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WSJ: What Your Need to Know About Price Earnings Ratios

By SIMON CONSTABLE

The price of a stock doesn't tell you anything about whether it's a good deal, but the so-called price/earnings ratio can help. The trick is figuring out which P/E ratio to use.

Obviously, just because one stock is $200 a share and another $12 doesn't mean the latter is cheaper in terms of what you're getting. For a better gauge, you need to calculate what you are paying for each dollar of company earnings. Hence, the P/E ratio, derived by dividing the price of the stock by one year of per-share earnings. So if one stock has a P/E of 12 and the other of 10, the latter is cheaper. Read original story here.

By SIMON CONSTABLE



Friday we got news that jobs remain scarce in the U.S. Unemployment is still hovering around 8 percent but that doesn’t really give any sense of just how bad things are for the vast majority of Americans. Thursday last week I heard a presentation by Professor Matthew Slaughter of Dartmouth’s Tuck school of business. It was sobering to say the least. First he pointed out: it will take until 2020 for the economy to get back the number of jobs we had at the beginning of the great recession. It gets worse. Even if you have a job, your earnings are being eroded. Median pay adjusted for inflation has fallen since 1989. It should be a reminder to anyone who thinks we’re on the road to recovery that it will be a long road.