PE Ratios on different websites

[LightningH]

The PE Ratio on yahoo Finance for IFT is 29.25 compared to about 11.9 on the NZX or the IRG site. I am not sure why this is. Are they using the same measures to calculate the ratio.

Ive had a bit of Google around and cant seem to find an obvious answer to the difference of the EPS.

Cheers

[Aaron]

If I took the 10cents eps from the march 2011 financial statements and todays price of $1.98 I get a PE ratio of 19.8.

You would have to know what price they used and what earnings per share they use. maybe its forecast earnings or perhaps they don't adjust the price every day.

The 11.9 P/E maybe adds back somethings like Interest, tax or depreciation or more likely they have used the total reported net surplus whereas it looks like Infratil use the "net surplus attributable to owners of the company" to calculate the eps in the 31/3/2011 statement of income.

Experienced investors on this site might know but I reckon you could be looking for a long time if you don't have the P and E figures that the websites used.

[LightningH]

Ok cool, I have been playing around with formulae on excel, seeing how I can filter/narrow down different companies i might be interested in looking at in more depth. I'm learning a lot from the comments posted on this site.

[Snoopy]

You would have to know what price they used and what earnings per share they use. maybe its forecast earnings or perhaps they don't adjust the price every day.

Aaron is right in that sometimes what is presented as PE is in fact 'forecast PE', or a '50% weighting of past PE and forecast PE' or some other weird weighting which should be disclosed in the fine print of your data source. Some may argue that the 'correct' PE is always the historical figure based on the last declared full year earnings period. The problem with that approach is that you can only invest going forwards - historical earnings are done and dusted.

I imagine most of these are calculated on a spreadsheet by feeding in daily data. That means I think it unlikely that the figures are not updated every day for share price (P). Obviously the earnings (E) will not be updated every day.

The 11.9 P/E maybe adds back somethings like Interest, tax or depreciation or more likely they have used the total reported net surplus whereas it looks like Infratil use the "net surplus attributable to owners of the company" to calculate the eps in the 31/3/2011 statement of income.

Firstly I think it is very unlikely the figures for interest and tax or anything else has been added back into the profit figure. To do so would produce an EBIT multiple ratio. That might be useful, but to pass it off as a PE ratio would be plain dishonest.

The 'problem' (if you want to think of it that way) is that when you have a company like Infratil that invests in other listed entities, accounting rules requires them to mark to market any share price movements of their investments at results time. Such adjustments do not reflect the operational profits of Infratil. Personally I would remove any such adjustments when working out a PE ratio for Infratil. That is because listed investments suffer from the vicissitudes of the market that are out of the control of Infratil management.

SNOOPY

[lou]

The yahoo PE ratio is worked out using
Price 1.98
EPS .07 (rounded) (trailing twelve months as at 30/9/2011)

Don't know who is correct though

[LightningH]

Woah this is a bit more to this than i first thought.
From Yahoo- Trailing P/E (ttm, intraday):29.48
Forward P/E (fye 31/03/2013)¹:13.17 (aha! more in line with the other sites)
Diluted EPS (ttm):0.07
I'm guessing the yahoo EPS is from quarterly results as the Diluted EPS from the infratil statement is 5.2(2010) or 10.7(2011).
It is difficult to find where/how the data comes from on these websites (maybe i'm just not looking hard enough). For example Direct Broking states a EPS of 16.4c. Pretty sure its not undiluted EPS and its not a forecast either, as that is $0.10 further down their site. I am thinking it maybe they do adjust for the fact that infratil has investments in other listed entities, as Snoopy points out.