The /data/floor-price page returns three numbers labelled Dividend Floor, Valuation Floor, and EPV Floor. They almost always disagree — sometimes by 30%+ — and the EPV value usually prints lowest. That isn't a bug; it's the point. Each floor answers a different question, and reading them as a triangulation rather than a single answer is what makes the page useful.

The three questions, three answers

D
Dividend Floor — at what price would the yield look extreme?
Formula: forward dividend ÷ 95th-percentile historical TTM yield. Translates "the highest yield this stock has ever traded at without breaking" into a price. Anchors the price at which yield-hungry buyers historically step in. Requires a stable dividend payer with ≥5 years of history.
V
Valuation Floor — what's the cheapest multiple ever paid?
Formula: forward EPS × max(5.0, 5th-percentile historical forward P/E). The lowest multiple the market has assigned during normal times, applied to next year's consensus earnings. The 5.0 floor on P/E is a guard against single-year extreme contractions. Falls apart for businesses in transition or for cyclicals where historical P/E has lost meaning.
E
EPV Floor — what is it worth if growth stops forever?
Formula: (5-year mean NOPAT ÷ WACC + cash − debt) ÷ shares. Bruce Greenwald's "Earnings Power Value" — discount today's normalized earning power as a perpetuity with zero growth. Returns nothing for high-growth or unprofitable companies. The most conservative anchor; designed to be a true absolute floor.

Why EPV almost always prints lowest

Three structural reasons stack on top of each other:

  1. No-growth perpetuity. EPV uses NOPAT / WACC. A normal DCF would use NOPAT / (WACC − g) with terminal growth around 2–3%. Removing that g raises the denominator from ~5–6% to 8%, cutting the value 33–67% before you do anything else.
  2. 5-year averaged EBIT, not forward. Dividend Floor and Valuation Floor look forward (next year's dividend, next year's EPS). EPV looks back five years and averages. A company in recovery mode prints lower under EPV than under the other two.
  3. Punitive 8% WACC. The default cost-of-capital is intentionally conservative for a hard floor. Each 1pp added to WACC lops ~12–15% off the value under perpetuity math.
Dividend and Valuation floors implicitly trust the market — "at the worst multiple history has paid, what would this be worth?" EPV trusts the company in isolation — "if the market never rewards growth again, what is this worth?" That's why EPV is structurally lower: it strips out the embedded growth premium the other two retain.

How to read the three together

Don't pick one. Read the spread.

1. Tight cluster (within ~10%)

Common for stable dividend blue chips — KO, PG, ABT, ENB. Take the median for your Sell Put strike. The methods agree because the company's growth rate is small and predictable, so the no-growth assumption costs you very little.

2. Wide spread, EPV much lower (30%+ gap)

The market is pricing in real growth that hasn't yet shown up in 5-year average EBIT. Examples: a software company past inflection, a cyclical in early recovery, a consumer brand expanding internationally. The truth is somewhere between Valuation Floor and EPV. If you're a buyer demanding margin of safety, weight EPV; if you're writing puts and just need a sane strike, weight Valuation Floor.

3. EPV is null, the other two diverge wildly

Either the company isn't consistently profitable on a 5-year basis, or NOPAT − debt is negative. Don't use this page as your sole anchor — these are the names where DCF, multiples, and option premiums all disagree because the future cash flows are not yet observable. Lower confidence by default.

4. Dividend Floor is null but the others compute

Non-dividend payer, or fewer than 5 consecutive years of dividends. Lean on Valuation Floor for the optimistic anchor and EPV for the conservative one; the median of two is a fine working strike.

What this page is, and what it isn't

It is a strike anchor for selling puts and a conviction check for adding to a position on a drawdown. It is not an intrinsic value model — none of the three floors estimate "fair" price. They estimate floors: prices at which historical evidence (Dividend), market behaviour (Valuation), or arithmetic (EPV) say a buyer should be very interested.

A stock trading 5% above its three floors clustered tightly is uninteresting from a Sell Put standpoint. A stock trading near the median of its three floors with EPV providing real downside protection is the setup the page is built to surface.

Three floors = three lenses: Dividend (yield-extreme) · Valuation (multiple-extreme) · EPV (no-growth perpetuity)
EPV is structurally the lowest because it removes the growth premium the others retain
Tight cluster → trust the median · wide spread → EPV is conviction, Valuation is the working strike

Open Floor Price calculator →