Nifty P/E and Dividend Yield

This week lets look at 2 interesting ratios Price to Earning Ratio and the Dividend Yield of the Nifty. I have plotted the graphs from 1999-2010 taken from the NSE site.

1. Price - Earning Ratio.
This is nothing but the Market Price divided by the Earnings per Share or the Profits made by the company. This helps us identify how expensive the market is.
In the bubble peaks made by the market in 2000 and 2008, it had touched almost 28. In the bottoms made in Jan 04 and Mar 09 it was near 11 and Sept 01 around 12. Whenever the market has tumbled from P/E of 28 or rallied from 10-12 P/E it was a major top or bottom.


The market is currently around a P/E of 22.05. In Feb 01 when market tumbled from a P/E of around current levels it came to a P/E of around 13 again. On subsequent occasions it stopped its fall in a range from 12 to 15.
Now the EPS is Rs 234, after another 2 sets of quarterly results by July, assuming a gain of 6 pc, the eps should around Rs 250.
This gives a Nifty range between 3000 and 3750. This would coincide a retracement of 50 to 76 % of the rise. The figures would look speculative right now but the graph gives a perspective of P/E range.

2. Dividend Yield
Dividend yield is nothing but if we take dividend as a percentage of market price.High dividend yield means the stock price is low and vice-versa. This is inversely proportional to price of Nifty. When nifty is at highs, dividend yield is at lows and vice versa.


In 2000, the yield bottomed at 0.62, in 2008 at 0.88 and currently we are 0.93. Remember in 2000, we were in the dot com boom, hence IT stocks which give low dividend compared to price were at the top. For a dividend yield of 0.88, market would trade at around 5550 or 18500. We are not very far from that.
The yield tops out at 1.7 to 2. The dividend earning now is at 4919.Assuming a earning of Rs 5200 by the time we bottom out, Nifty would come to a range of around 3100

Both the above studies, simply indicate we may be near the top and give a range of the fall to follow.Of course, we could simply discard the 8 year cycle go on to make another peak at Nifty P/E of 28 translating to Nifty 7000 and then crash big time.

Lots to ponder about. Its your money, make informed decisions.