Bank shares like Bank of Queensland Limited, Bendigo & Adelaide Bank Ltd (ASX: BEN) and Westpac Banking Corp (ASX: WBC) are very popular in Australia because they tend to have a stable dividend history, and often pay franking credits.
In this article, we’ll explain the basics of investing in ASX bank shares. But if you’re interested in understanding the value of dividend investing in Australia (i.e. the benefits of franking credits), check out this video from the education team at Rask Australia.
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Using comps for PE ratios
The ‘PE’ ratio compares a company’s share price (P) to its most recent full-year earnings per share (E). Remember, ‘earnings’ is just another word for profit. That means, the PE ratio is simply comparing share price to the most recent yearly profit of the company. Some experts will try to tell you that ‘the lower PE ratio is better’ because it means the share price is ‘low’ relative to the profits produced by the company. However, sometimes shares are cheap for a reason!
Secondly, some extremely successful companies have gone for many years (a decade or more) and never reported an accounting profit — so the PE ratio can’t be used to value them.
Therefore, we think it’s critical to dig deeper than just looking at the PE ratio and thinking to yourself ‘if it’s below 10x, I’ll buy it.’
One of the easy ratio models analysts use to value a bank share is to compare the PE ratio of the bank/share you’re looking at with its peer group or competitors and try to determine if the share is too much or cheap relative to the average. From there, and using the principle of mean reversion, we can multiply the profits/earnings per share by the sector average (E x sector PE) to reflect what an average company would be worth. It’s like saying, ‘if all of the other stocks are priced at ‘X’, this one should be too’.
If we take the BOQ share price today ($7.28), together with the earnings (aka profits) per share data from its FY24 financial year ($0.41), we can calculate the company’s PE ratio to be 17.8x. That compares to the banking sector average PE of 20x.
Next, take the profits per share (EPS) ($0.41) and multiply it by the average PE ratio for BOQ’s sector (Banking). This results in a ‘sector-adjusted’ PE valuation of $8.14.
Why fully franked dividends boost the BOQ share price
Given that ASX bank shares like BOQ tend to have a history of paying dividends – and they are relatively stable businesses like REITs – we can use a modelling tool called a dividend discount model or DDM to do a valuation.
A DDM uses the dividends shareholders are ‘expected’ to receive to arrive at a valuation. To do this you’ll need to know the last full-year dividend, and make an assumption and what you think the dividend growth will look like for the next few years. The only other number you need is a ‘risk’ rate (e.g. 7%) which is explained further below.
To do the valuation, use this formula: Share price = full-year dividend / (risk rate – dividend growth rate). It’s a good idea to do the calculation with a few different growth and risk assumptions, then take the average valuation. This helps to account for some of the uncertainty.
To simplify this DDM, we will assume last year’s dividend payment ($0.34) climbs at a consistent rate each year.
Next, we determine the ‘risk’ rate or expected return rate. This is the rate at which we discount the future dividend payments back to today’s dollars. A higher ‘risk’ rate results in a lower share price valuation.
We’ve used a blended rate for dividend growth and a risk rate between 6% and 11%, then averaged the results.
This approach yields a valuation of BOQ shares of $7.19. However, using an ‘adjusted’ dividend payment of $0.35 per share, the valuation goes to $7.40. The expected dividend valuation compares to Bank of Queensland Limited’s share price of $7.28.
Since the company’s dividends are fully franked, you could make one further adjustment and do the valuation based on a ‘gross’ dividend payment. That is, the cash dividends plus the franking credits (available to eligible shareholders). Using the forecast gross dividend payment ($0.50), our valuation of the BOQ share price comes out at $10.57.
| Growth rate | ||||
| 2.00% | 3.00% | 4.00% | ||
|
Risk rate
|
6.00% | $8.75 | $11.67 | $17.50 |
| 7.00% | $7.00 | $8.75 | $11.67 | |
| 8.00% | $5.83 | $7.00 | $8.75 | |
| 9.00% | $5.00 | $5.83 | $7.00 | |
| 10.00% | $4.38 | $5.00 | $5.83 | |
| 11.00% | $3.89 | $4.38 | $5.00 | |
BOQ share price, key takeaways
You could consider using these models as the starting point for your process for analysing and valuing a bank share like BOQ. However, please remember that these are just tools used by analysts and in reality, a good analyst and investor will likely conduct 100+ hours of qualitative research before diving into their spreadsheet and starting their modelling.
For example, we spend a lot of our time looking at bank shares and writing about them, but if we were thinking about investing in a bank today we would want to get a handle on its growth strategy, economic indicators like unemployment, and then study house prices and consumer sentiment.
