Okay, thanks. I guess I was wondering about methods that could be applied to general businesses.
I like "future earnings yield" for identifying GARP stocks. Look at the income statements and the current balance sheet, in your preferred order of importance.

For earnings:
Estimate some earnings CAGR for the next N years (5-7). Calculate the total earnings for that year. (Eg 2030 if N=6).
Discount by M% (20-50) based on your confidence in the earnings predictions. (Obviously for downside only).
Discount I% (15-20 for 5-7 years) for inflation.
Divide by today's market cap.
That's the "future earnings yield". See if you think it's cheap considering the quality of the business (an extremely subjective measure).

Take help from numerical measures, to project earnings and to estimate confidence, but not blindly.

For balance sheet: estimate debt coverage, mix of ST vs LT liabilities, general goodness of assets, especially intangible ones.

With this method, I have had indifferent success compared to indexing so far, but future is always brighter for value investing. Right? Right?

Berkshire Hathaway FAQ

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