Börsennotizbuch

Wir befinden uns am Ende der US-amerikanischen Berichtsaison und etwa in der Mitte der europäischen. Berichtet werden im Grunde genommen gute bis sehr gute Zahlen. In den USA werden die Gewinne mit einer (knapp darüber oder knapp darunter) zweistelligen Rate gewachsen sein. In Europa – das gleiche Bild. Somit halten die Gewinne mit den deutlichen Steigerungen der Aktienkurse Schritt. Die Preis-Gewinn-Verhältnisse der wichtigsten Indizes der Welt sind nicht gestiegen; die Aktien bleiben mit KGVs von ca. 15 (Europa) und ca.16-17 (USA) nicht besonders teuer (10-jährige-Anleihen-KGV Europa ca. 25, USA ca. 21).

(Für die Berechnung der KGVs können unterschiedliche Gewinne bzw. Gewinnschätzungen genommen werden).

Ich bin bekanntlich bullish eingestellt, dennoch sollte man, erstens, nicht blind auf KGVs als Bewertungsgröße vertrauen, und, zweitens, die Entwicklungen auf keinen Fall leichtgläubig (linear) in die Zukunft fortsetzen.

Zu diesen beiden Punkten möchte ich aus dem Monatlichen Bulletin der EZB (Index) (Februar 2007) die Grafik oben und eine Passage zitieren:

A company’s profitability can be measured in several ways. Reported earnings is the broadest and most recognised performance measure, since it includes, in principle, all income, expenses and charges. Another performance measure is cash flow from operations, which is the net inflow of liquid funds generated from a firm’s operations and irrevocably secured during the reference period. Chart B plots the price-earnings ratio based on reported earnings and the price-cash flow ratio for the MSCI EMU stock price index. For most of the time since the early 1990s, the price-cash flow ratio has co-moved relatively closely with the price-earnings ratio. In recent years, however, developments in the two ratios have been quite different. While the strong stock price advances have led to an only moderate increase in the price-earnings ratio, the price-cash flow ratio has risen relatively strongly.

This differing behaviour in the two ratios in part reflects developments in certain non-cash expenses, namely amortisation of intangibles and depreciation, which are deducted from the cash flow from operations when calculating reported earnings. According to individual euro area company data, depreciation has gradually declined in relative terms in recent years. As a result, reported earnings showed stronger increases than operating cash flows in this period. At the same time, the introduction in 2005 of new accounting standards in the euro area, the International Financial Reporting Standards (IFRS), could have boosted reported earnings through its shift in the focus of accounts from historical costs to “fair-value accounting”. In general, this shift tends to make profits more volatile than in the past. In particular, it might lead to higher reported earnings during economic “good times” and lower reported earnings in “bad times”, the former of which might be relevant in the present context.

To conclude, the strong stock market performance in the euro area in recent years may to a large extent be related to the (better than expected) development of earnings. Some caution is, however, warranted in such an explanation due to the fact that cash flow from operations, a measure that tends to better reflect companies’ profit-enerating capacity, has in recent years grown more slowly than reported earnings.

European Central Bank, Monthly Bulletin February [PDF], s. 34.