History
Robert D. Coleman's Evolution of Stock Pricing notes that the invention of double-entry bookkeeping in the fourteenth century led to company valuations being based upon ratios such as price per unit of earnings (from the income statement), price per unit of net worth (from the balance sheet) and price per unit of cash flow (from the funds statement). The next advance was to price individual shares rather than whole companies. A price/dividends ratio began to be used. Following this, the next stage was the use of discounted cash flows, based on the time value of money, to estimate the intrinsic value of stock.
Read more about this topic: Share Price
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“The visual is sorely undervalued in modern scholarship. Art history has attained only a fraction of the conceptual sophistication of literary criticism.... Drunk with self-love, criticism has hugely overestimated the centrality of language to western culture. It has failed to see the electrifying sign language of images.”
—Camille Paglia (b. 1947)