With traditional discounted cash-flow analysis, you forecast cash flows
to estimate a stock’s value. Expectations investing reverses the process. It
starts with a rich, underutilized source of information—the stock
price—and determines the cash-flow expectations that justify that
price. Those expectations, in turn, serve as the benchmark for buy, sell,
or hold decisions.
Before we hike too far down the expectations investing path, we
need to be certain that we are tracking the right expectations. We must
therefore answer an essential question: Do prices in financial markets
truly reflect expected future cash flows?
THE RIGHT EXPECTATIONS
We return to first principles ...