What the fair-value zone is and how we read it

Why a range, not a single number

A company's value is not a natural constant that can be measured to the cent. Every estimate depends on assumptions: how much the company will grow, what a reasonable required return is, how sustainable today's margins are. Move an assumption by one percentage point and the "exact" number shifts.

That is why every stock page shows not a target price but a **fair-value zone**: the range within which the estimate remains reasonable when the key assumption moves up or down. A single number suggests false precision; a range honestly shows how sensitive the estimate is.

How the zone is built

In short (the full description, with all rules and acknowledged mistakes, is on the Methodology page):

1. Several methods, one by one. For each company we compute every method that makes sense: discounted cash flow (DCF — the present value of the future cash the business generates), a comparison with market prices of similar companies, a justified price-to-book ratio, and for holdings the sum of the parts (SOTP).
2. An anchor by company type. The methods are not averaged. Depending on what kind of company it is — an industrial with announced growth, a cyclical, a bank, a holding — one method is the anchor (the most appropriate for that type) and the others serve as a check. A bank, for example, is not valued on EBITDA, because for a bank debt is not a financing cost but the raw material of the business.
3. Zone = anchor ± sensitivity. We move the anchor estimate's key assumption (most often the required return by ±1 percentage point) and get the lower and upper edge.
4. A check against the market. When our zone deviates strongly from the market price, we always run the reverse computation too: what assumptions the market price would imply. If those assumptions are unrealistic, we write why; if they are possible, we write that as well.

What "above" or "below" the zone means

On the market overviews, each stock carries a gap — the position of the last price versus the zone, e.g. "+19% above" or "−23% below".

It is important to understand what that is and what it is not:

• It is a fact: the market price is currently that far above or below our estimate, under assumptions that are publicly written out on the stock page.
• It is not a signal: above the zone does not mean "sell", below does not mean "buy". The market may know something the public data does not yet show; our estimate may be wrong in an assumption; for thinly traded stocks the last price may be old and indicative.

The gap is an invitation to ask "why is the difference this large?", not an answer to "what should I do?". We never answer the second question — that is a regulatory obligation (an informational service is not an investment adviser), but also our conviction: the conclusion belongs to the reader.

How to verify every number of ours

Every stock page has a section "How this estimate was made" with parameters, limitations and a history of changes, and every data point carries a source (the report and the page it was taken from). If something says "assumption", it means the number could not be measured or calibrated from public data — and it is flagged deliberately, so you know how much confidence the estimate deserves.

When a data point does not exist or cannot be computed honestly, we write n/a (not applicable or not available) — never zero and never an invented value.