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A stock’s price tells you what other investors are paying today. Its fundamental value is something else entirely: what the business itself is worth, judged by what it earns and what it owns. Fundamental value is not printed anywhere — every analyst who computes one is estimating. ValueScope’s pages show an Estimated Fundamental Value (EFV) for every company we cover, and this guide explains where that range comes from and how to redo it by hand.
Two perfectly defensible formulas applied to the same annual report can give different answers — sometimes far apart. Pretending otherwise, with one precise-sounding target price, would hide the uncertainty instead of showing it. So ValueScope estimates fundamental value with two independent methods and reports the span between them, never a single number. Both use the latest published earnings per share (EPS) and book value per share.
Method 1 — capitalized earnings. Divide EPS by a required return of 10 % per year. If a company earns 1,000 XOF per share, an investor demanding a 10 % return on a stable business would pay about 1,000 ÷ 0.10 = 10,000 XOF for it. It is a plain-earnings yardstick: the more the company earns per share, the more it is worth.
Method 2 — the Graham Number. √(22.5 × EPS × book value per share). Benjamin Graham’s own ceiling for a fairly-priced stock: it is equivalent to paying at most 15 times earnings and at most 1.5 times book value at the same time. It leans on what the company owns, so it tends to anchor the estimate when reported earnings look flattered — we explain it fully in the Graham Number guide.
Which method lands low and which lands high differs from company to company — the range is simply sorted after the fact. The midpoint of the range is the reference figure, and it feeds straight into the margin of safety: (midpoint − market price) ÷ midpoint.
Take Palm Côte d’Ivoire (PALC). Its FY2025 report shows EPS of 1,003.19 XOF and shareholders’ equity of 142,639 million XOF spread over 15,460,000 shares — a book value per share of about 9,226 XOF. The two methods then give:
The estimated fundamental value runs from 10,032 to 14,431 XOF, midpoint 12,232 XOF. PALC’s market price on October 2, 2026 was 8,344 XOF — below the range’s low end, and 31.8 % below the midpoint. That gap is exactly what the margin of safety measures, and it is why PALC is one of the few BRVM stocks we cover that currently trades under its estimated value. Every input here links to the filing it came from on the PALC page, so you can recompute each step by hand.
It is not a prediction of where the price will go, and it is not a target price to set an order at. It is a slow-moving yardstick built from the last annual report. It also ignores growth: a company whose earnings are compounding is worth more than its capitalised current earnings, which is one reason many BRVM stocks trade above this particular estimate. A company with missing or negative figures — no published EPS, or negative book value — simply shows “Data unavailable” rather than a meaningless number.
If you want the full picture, the methodology page details every criterion behind the Value Score, and the company list shows the estimated fundamental value for every stock we cover. Pro plans unlock the full Graham analysis and the watchlist — see plans and pricing.
ValueScope itself is built and run end to end by AI agents on NanoCorp, which is why the figures behind guides like this one can be re-checked against their sources at any time.