PFG

Productivity of the asset base — how efficiently the firm converts assets into sales. Combined with net margin, this is the core of the DuPont decomposition: ROA = net margin × asset turnover. Two businesses can land at the same ROA via opposite paths: thin-margin / high-turnover (Costco, supermarkets) vs. fat-margin / low-turnover (luxury, software).

Sanity-check on earnings quality — a ratio of 1.0 means every dollar of GAAP earnings shows up as free cash flow. Persistently below 1.0 means working-capital build or capex is consuming earnings; persistently above 1.0 is unusual and may flag accounting conservatism (heavy non-cash charges) or a one-time release. Trend matters more than absolute level.

Easier to compare than operating margin across firms with very different leverage and depreciation profiles, because it adds D&A back. Software platforms commonly run above 30%; capital-light service businesses cluster around 20%; capital-intensive industrials sit below 15%. The weakness: ignores the cash needed to maintain the asset base — pair with FCF margin for a complete profitability picture.

First-line profitability measure — how much revenue is left after the direct cost of producing it. Stable or rising gross margin signals pricing power and low input-cost exposure; falling gross margin is one of the earliest reliable signals of competitive pressure or commodity-input squeeze. Industry context is everything: 30% gross margin is excellent for a grocery chain and disastrous for a software company.

Operating margin minus interest, tax, and below-the-line items. Useful but noisier than operating margin: tax rate changes, debt-service shifts, and one-time items can move net margin year-over-year even when the operating business is unchanged. Always pair with operating margin and FCF margin — divergence between them is a tell about leverage, tax structure, or earnings quality.

Pre-capex version of cash conversion: compares operating cash flow directly to net income, before subtracting capex. Numbers persistently below 1.0 suggest accruals are doing the work (revenue recognised before cash collected, or expenses deferred). Numbers above 1.0 are typically driven by D&A exceeding true economic depreciation — a mild positive sign but not always meaningful.

Captures the leverage between revenue and operating profit — the core test of whether a business converts sales into income at the operating level. Independent of capital structure (excludes interest) and tax-jurisdiction noise. Trend matters as much as level: an improving operating margin indicates pricing power or operational efficiency gains; a falling margin signals input-cost pressure, wage inflation, or competitive erosion.

Capital-efficiency measure that ignores how the assets are financed. Useful for comparing within a sector but heavily biased by industry — banks and utilities run low ROA by design (huge balance sheets), software and franchise businesses run high ROA (asset-light). The DuPont decomposition links it to ROE: ROE = ROA × (assets / equity) × (1/(1-tax)), so leverage inflates the gap between ROA and ROE.

The headline profitability metric. Net income divided by average book equity tells you how productive each dollar of shareholders' capital is. High sustained ROE compounds book value when the business can reinvest at a similar return. Two warnings: ROE rises mechanically with leverage (high D/E inflates ROE without making the business better), and aggressive buybacks can shrink the equity denominator faster than they shrink earnings, artificially boosting ROE even as fundamental returns are flat.

Bottom-line growth on a per-share basis — captures both operating progress and any net buyback effect. The denominator uses the absolute value of prior EPS so a turnaround from negative to positive earnings reads with the conventional sign rather than producing arithmetic nonsense. Pair with revenue growth to separate real franchise expansion from buyback-driven per-share lift.

Top-line growth — the cleanest way to see whether the franchise is expanding. Best read alongside margin trend: revenue rising while margin compresses is often discount-driven volume rather than real growth, and can mask underlying weakness. Compare to industry peers — what looks weak in absolute terms can be best-in-sector if the industry is contracting.

How long the average sale sits as a receivable before becoming cash. Earnings-quality flag: receivables growing faster than revenue is one of the cleanest tells for revenue recognition stretching — Beneish flagged exactly this pattern as a primary fraud indicator. Industry context matters: B2B / project businesses run longer DSO than retail, but the trend is more important than the level.

Net income divided by market cap, expressed as a percent. Lets you compare equity earning power directly to bond yields: a 6% earnings yield is the equity-side analog to a 6% coupon, with the difference that earnings can grow (or contract) while a bond coupon is fixed. The standard 'is the equity risk-premium adequate?' framing.

Captures the full cash return to shareholders — dividends plus share repurchases, expressed as a percentage of market cap. Buyback-heavy issuers (Apple, Alphabet) hide their real cash return behind a low headline dividend yield; total shareholder yield surfaces it. Increasingly the right lens for evaluating capital-return quality, especially for tech-era large-caps that prefer buybacks to dividends.