Knowing the EPS Formula: Predicting When an EPS Will Uplift or Downsize

Stockholders of businesses need to understand the importance of EPS (Earnings Per Share) and how to determine if a particular investment will be favorable or not, as they head on with their investment portfolios.

EPS is an important know-how that equips an investor with the proper decisions needed in the share market. It affords them the means to determine the amount of money they have earned on a given investment.

EPS informs stockholders on the actual net income of a company and for each stock bought and owned. Stockholders are often observant to follow stock market reports to know the position of their investment earnings.

How Does Earning per Share Work?

The calculation modules are the Basic EPS and Diluted EPS.

Stock analysis also requires the ability to forecast revenue growth to determine what the likely changes could be. This is an important security mechanism that leads to stocks future worth.

Let’s take a look at it this way: assuming a company is constantly improving on its high growth rate over a long period, it will obviously command multiples that exceeds the market multiple.

When it is so, it means that the company’s stock price should increase dramatically, and which in turn favors investors with a higher return.

It is required that in making forward projection to determine whether a share will increase or decrease, a shareholder should understand the numerous input mechanism – some of which come from quantitative data analysis and are more subjective.

What is EPS and How to Calculate Earnings per Share?

EPS is the abbreviation for Earnings per Share. It is the allocated portion of a company’s revenue earnings from their net profit which an investor is entitled to due to an agreement on shareholder’s investment bond as stated on the company’s share listing.

EPS is a proof of a company’s profitability, and it is calculated in this manner:

EPS = (Net profit – Dividend on stocks)/Average Outstanding Shares.

Until now, there remains two major Earnings per Share formula, apart from some others.

The Basic EPS Ratio

Net Profit ÷ Total number of capital stock = EPS

For instance, a company’s $64.94 million net income is divided by the 17 million shares of stock the business has issued to compute its $6.64 EPS.

The Basic EPS is commonly a calculation model for public business because, privately owned businesses are not actively traded.

Consequently, it is not readily available for the stock shares, especially as they are absent on the EPS stock reports according to GAAP (Generally Accepted Accounting Principles). This is because, private corporations deliberately exempt themselves due to their belief that shareholders have no focus on per share values in exchange for focus on the company’s total net value.

The Diluted EPS Ratio

The Diluted EPS Ratio is a calculation method of driving net income by the number of shares, and with the possibility of being issued out in the future. The computation is demonstrated in this format:

Net profit ÷ Capital stock shares issued and potentially issued = EPS

The first computation is based on the number of stock shares actually issued and outstanding, whereas the second computation bases its EPS on the higher number of stock shares.

Both calculation methods are often reported at the lower part of the income statement.

The Importance of EPS and Forecasting

EPS uncovers deeply the financial health of a company. It may only be needed when choosing stocks from a motley stocks. For this cause, you must keep a close observation of a company’s EPS in its every quarterly result as the company provides the public with information analyzed by EPS from a single stock market.

Now let us consider this example:

Company Y and Company Z are in the same segment and they are good tradable investment opportunities. With the EPS, you can ascertain each of the companies’ individual EPS over time.

The importance of EPS is invaluable when predicting the increase or decrease tendencies of shares on a company’s listings. This skill helps you to know the proper time to sell or buy shares. Though stock forecasting requires the compilation of many qualitative data points from a variety of sources, it is nonetheless, all subjective determination.

For instance, it is obviously clear that EPS can go down if profit falls, even though it may not certainly be true from a different perspective, because it can also ascend even though the company’s profits are on the descending order.

On the reverse, EPS can also take on the decreasing tilt while the company’s profit is on the rise. Suppose, for instance, that a company goes up by $2,200 and raises its total number of shares by 240, the EPS will go down to 18.32 per share (2,200/240).

All this being said, forecasting can only land a predictor at a positive speculated point. Either way, there are indices that you have to put up with to adjust on your decision after carrying out on forecast.