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Zacks.com featured highlights include The Gap, Embecta, Blue Bird and ZIM Integrated Shipping Services

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Chicago, IL – December 24, 2024 – Stocks in this week’s article are The Gap Inc. GAP, Embecta Corp. EMBC, Blue Bird BLBD and ZIM Integrated Shipping Services ZIM.

4 Best-Bargain PEG Stocks that Value-Investors Love

With the market getting increasingly fickle on external shocks, investors are more focused on finding an investment strategy that emphasizes judging a stock's inherent potential. Needless to mention, value investment is gaining popularity day by day. However, this apparently simple-to-understand investing strategy has historically shown dangerous outcomes a number of times because of people's oversight of its basics.

Warren Buffet, the popular value investor, believes that proper understanding of the "intrinsic value" of a stock may ease out many problems in this respect. According to him, going by the fundamentals of value investing, as we pick stocks which the market is currently undervaluing, we also need to focus on the earnings growth potential of a stock.

Several stocks that have surged significantly in the recent past have shown the overwhelming success of this pure-play investment strategy. Here, we discuss four such stocks — The Gap Inc., Embecta Corp., Blue Bird and ZIM Integrated Shipping Services.

More on Value Investing

However, this simple value investment technique has some drawbacks, and not properly understanding the strategy may often lead to "value traps." In such a situation, these value picks start to underperform over the long run when the temporary problems, which once drove the share price down, turn out to be persistent.

There are many value investment yardsticks, such as dividend yield, P/E or P/B, which are simple and can single out whether a stock is trading at a discount.

However, for investors looking to escape such value traps, it is also vital to determine where the stock will be headed in the next 12 to 24 months. Warren Buffett advises these investors to focus on the earnings growth potential of a stock. This is where the importance of a not-so-popular value investing metric, the PEG ratio, lies.

PEG Ratio at a Glance

The PEG ratio is defined as (Price/ Earnings)/Earnings Growth Rate

A low PEG ratio is always better for value investors.

While P/E alone fails to identify a true value stock, PEG helps find the intrinsic value of a stock.

There are some drawbacks to using the PEG ratio. It does not consider the common situation of changing growth rates, such as the forecast of the first three years at a very high growth rate, followed by a sustainable but lower growth rate over the long term.