Price to Free Cash Flow Backtest

Another favorite valuation ratios used by value investors is the price to free-cash-flow ratio (P/FCF). Instead of using earnings, this valuation ratio focuses on the cash flow statement results. It tries to approximate the value based on the theory that stock intrinsic value is based on the future free cash flows available to owners. Free cash flow is also closely related to what Warren Buffett describes as “owner’s earnings”, but instead of using maintenance capital expenditures, it uses current capital expenditures.

The price-to-free-cash-flow ratio for this backtest is calculated as follows:

P/FCF = current share price / trailing twelve month free cash flow per share
where free cash flow is equal to operating cash flow minus capital expenditures (CAPEX)

The disadvantages of this ratio is that it is not forward looking and free cash flows can be much more volatile than earnings, especially if there infrequent large capital expenditures that can impact the trailing twelve month free cash flows in the denominator of this ratio. The advantages of this ratio are that you do not have to forecast earnings or rely on analyst estimates and free cash flow numbers often avoid accounting issues with accruals that are used to smooth earnings. Free cash flows can often be more representative of what owners might be able to extract out of the company.

I decided to run a backtest of this ratio from January 2, 2000 to December 31, 2020 using annual rebalancing and dividing the universe of stocks into quintiles starting from highest P/FCF ratio to lowest (cheapest) P/FCF. I used my standard method of backtesting stock fundamentals on Portfolio123 that I described in an earlier article. The average excess returns for each quintile are displayed in the chart below. As expected, stocks with the highest P/FCF ratio in the first 20th percentile underperform the S&P 500 equal weight index by 0.87%. Stocks above the 80th percentile (5th quintile) with the lowest forward PE produce an average annual excess return of 2.39%. There is a fairly linear pattern to average excess returns as P/FCF decreases from the 1st quintile to the 5th quintile. However, the increase in average excess returns flattens out after the 3rd quintile.

The full details of the backtest are in the table below.

Reviewing the average excess returns, we can see that the P/FCF ratio outperforms the PE ratio we tested last week and the forward PE ratio for the top quintile. The 1th quintile average excess returns were a bit lower for the PE ratio (-2.08%) than the P/FCF ratio (-0.87%).  I also noticed that the annualized return from January 2, 2000 to December 31, 2020 was 11.36% for the 5th quintile, which is lower than the annualized returns for the 4th quintile (11.36%), but only by a negligible amount.

It is interesting to note that the top quintile (lowest P/FC ratios) underperformed the bottom quintile over the past four years similar to the performance of the PE ratio and forward PE ratio. That seems consistent with the recent chatter on social media that value investing is dead. I’m not so sure I buy into that, but I just wanted to show you how that’s played out in the numbers.

Portfolio123 recently added several new valuation ratios including this revised price to free cash flow ratio. I’ll be backtesting several of those along with some old time standard valuation ratios over the next couple of weeks. Be sure to subscribe or follow along to get the latest updates.