet risk; same with Goldman Sachs. We are near the bottom in big cap tech, which bodes well for the general indices. Stick with the higher quality balance sheets until the Fed reverses course.

The long term trend starting from Jan 2009 suggests that the S&P500's fair value is about 3,555, which is 10% lower. The graph below clearly shows the effect of the excess stimulus over the past 2 years changed the slope of the uptrend.

We will be spending time looking for cheap stocks and letting you know about the few gems as we find them. There should be plenty of upcoming opportunities in this falling-knife environment.