Value 40: Cheap on Book and Earnings
Builds price-to-book and price-to-earnings from reported consolidated financials, blends both into one cheapness score, and holds the 40 cheapest profitable companies in the Nifty 500. Equal weighted, rebalanced quarterly.
Why this is expected to work
Value is the oldest documented cross-sectional premium — Fama and French (1992) built HML on book-to-market, and Lakonishok, Shleifer and Vishny (1994) argued the premium is behavioural rather than compensation for risk: investors extrapolate poor recent performance too far into the future, so cheap stocks are systematically over-discounted. Two multiples are used rather than one because each fails differently. Price-to-book is meaningless for asset-light businesses, and price-to-earnings is meaningless when earnings are near zero. Requiring positive profit before ranking removes the largest single source of fake cheapness, which is a loss-making company whose P/E is undefined or negative. Note that value has endured multi-year droughts — 2015 to 2020 globally was one — so this is the template that most rewards looking at the drawdown chart, not the headline return.
How the pipeline works
NIFTY500 constituent
Keeps rows where nifty500_member == 1
nifty500_member == 1 Liquid: traded > Rs 3 cr/day
Keeps rows where turnover > 30000000
turnover > 30000000 Profitable last full year
Keeps rows where net_profit_annual_consolidated > 0
net_profit_annual_consolidated > 0 Price to book
Computes price_to_book = market_cap / total_equity_annual_consolidated
market_cap / total_equity_annual_consolidated Price to earnings
Computes price_to_earnings = market_cap / net_profit_annual_consolidated
market_cap / net_profit_annual_consolidated Sane book multiple
Keeps rows where price_to_book > 0
price_to_book > 0 Cheapness composite
Blends 2 factors into value_score
40 cheapest
Selects the top 40 by value_score
What this template teaches
- Deriving valuation ratios from raw fundamentals
- Multi-factor blending with equal factor weights
- Why a profitability gate precedes a value screen
Value Screens That Survive Contact With Indian Data
Price-to-book and price-to-earnings both break in predictable ways. Using two multiples with a profitability gate in front removes most of the fake cheapness a naive value screen collects.
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