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How to I calculate the average P/E of a particular industry?

Where can I find the historical PE ratio for a given stock market sector or industry?

  • Where can I find the historical PE ratio for a given stock market sector or industry? When you get a stock quote from Yahoo Finance, the http://finance.yahoo.com/q/hp?s=HPQ tells you what the stock sold for on a given day. The http://finance.yahoo.com/q/co?s=HPQ shows the average PE ratio for that stock's industry. I am looking for something kind of in-between — namely, to find out what the PE was for a given industry/sector was on a given date. Where can I find this information online?

  • Answer:

    If you are looking for historic P/E ranges for an industry I'm not sure you can get that for free on the net. I usually see it in sell-side strategy pieces or quant boutique sell-side stuff. If you have access to that sort of stuff I highly recommend the Empirical Partners stuff. They are a equity quant research boutique. They publish this sort of stuff all the time. Also similar historic P/CF and P/B metrics. Only sell-side research I read.

tomwheeler at Ask.Metafilter.Com Visit the source

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Well, this might take a while, but you can get a stock's historic P/E on http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/interchart/interchart.asp?symb=DELL (on the left menu bar, go to "lower indicators" and then select P/E ratio". You could adjust the chart period to quarterly or monthly, then build an aggregate for an industry by taking the major players who account for ~90% of market share (depending on industry). On a general note, formulating composite earnings multiples is part science and part art -- like it or not, there is a lot of wiggle room.

fourstar

Alternatively, you could try to find someone who has access to http://www.capitaliq.com/main.asp

fourstar

Marking all three as best answers, because they collectively explain where to get complete (for pay) data and also how to piece it together for free.

tomwheeler

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