This is the Graham toolbox: metrics that price a company against its assets rather than its earnings. The logic is older and blunter than any DCF - a business is worth at least what its parts would fetch, and occasionally the market sells you those parts for less than liquidation value. Those cases are rare, usually ugly, and historically very profitable.

All figures in the ValueMap screener are trailing twelve months (TTM) unless noted.

Graham Net-Net

What it is: The Graham net-net: current assets minus total liabilities, a conservative liquidation estimate that values every fixed asset - plants, brands, the operating business itself - at zero. When a stock trades below this figure, the market is selling you the company for less than the cash-out value of its most liquid assets alone.

Why value investors care: Graham’s actual discipline was stricter than merely trading below the figure: he bought at two-thirds of net current asset value, stacking a margin of safety on top of an already conservative liquidation number. At that price, even a mediocre outcome - a wind-down, a takeover, a partial recovery - tends to pay. One data warning that matters here more than anywhere: the data source (FMP) sometimes scales this figure inconsistently across companies, so treat it strictly as a screening and ranking signal, and verify against the actual balance sheet before acting on any single name.

Graham Number

What it is: The Graham Number: the square root of 22.5 times earnings per share times book value per share. It is Graham’s ceiling for a defensive investor’s purchase price, baking his two limits into one figure - no more than 15x earnings and no more than 1.5x book, since 15 x 1.5 = 22.5.

Why value investors care: A stock trading below its Graham Number passes both the PE <= 15 and PB <= 1.5 tests simultaneously, in a single screener column. Note the square root: it is only defined when EPS and book value are both positive, so this field is NULL for lossmakers by construction - absence here means “unprofitable,” not “missing data.” The honest limitation is that it is a deliberately conservative anchor: it will exclude nearly every great growth business ever listed, and a company can clear it while still being a bad business. That is the point - it screens for cheapness, and quality is your job.

Book Value Per Share

What it is: Book value per share: shareholders’ equity divided by shares outstanding - the accounting net worth of the company, sliced per share. It is what each share would claim if the balance sheet were settled at stated values, and it is the denominator that feeds the PB ratio.

Why value investors care: Set it against the price and you have PB; watch it compound over a decade and you have a rough proxy for intrinsic value creation - the metric Buffett reported on the first page of Berkshire’s annual letter for fifty years. A company that grows BVPS at 10% a year while paying a dividend is building value regardless of what the stock does that quarter. The trap is composition: equity stuffed with goodwill from acquisitions is not the same as equity built from retained cash, though the number looks identical. Tangible book, below, is the cross-check.

NCAV

What it is: NCAV stands for net current asset value: current assets minus total liabilities, the raw dollar figure behind net-net investing. It asks what would remain if you liquidated only the current assets - cash, receivables, inventory - paid off every liability, and valued the fixed assets at zero.

Why value investors care: NCAV is negative for most healthy large caps, and that is completely normal - a mature business is not supposed to hoard current assets exceeding all its obligations. The metric only becomes interesting when it is positive and large relative to market cap, which happens mostly among small, neglected, or frightening stocks - and that is precisely the hunting ground. When a market cap sits below a positive NCAV, you are being paid to take the operating business. The caveat is that such stocks are cheap for reasons, usually visible ones; the classic defense is buying a basket rather than betting on any single name.

Price To Fair Value

What it is: Price to fair value: the share price divided by FMP’s modeled fair-value estimate, typically derived from a discounted cash flow. Below 1 means the data provider’s model sees the stock trading at a discount to its estimated intrinsic value.

Why value investors care: Below 1 is nominally cheap, and below 0.7 is where a classic margin of safety would begin - if you believed the model. You should not, at least not on faith: a third party’s fair value is an opinion, not a fact, and it inherits every assumption about growth and discount rates baked into it, where small changes move the output violently. Its real use is as a cross-check: when it disagrees sharply with the asset-based metrics on this page, that disagreement always has a reason worth finding. Use it to generate questions, never to answer them.

Tangible Book/Share

What it is: Tangible book value per share: shareholders’ equity minus goodwill and intangibles, divided by shares outstanding. It is book value with the accounting entries cut out - the version of net worth a liquidator or a bank regulator would recognize, and the harder floor under the stock.

Why value investors care: For serial acquirers the gap between book and tangible book is enormous, and this is the honest number: goodwill is the memory of prices paid, not an asset you can sell. A stock trading below tangible book deserves attention the way sub-book stocks did in Graham’s day. It is also the standard lens for valuing banks - price to tangible book around 1 is the reference line the whole sector trades against, above it for quality franchises, below it when the market doubts the loan book. The caveat cuts both ways: some intangibles, like a franchise or a patent portfolio, have real value the metric throws away.