When a valuation touches your money, you deserve to see how it was made. Here is exactly how Lemma Analysis calculates what a stock is worth — the method, the assumptions, the data, and the limits.
Our core valuation engine is a discounted cash flow (DCF) model. The idea is simple to state: a company is worth the cash it will hand its owners over its life, counted in today’s money. The work is in getting there honestly. We run the same seven steps for every company, and you can see and change the inputs at each one.
We start from the company’s most recent revenue and grow it forward, year by year, at a growth rate seeded from its own history and kept inside a sane range.
A target operating margin converts revenue into operating income; a tax rate then leaves the after-tax operating profit a business actually keeps.
From that profit we subtract the reinvestment a company needs — capital expenditure and the change in working capital — to arrive at the free cash flow available to all investors.
A dollar next year is worth less than a dollar today. Every projected year of free cash flow is discounted back to the present using WACC — the blended return debt and equity holders require.
A business does not stop after the explicit forecast. A terminal value captures every cash flow past the final year, assuming a modest perpetual growth rate, and is discounted back like any other year.
The present value of the forecast years plus the present value of the terminal value equals the enterprise value — what the whole operating business is worth today.
Subtract debt, add back excess cash, and you have the equity value that belongs to shareholders. Divide by shares outstanding for an intrinsic value per share you can compare to the market price.
A DCF turns on eight assumptions. Rather than hard-code them, we seed each from real history — the company’s own record where possible, its sector where the company alone isn’t enough, and the global economy for the long run — and bound every one to a sensible range so no single slider can drift into nonsense. The source label below shows where each default is drawn from.
How fast sales are assumed to grow each forecast year, seeded from the company’s own multi-year history.
The share of revenue that becomes operating profit, anchored to what the business has historically achieved.
The effective tax applied to operating profit, based on the rate the company has actually paid.
The discount rate — the blended return investors require. Estimated from sector-level risk and capital costs.
The modest perpetual growth assumed forever after the forecast, held near long-run economic growth.
Capital reinvestment as a share of revenue, drawn from the company’s historical spending.
The cash tied up in operations as the business grows, scaled from its own history.
Annual buybacks or dilution, so per-share value reflects a changing share base.
The discount rate, WACC, deserves its own note — it is the return investors require, and it moves the answer more than almost anything else. We break down how it is built on the WACC and free cash flow glossary pages.
Market prices and fundamental data are sourced from established financial-data providers and companies’ own regulatory filings. We do not invent numbers, and we do not launder opinions as data. Every input to a model is a fact drawn from those sources, and every output is built from inputs you can inspect.
Established market-data providers for prices and quotes, and audited company filings for the financial statements behind every assumption.
Prices refresh through the trading day; fundamentals update as companies report. Valuations are computed on the latest data available at the moment you run them.
Every assumption is anchored to historical averages and bounded to a sane range, so defaults stay defensible — and you can always override them and see the effect.
Honesty about what a model cannot do is part of trusting what it can. A DCF is a disciplined way to think, not a crystal ball — here is where it falls short, and how we handle it.
A DCF cannot see the future. Change the growth rate or the discount rate and the answer moves — which is exactly why every assumption is visible and editable rather than hidden.
Two inputs dominate the result: the discount rate and the perpetual growth rate. We show a bear/base/bull range and a WACC × growth sensitivity grid so you read a spread, never a single false-precision number.
A DCF works best for mature, cash-generative businesses. Early-stage companies with no stable free cash flow, and banks or insurers whose economics don’t fit the model, are poorly served by it — and other lenses fit them better.
Recessions, regime changes, disruption and outright shocks sit outside any forecast. A DCF frames a base case; it is not a prediction, and nothing here is investment advice.
A stock is a claim on a business, and a business is worth the cash it can return to its owners. DCF is the one method that values a company on exactly that — its own cash flows — rather than on what a crowd is willing to pay for a similar-looking peer today. It is the framework serious analysts reach for because it forces the real questions into the open: how fast can this company grow, how profitably, and what is that future cash worth now.
Just as important, a DCF makes its assumptions arguable. A multiple hands you a number with the reasoning hidden inside it; a DCF lays every driver on the table where you can challenge it. For investors who want to understand a valuation rather than borrow one, that transparency is the whole point.
DCF is our backbone, not our blinders. Each of these methods answers a slightly different question, and we treat them as cross-checks — a second opinion on the number a DCF produces.
Price a company against peers on ratios like P/E or EV/EBITDA. Fast and market-aware, but it inherits whatever the market is mispricing.
EV/EBITDA →Value a stock purely on the dividends it pays. Clean for stable dividend payers, but silent on companies that reinvest instead of distributing.
P/E ratio →Value the business by what it owns net of what it owes. A useful floor for asset-heavy firms, but it ignores the earning power of the assets.
Book value →With a discounted cash flow (DCF) model. We project a company’s free cash flow forward, discount every year back to today at its cost of capital, add a terminal value for the years beyond the forecast, and bridge from enterprise value to an intrinsic value per share. Every assumption behind that number is seeded from the company’s own history and shown to you so you can inspect and change it.
Market prices and fundamental data come from established financial-data providers and companies’ own regulatory filings. Every derived figure — a valuation, a ratio, a score — is built from those inputs, and where a number depends on an assumption we surface the assumption rather than bury it.
A DCF is a disciplined estimate, not a prediction. Its accuracy depends entirely on its assumptions, which is why ours are prefilled from real financial history, bounded to sane ranges, and shown as a bear/base/bull spread with a sensitivity grid — so you read a range of outcomes instead of a single false-precision figure.
Multiples price a company relative to its peers, so they carry along whatever the market is currently getting wrong. A DCF values the business from first principles — the cash it can actually return to owners — and forces every assumption into the open. We use DCF as the backbone and cross-check it against multiples.
DCF works best for mature, cash-generative businesses with a reasonably predictable model. It is a poor fit for early-stage companies without stable free cash flow, and for banks and insurers whose economics don’t match the framework — for those, comparable multiples or asset-based methods are more appropriate.
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