What is the value of Common Stock?
This is not easy. This is a mess. Think about it. What is the value of a share of stock in a specific company? In one sense it is the price the stock trades at. Both the buyer and seller agree to exchange the stock at that price. We assume that they are both rational people and both know something about the company and its future plans and profit potential. So, yes, that is one method: check the price of the stock in the paper or on the internet. But that’s pretty darn easy. It’s not really finance. It’s more like reading. And I don’t know if you realize this or not, but they don’t give Nobel Prizes for reading. So there are other ways of doing stock valuation too. The Gordon Growth Formula, also known as The Constant Growth Formula assumes that a company grows at a constant rate forever. This, by the way, is impossible. I mean, it can’t grow forever. You know, if a company doubles in size every 5 years, pretty soon every single person in the world is their customer and then they can’t
