The Curious Investor

Start Looking Forward to Earnings Season

A good point indeed. Forward P/E is only as reliable as the source of the forward estimate. Truth be told, to get a good apples-to-apples number, you should develop your own methodology for cleaning an earnings number and projecting forward. That way, you know you are getting a consistently calculated earnings number.

If it wasn't obvious, I found my forward P/E numbers using Yahoo! Finance. The forward earnings number used is Yahoo's average analyst estimate for the next four quarters. I believe the source data from this is from Thomson Financial which aggregates estimates from various sell-side research.