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A share’s market price is what other investors are willing to pay today. A company’s value is what the business itself earns and owns. Those two numbers drift apart, in both directions, all the time. Benjamin Graham’s answer to that gap is the margin of safety: don’t try to predict the price, and instead buy only when the market charges clearly less than your estimate of the business is worth. The margin is your buffer — the room you have to be wrong about the estimate and still come out ahead.
On the BRVM this matters more than on big markets, not less. Daily volumes are thin, a handful of brokers concentrates opinion, and a rumour in a WhatsApp group can move a price without anything changing in the annual report. A price that looks “low” in CFA francs says nothing on its own: what counts is the price compared with what the company earns per share and owns per share.
ValueScope estimates a company’s fundamental value as a range, never a single number. The low end is the Graham Number — √(22.5 × earnings per share × book value per share), Graham’s classic defensive ceiling. The high end capitalises earnings per share at a 10 percent required return. The midpoint of that range is the reference, and the margin of safety is (midpoint − market price) ÷ midpoint. A positive margin means the market price sits below the estimated midpoint; a negative one means you are paying above it. Every figure that enters the formula — EPS, book value per share, the price itself — links to the filing it came from, so you can redo the arithmetic by hand.
Take Palm Côte d’Ivoire (PALC) — at the time of writing, one of the few BRVM stocks whose market price sits below its estimated value. With a market price of 8,344 XOF (October 2, 2026), a Graham Number of 10,032 XOF and capitalised earnings of 14,431 XOF, the estimated fundamental value runs from 10,032 to 14,431 XOF, midpoint 12,232 XOF. The margin of safety is therefore (12,232 − 8,344) ÷ 12,232 ≈ +31.8 %: the market charges roughly a third less than the midpoint estimate. That is exactly the buffer Graham had in mind — and you can unfold every one of these numbers on the PALC page down to its source document.
The honest other side: most BRVM companies we cover currently score a negative margin — the market has been paying above these estimates for months. That is not a bug or a reason to abandon the method. A negative margin simply says “wait, or look elsewhere”; a positive one says “here is where the arithmetic, not the rumour, does the work.” An estimate is not a prediction, and a wide margin does not remove the risk of being wrong.
If you want to go further, the methodology page details every criterion behind the Value Score, and the company list shows the margin of safety 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.