I am a fundamental investor so I look for mismatch between market price and the intrinsic value of a company.  This will require time and effort to carry out a fundamental analysis and valuation of the company.

In practice I would take about a week to carry out such an analysis for a new company. This is because I go through the past 10 years of annual reports reading the management discussions and analysis as well as look at industry reports and annual reports of its competitors

In order to ensure that my time is spent well, I will screen for potential companies. One quick and dirty screen is to compare the ROE trend with the share price trend as shown in the example below for NPC, a Bursa Plantation company.

You can see that while NPC’s ROE was volatile and had improved over the past few years, the market price was relatively stable. Better still, it did not go up over the past few years despite the better ROE.

I am not a trader but I do know that some traders combine technical analysis with fundamental analysis to get better insights. If I was trader, I would think this ROE vs share price trend can provide some food for thought. For example, does the chart mean that it time to go in and wait for the crowd to realize that there is better performance?

If you want to know more about whether traders can make money with fundamentals go to “Can you make money trading with fundamentals?”