P/E Ratio: Useful Valuation Tool or One Number Too Many Investors Trust?
The P/E ratio is the number most people learn first, and plenty of people stop there. It sits on every stock quote page and squeezes a whole company into a single figure, which is what makes it useful and also what makes it so easy to misread. The S&P 500 traded on a forward P/E […]
Cheap Stock or Value Trap? Five Things to Check Before Calling a Company Undervalued
Every stock screener has a page full of companies trading on a P/E of 5 or 6, and most of them are there for a reason. Some are real bargains the market has overlooked. Another kind is the value trap, a stock that looks cheap because its profits are shrinking and keeps looking cheap all […]
How Do You Know if a Company Is Cheap? A Guide to Stock Valuation Ratios
A $5 share can be expensive and a $900 share can be cheap, which tends to confuse everyone the first time they hear it. The share price only tells you what one slice of a company costs. It says nothing about how many slices there are, how much the business earns or how much cash […]
Bond Yields Are Back Near Multi-Decade Highs: Why Should Stock Investors Care?
Bonds have a reputation as the sleepy end of the market, the part of a portfolio people buy so they can stop thinking about it. That reputation hasn’t held up well in 2026. The 10-year US Treasury yield climbed above 5.35% on October 7, its highest level since 2002, and France’s 10-year borrowing cost came […]
AI Earnings Season: Are Chip Stocks Still Justifying Their Valuations?
TSMC’s profit rose 68.7% in the third quarter, and Samsung expects its operating profit to come in almost nine times higher than a year ago. Numbers like that would usually settle any argument about a share price. With chip stocks, though, the argument has moved on to what investors have already paid for, since much […]
Oil Prices and Inflation: How the October 2026 Spike Reaches Interest Rates
Oil prices usually get quoted per barrel, which isn’t much use unless you happen to own a refinery. The more useful question is where that barrel ends up. Brent crude settled at $105.92 on October 15, well above its 2025 average of $69, and the extra cost is moving through diesel, freight and factory prices […]
October 2026 Inflation Watch: What the Next CPI Report Could Tell the Fed
For a report made up of price tables, CPI gets a remarkable amount of attention. The next CPI report comes out on November 10, a month after US inflation rose to 3.7%, and it’s likely to move the dollar and US stocks within minutes of being published. Most of September’s rise came from gas, which […]