Where can I find the historical PE ratio for a given stock market sector or industry?
February 23, 2008 8:32 AM Subscribe
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 historical prices page tells you what the stock sold for on a given day. The competitors page 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?
Best answer: Well, this might take a while, but you can get a stock's historic P/E on BigCharts.com (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.
posted by fourstar at 9:53 AM on February 23, 2008
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.
posted by fourstar at 9:53 AM on February 23, 2008
Best answer: Alternatively, you could try to find someone who has access to Capital IQ
posted by fourstar at 9:55 AM on February 23, 2008
posted by fourstar at 9:55 AM on February 23, 2008
Response by poster: 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.
posted by tomwheeler at 9:21 AM on February 24, 2008
posted by tomwheeler at 9:21 AM on February 24, 2008
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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.
posted by JPD at 8:54 AM on February 23, 2008