5 Best PEG-Driven Value Stocks to Boost Your Portfolio Returns

Urmimala Biswas
6 min read

In This Article:

In a market dealing with external shocks, value investing is fast gaining popularity. The success of value investors like Warren Buffett underscores this. Buffett and his business partner, Charlie Munger, managed to register more than 19.8% CAGR for Berkshire Hathaway from 1965 through 2023. This compares favorably with a 10.2% rise of the S&P 500 Index during the same period. In this article, we discuss how the price/earnings to growth (PEG) ratio can become an efficient yardstick in picking the best value stocks.

Several stocks that have surged significantly in the recent past have shown the overwhelming success of this pure-play investment strategy. Here, we discuss five such stocks — Stride, Inc. LRN, Virtu Financial VIRT, The Travelers Companies TRV, Coastal Financial CCB and Gold Fields Limited GFI.

More on Value Investing

While searching for a suitable investment option, value investors with a varied risk appetite are unlikely to consider the PEG ratio among several other popular metrics like price/earnings (P/E), price/sales and price/book value (P/B).

This is because they often find this ratio complicated, considering the limitations in calculating a stock's future earnings growth potential. Yardsticks, such as dividend yield, P/E or P/B, are commonly used to single out stocks trading at a discount.

However, while not taking into account the growth potential of a stock, these ratios might end up convincing us to invest in stocks that are at a discount just because of their poor show. This might often lead to “value traps” — a situation when these value picks start to underperform over the long run as temporary problems, which, once pulled down the share price, turn out to be persistent. In such a case, even if you buy a stock at less than its fair value, you might still end up paying more. And here comes the importance of this not-so-popular but crucial value investing metric, the PEG ratio.

PEG Ratio at a Glance

The PEG ratio is defined as (Price/ Earnings)/Earnings Growth Rate

A low PEG ratio is always better for value investors.

While P/E alone fails to identify a true value stock, PEG helps find the intrinsic value of a stock.

There are some drawbacks to using the PEG ratio. It doesn’t consider the very common situation of changing growth rates, such as the forecast of the first three years at a very high growth rate, followed by a sustainable but lower growth rate over the long term.

Hence, PEG-based investing can turn out to be even more rewarding if some other relevant parameters are also taken into consideration.

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