Investors often treat reported earnings as the "yield" of equities due to the wide availability of reported earnings and the ubiquitous Price-to-Earnings ratio, however this can be a misleading measure of the actual economic value created for shareholders if earnings are overstated during cyclical upturns and the subsequent adjustment during downturns is reported as one-time items or direct-to-equity adjustments. I propose an alternate measure, a sum of the change in reported book value and dividends paid out as a proxy for the economic value created in a period.
Over the last 22 years, every $1 of S&P500 reported earnings has only led to $0.76 of dividends + book-value gains. If you exclude 2008, the year in which reported earnings and the alternate measure previously described differ most, every $1.00 of earnings generates only about $0.84 of economic value to investors. The sample, admittedly limited in size, was obtained using Bloomberg. Bold red line indicates a slope of 1, lighter black line is a simple OLS regression trend-line with no intercept.
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| Change in BV + dividends vs reported earnings |
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| Change in BV + dividends vs reported earnings ex-2008 |
EDIT: A reader helpfully pointed out that I left-out the effect of buy-backs, which accrue to the price of shares but are functionally equivalent to dividends. Lacking a time-series of total buy backs, I can't correct the post to include that. Additionally, any buy-back made at a P/B multiple of > 1 would dilute BV per share. Assuming book value is understated is a reasonable assumption for companies where marginal investment turns out to be profitable or during inflationary periods where the nominal value of capital stock is understated as a result. My apologies for these careless omissions. I will not remove the post, but I think it is worth noting that these omissions make the prior analysis basically useless.
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