IBKR GlobalAnalyst: The PEG Ratio & Finding Undervalued Stocks

I’ve been using the Interactive Brokers platform for several years.

As an investor, I’ve enjoyed the wealth of research tools that the platform offers.

These tools are great for conducting detailed analysis and help inform my investment decisions.

As I am always interested in learning more about companies and finding good investment opportunities, I was excited to hear that Interactive Brokers was releasing a new tool called GlobalAnalyst.

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What is IBKR GlobalAnalyst?

GlobalAnalyst is a tool developed by Interactive Brokers that was launched on November 30.

As the name suggests, the tool allows investors to analyze and compare a wide range of stocks from around the world.

Users of GlobalAnalyst can filter by country, region, industry, market capitalization, and currency to compare two or more companies.

The tool helps investors explore markets from around the world for opportunities in other regions that they may not have traditionally been aware of.

Whether it be the mid-cap healthcare sector in Ghana or the small-cap energy sector in New Zealand, GlobalAnalyst can help users find potentially lucrative investment opportunities.

Users are able to compare a number of different companies using multiple metrics in one easy-to-understand chart.

The PEG Ratio

While traditional metrics like the price to earnings (P/E) ratio and revenue remain important, GlobalAnalyst places more emphasis on the Price Earnings to Growth (PEG) ratio.

The ratio is used to gain insight into how fast a company is growing relative to its peers.

This PEG ratio is calculated by using the P/E ratio and dividing it by the growth rate of earnings from the company.

As the company grows faster, its PEG ratio will go down. If a company’s growth is slowing, its PEG ratio will go up.

In my research, I’m looking to identify companies with low PEG ratios, as they generally seem to have potential for future growth.

Using GlobalAnalyst

One of the great things about GlobalAnalyst is that it’s available to both clients and non-clients of Interactive Brokers.

This public access makes the tool helpful for just about any investor looking to add to their knowledge base.

With so much information out there, I found this tool helpful in summarizing all of the different metrics in one place, making comparisons easy to do.

Within the tool, users can filter companies from around the globe using a variety of attributes.

These filters can help create shortlists of different companies that can be analyzed further.

Example 1: Searching Global Markets

To start, I was looking to gain an understanding of what regions in the world have high concentrations of undervalued companies with potential for growth.

It’s easy to stay focused on familiar Canadian and US companies, so I was wondering if a tool like GlobalAnalyst could quickly surface some opportunities I wouldn’t traditionally look at.

I set the filters to:

Industries: Technology
Regions: All except USA
Market Cap: Mid Cap
Currency: USD (to display report in)

After sorting by PEG ratio from low to high, the chart shows that within these parameters, the lowest PEG ratio companies are located in markets like the Hong Kong, Finland, Israel and Japan.

Apart from sorting by PEG, results can also be sorted by attributes such as price, market cap, revenue or P/E.

This information is helpful guidance to further examine global markets for potential investment opportunities.

(Currency can be updated to display all numbers in your preferred currency.)

Example 2: Large Cap US Opportunities

In another example, to bring it back to looking for opportunities stateside, I filtered by the technology sector, for companies that are large-cap and based in the United States.

The chart yields 136 companies.

This is a helpful starting point in my analysis of figuring out what companies have higher potential for future growth relative to their peers.

From here, I can shortlist based on other criteria I have and go deep researching a few particular companies.

Example 3: Comparing Companies

If a starting point of 136 companies is too many, the platform allows you multiple ways to narrow down your analysis.

Rather than searching using the filters above, users can also narrow down to 2-3 companies they wish to compare.

For example, if the technology sector is too broad and you wanted to search specifically for semiconductor companies, you could type in the company names and compare them.

After typing in the company tickers, sorting by PEG ratio allows a user to compare them based on how fast they are growing relative to each other.

With a PEG of 6.9, I would think that Nvidia (NVDA) is slowing down and not growing as fast as the other two companies.

In comparison, Intel Corporation (INTC) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) both have PEG ratios below one.

This would suggest that these companies have been continually growing and do not show signs of slowing down.

Based on this comparison, I would spend more time looking into AMD and Intel as potential investments.

Overall, GlobalAnalyst is another great tool Interactive Brokers has developed to help users and non-users make informed investment decisions.

The inclusion of the PEG ratio into the analysis adds depth that is lacking in other tools.

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