Price to cash flow (P/CF)
What you pay for one unit of cash generated by operations.
Operating cash flow skips the accounting judgements that sit between revenue and reported profit.
How it is computed here
Market capitalisation / operating cash flow
Combines more than one basis. See the note. The pipeline prefers the data vendor's published trailing-twelve-month ratio when one exists, and falls back to recomputing from the latest filed fiscal year when it does not. Those two are different measurements: the vendor figure puts twelve months of flow over the most recent quarterly balance sheet. The source trail on each figure names which path produced it. Filed under value. Neither a high nor a low reading is good on its own, so it is never coloured as one.
No published threshold exists for this figure, so this page prints none. Read it against the company's own history and its peers instead.
When it misleads
- Operating cash flow is before the capital spending needed to stay in business, so a capital-hungry company looks cheaper here than it is.
- Working-capital swings can flatter or damn a single year.
Questions
How is price to cash flow calculated?
Market capitalisation / operating cash flow. Combines more than one basis. See the note. The pipeline prefers the data vendor's published trailing-twelve-month ratio when one exists, and falls back to recomputing from the latest filed fiscal year when it does not. Those two are different measurements: the vendor figure puts twelve months of flow over the most recent quarterly balance sheet. The source trail on each figure names which path produced it.
What does price to cash flow tell a value investor?
Operating cash flow skips the accounting judgements that sit between revenue and reported profit.
When does price to cash flow mislead?
Operating cash flow is before the capital spending needed to stay in business, so a capital-hungry company looks cheaper here than it is. Working-capital swings can flatter or damn a single year.