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India Tourism Development (NSE:ITDC) shares have continued recent momentum with a 41% gain in the last month alone. The full year gain of 20% is pretty reasonable, too.
All else being equal, a sharp share price increase should make a stock less attractive to potential investors. In the long term, share prices tend to follow earnings per share, but in the short term prices bounce around in response to short term factors (which are not always obvious). The implication here is that deep value investors might steer clear when expectations of a company are too high. Perhaps the simplest way to get a read on investors' expectations of a business is to look at its Price to Earnings Ratio (PE Ratio). A high P/E implies that investors have high expectations of what a company can achieve compared to a company with a low P/E ratio.
Check out our latest analysis for India Tourism Development
How Does India Tourism Development's P/E Ratio Compare To Its Peers?
We can tell from its P/E ratio of 74.47 that there is some investor optimism about India Tourism Development. You can see in the image below that the average P/E (19.5) for companies in the hospitality industry is a lot lower than India Tourism Development's P/E.
Its relatively high P/E ratio indicates that India Tourism Development shareholders think it will perform better than other companies in its industry classification. The market is optimistic about the future, but that doesn't guarantee future growth. So investors should delve deeper. I like to check if company insiders have been buying or selling.
How Growth Rates Impact P/E Ratios
P/E ratios primarily reflect market expectations around earnings growth rates. Earnings growth means that in the future the 'E' will be higher. That means even if the current P/E is high, it will reduce over time if the share price stays flat. Then, a lower P/E should attract more buyers, pushing the share price up.
Notably, India Tourism Development grew EPS by a whopping 31% in the last year. And it has bolstered its earnings per share by 38% per year over the last five years. So we'd generally expect it to have a relatively high P/E ratio.
Remember: P/E Ratios Don't Consider The Balance Sheet
One drawback of using a P/E ratio is that it considers market capitalization, but not the balance sheet. Thus, the metric does not reflect cash or debt held by the company. The exact same company would hypothetically deserve a higher P/E ratio if it had a strong balance sheet, than if it had a weak one with lots of debt, because a cashed up company can spend on growth.