Who is behind this
ValueCalc is built and maintained by Lin Hui, a private investor who works valuation problems by hand — discounted cash flow models sketched out on paper, the same arithmetic shown on these pages. He is also the person who answers the email, so a correction you send actually reaches whoever wrote the page. The methodology and editorial standards page sets out how the examples are built and what the site will not publish.
The motivation is unglamorous. Most free calculators online either hide the formula, return a number without stating its assumptions, or sit behind a registration form. This site tries to do the opposite: show the arithmetic, name the limits, and let you check the work yourself.
Lin Hui is not a registered investment adviser and does not manage money for others. The calculators published here are the models used personally, put in the open in the hope they are useful to someone else.
What this site is
ValueCalc is a small, independent collection of free stock valuation calculators. The idea is narrow and deliberate: give individual investors the same arithmetic tools that professionals use, without a paywall, a signup form, or a data-harvesting backend.
Every calculator runs in your browser. Nothing you type is sent to a server, which means there is no account to create and no portfolio data for us to hold — or to lose.
Why free
Valuation tools are usually locked inside expensive terminals or buried behind registration walls. The underlying math, however, has been public for decades: Graham's margin of safety, Gordon's growth model, discounted cash flow, DuPont decomposition. None of it requires a subscription.
The site is funded by advertising. That keeps it free, and it means we have no incentive to steer you toward any particular stock, broker or product — we do not sell data and we do not run a newsletter.
How the calculators are built
Each tool implements a standard, published formula with no hidden adjustments. Before release, results are checked by hand against the worked examples shown on each page, to confirm the arithmetic behaves as expected. Formulas are shown on every page, so you can verify the method rather than take it on trust.
Where a model has known limits, the page says so. The Gordon Growth model, for instance, is inappropriate for a company that does not pay a dividend, and a reverse DCF is meaningless without positive free cash flow. We would rather explain the boundary than let a number look more authoritative than it is.
Editorial standards
Three rules govern what gets published here. First, every formula must be one you could look up in a textbook and reproduce by hand — no proprietary adjustments, no "secret sauce" weighting. Second, every worked example runs on the same hypothetical company — Stetron Industries, whose figures are invented but internally consistent — so that assumptions accumulate as you move from one page to the next instead of resetting each time. The numbers are deliberately untidy, because a calculator that only works on round inputs is not much use. Third, where a model is easy to misuse, the page says so plainly instead of burying the caveat.
Those rules occasionally mean a page is shorter than it could be, or that a tool refuses to flatter a bad input. That is deliberate. A valuation tool's job is to make your assumptions visible, not to make them look good.
What we are not
We are not a broker, a fund, or a registered investment adviser. We do not publish buy or sell recommendations, price targets or stock picks. The calculators produce arithmetic from the inputs you provide — they do not form a view on any company. Please read the full disclaimer before using any output for a decision.
Accuracy and corrections
We aim for correctness and test against known examples, but errors are possible. If you spot a formula behaving wrongly, or an explanation that is imprecise, please tell us — corrections are made quickly and openly.
Scope and coverage
The calculators are currency-agnostic — they work on whatever figure you type in, whether that is dollars, euros or renminbi, because the arithmetic does not care about the unit. Every worked example uses the same hypothetical company, Stetron Industries. It is not a real business and nothing here is a recommendation; carrying one set of invented assumptions across the whole site is what lets you follow the reasoning from one page to the next.
Coverage is deliberately narrow — equity valuation, and the ratios that feed into it. There are no options pricers, no technical indicators, no stock screeners and no portfolio trackers here, and no plans to add them. One thing done properly is worth more than a dashboard full of half-working widgets.
Contact
The fastest way to reach us is hello@stockvalcalc.com. Bug reports, calculator requests and corrections are all welcome.