The Intrinsic Value Calculator — A Step-by-Step Guide

There's an old line from Warren Buffett that the calculator on this page is built
around: "Price is what you pay. Value is what you get." The market quotes you a
price every second of the trading day. What it never hands you is an independent
estimate of value — what the business might actually be worth based on its
fundamentals. The Intrinsic Value Calculator exists to produce exactly that
estimate, with three time-tested measures blended into one fair value, and to line it up next to the live price so
you can see the gap.

This guide walks through the whole page — what you type in, what comes back, and how
to read each card — with one idea kept in view throughout:

TyBuff is an analytical platform, not a financial adviser. Every figure here is
an estimate produced by a mathematical model from public data. It is for research
and educational use — not investment advice, and not a signal to buy or sell. The
page tells you what the formulas compute; what you do with it is your decision.

What "intrinsic value" actually means

Intrinsic value is an estimate of what a stock is truly worth based on its
financial fundamentals, independent of its current market price. The logic is
simple:

The word doing the heavy lifting is estimate. Reputable models can disagree sharply
on the same company — which is exactly why this page runs several of them and shows you
each, rather than pretending there's a single right answer.

Step 1 — Run an analysis

At the top of the page is a small search card with two inputs:

Press Analyze and the results render below.

A note on access

The Intrinsic Value Calculator is a feature of the Advanced and Professional
plans. On the Essential plan you can still explore it with a set of demo tickers
(AAPL, MSFT, GOOGL, JNJ) to see exactly how it works before deciding whether to
upgrade.

Step 2 — Read the summary card

The first result card is the headline: the ticker, the company name, and four numbers
side by side.

The colors are a quick visual cue (green leaning cheap, red leaning expensive, amber
in between), not a rating. Two shortcut buttons sit underneath: Open Full
Fundamentals (the complete financial table) and Go to Detail Page (the
instrument's full detail view with charts).

Step 3 — The Fair Value gauges

Below the summary is the headline of the whole page: a large primary gauge, with three
smaller figures beneath it.

The primary gauge — Owner-Earnings Fair Value

The big gauge (marked "Primary estimate") shows the Owner-Earnings Fair Value.
This is the number the Verdict and the gauge needle are built on. Rather than a plain
average, it's a weighted blend that deliberately leans on the model closest to how
Graham and Buffett actually thought about value:

When one of those measures isn't available for a company, the remaining weights
re-balance automatically.

The three secondary figures

Underneath, three compact cards show the same business through different lenses, so you
can judge for yourself instead of trusting a single number:

When the figures broadly agree, the estimate is more robust. When they diverge
widely, the valuation is highly sensitive to assumptions — and deserves a wider margin of
safety.

Step 4 — The valuation models, side by side

This is where the page shows its work. Two cards sit next to each other.

Graham's Intrinsic Value

Named for Benjamin Graham, the "father of value investing" and the author of The
Intelligent Investor (and Buffett's teacher at Columbia). The card shows the revised
Graham formula right at the top:

V = EPS × (8.5 + 2g) × 4.4 / Y

and then breaks out every input so nothing is a black box:

The same card also shows a second, separate Graham measure:

DCF Valuation

A Discounted Cash Flow projects a company's future cash and discounts it back to
what it's worth today. The card states which inputs it used:

Seeing the models side by side is the point: when they roughly agree, you have a more
robust read; when they diverge, that disagreement is itself information about how
uncertain the valuation is.

Step 5 — The fundamentals cards

Three compact cards round out the picture with the ratios analysts lean on. Every row
has an info tooltip with a one-line definition, so you can hover for a refresher.

These ratios are most meaningful in context — compared to a company's industry
peers and its own history — rather than read as absolutes.

"How to Read This Page" — the built-in primer

Near the bottom there's an expandable How to Read This Page section. It's worth
opening at least once: it explains intrinsic value, walks through Graham's formula and
the DCF in plain language, describes the gauge and the margin-of-safety concept, and —
importantly — spells out the models' limitations in the platform's own words.

The Value Leaderboard

When you first land on the page (before running a specific ticker), you'll see two
ranking tables:

Both are ranked by the Owner-Earnings Fair Value — the same DCF-weighted blend as
the primary gauge, so the rankings and the single-ticker page always agree — and
refreshed periodically. Only stocks where both core models (Graham's growth formula
and the DCF) produce valid values are included; the Graham Number refines the blend when
available. The margin is capped at ±100% to keep extreme data artifacts from dominating
the list. Click any row to jump straight into that ticker's full analysis.

On the Essential plan the leaderboard appears as a blurred preview behind an upgrade
prompt; Advanced and Professional plans see the full top-ten tables and can open
any ticker.

Where these models stop being reliable

The page is candid about this, and so are we. Graham's formula and DCF were built for
established, profitable companies with reasonably predictable earnings. They can
produce misleading results for:

This is also why a stock can show "Insufficient data," or land near the ±100% cap on the
leaderboard. A clean-looking number is not the same as a reliable one — match the tool to
the kind of company you're looking at.

A quick workflow

  1. Type a ticker and analyze with the auto-estimated growth rate first.
  2. Re-run with a more conservative growth rate to see how sensitive the fair value is
    to that single assumption — if a small change swings the verdict, treat the result with
    extra caution.
  3. Compare the lenses — the primary Owner-Earnings Fair Value against the three
    secondary figures (Graham + DCF, all-three average, DCF only). Agreement is reassuring;
    divergence flags uncertainty.
  4. Check the margin of safety, remembering Graham's 25–30% cushion was the whole point.
  5. Cross-read the ratio cards against the company's peers and history.
  6. Sanity-check against the limitations — is this even the kind of company these models
    handle well?

What this page is — and what it isn't

To be completely clear, consistent with our
Terms & Conditions and
Full Disclaimer:

In short: the Intrinsic Value Calculator gives you a clear, transparent, multi-model
estimate of what a stock might be worth — and shows its working at every step. Whether
that gap between price and value means anything for you is always, and only, your call.