Calculators

Every calculator on the site, grouped by the question it answers — from what a business is worth to how much of it to buy.

Every calculator on the site, grouped by the question it answers rather than alphabetically. All eighteen run entirely in your browser: there is no account, no submission button, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

The grouping follows the order in which the questions actually arise when you sit down with a company. What is it worth, what rate should I discount that at, what am I paying for each dollar it earns, is the dividend safe, and how much should I buy. Tools that answer the same question are kept together, because that is how they get used in practice -- nobody reaches for a dividend model and a position-size calculator in the same breath.

If you are here to learn the method rather than to run a number, the guides are the better entry point. This page assumes you already know roughly what you are looking for and need to find the tool that does it.

Choosing between them

The five families below are not a taxonomy for its own sake. A discounted cash flow and a P/E multiple are answering genuinely different questions, and reaching for one where the other belongs is the most common way a valuation goes quietly wrong. The families are arranged so you can tell which is which before you start typing.

Cash-flow models assume a future and discount it. They are the only family that produces a value rather than a comparison, which is also what makes them the most fragile: move the discount rate or the terminal growth rate by a single percentage point and the answer can move by a third. That sensitivity is not a defect to be tuned away, it is the actual output of the analysis, and it is the reason a range is more honest than a single figure.

Multiples describe a price, not a value. They work on businesses that do not generate free cash flow, they take seconds, and they say nothing about what a company is worth. A stock on twelve times earnings is not cheap. It is on twelve times earnings, and whether that is cheap depends on what the business will do next -- which is the question the multiple declined to ask.

Risk and sizing tools are the ones people skip. They are not valuation at all; they are the bridge between an estimate and a decision. An estimate that is right and a position that is three times too large still loses money, and no amount of work on the first half repairs the second.

Whichever you pick, run a second method from a different family before you act on the number. Where two unrelated methods agree, you have learned something. Where they disagree, the disagreement localises the assumption that is actually doing the work -- and that is more useful than either number on its own.

What a business is worth

Five tools that produce a value rather than a comparison. They differ in what they assume about the future -- a stable dividend, two phases of growth, or a stream of cash flow that ignores the dividend question entirely -- so picking the one that matches how the business actually returns cash is the whole decision.

The rate, the discount and the size of the bet

Three tools that sit either side of a valuation. WACC sets the rate you discount at, margin of safety converts an estimate into a price you would be willing to pay, and position size decides how much of it you actually buy. Skipping the third is the most expensive of the three omissions.

What the price is paying for

What the market is paying relative to earnings, book value or operating profit -- plus the denominator three of them depend on. A multiple answers a question about price, not about value, and it cannot tell you what anything is worth.

Dividends, and whether they are safe

Two numbers that only mean something together. Yield tells you what a dividend pays today; payout ratio and its cash-flow cousin tell you whether the company can keep paying it. A yield quoted without the second number is a sales pitch rather than an analysis.

Growth, and what a return was made of

Measuring what an investment actually returned over a period, and taking that return apart to see where it came from. Price appreciation and dividends arrive from different sources and behave differently in a downturn, so the split matters more than the total.

The order they are meant to be used in

This site runs one worked example throughout. Stetron Industries generates $100m of free cash flow on 50m diluted shares, carries $200m of net debt, earns $2.60 per share and trades at $37.60. The same figures appear on every calculator page here, which means you can move through the whole chain without re-learning a new set of numbers at each step.

In tool terms the chain runs WACC for the discount rate, then a valuation, then margin of safety to convert the estimate into a price you would actually pay, then position size to decide how much of it to own. Reverse DCF sits in the middle as the sanity check: it takes the market price as given and solves for the growth rate implied by it, and the answer is frequently higher than anything you would have written down yourself.

The usual failure is starting at the end. Someone forms a view, sizes the position first, and works backwards to a valuation that supports it -- at which point the model has stopped being an input into the decision and become a justification for it. Running the chain in order is slower and considerably less comfortable.

What these tools will not do

Where the reasoning lives

Each calculator page explains its own formula and the assumptions it rests on. What it does not do is argue for when one method should be preferred over another, which is the question that decides whether the arithmetic is worth anything. That argument is in the guides, and every one of them is listed here: