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P/B Ratio Screener — Find Stocks Trading Below Book Value
Mid and large-cap stocks ranked by price-to-book ratio, with every row labeled by valuation tier — from deep value names below 1× book to asset-light compounders commanding premium multiples. Pair it with the P/E Ratio Screener and ROE Screener to find quality at a reasonable price.
How to Read P/B Ratio Data
The price-to-book ratio answers a simple question: how much is the market paying for each dollar of net assets? A business with $10 billion of book equity and a $20 billion market cap trades at 2× book — investors are paying two dollars for every dollar of stated net worth. Benjamin Graham built his entire investing framework around this ratio, looking for companies priced below book (or below two-thirds of book value) as a margin of safety against permanent loss of capital.
The valuation tier badge is the organizing feature of this screener. Every row is labeled: Deep Value for P/B below 1×, Value for the 1–2× Buffett zone, Fair for 2–4×, Elevated for 4–10×, and Premium above 10×. Filter by sector and the tiers let you scan an industry and immediately see which names are priced cheaply relative to book and which carry significant growth expectations embedded in their multiple.
Read P/B alongside return on equity. A low P/B is only attractive if the assets are productive — if the business earns a decent return on equity, a discount to book is a gift; if it earns nothing on those assets, book value is notional and the "discount" is illusory. The highest-quality businesses in the screener — durable franchise brands, asset-light software platforms — routinely trade at 5–20× book because the market correctly prices in decades of compounding above the cost of capital.
P/B Ratio vs. Other Valuation Multiples
P/B is the oldest valuation multiple, predating the DCF by decades. It works best for asset-heavy industries — banks, insurers, real estate companies — where most of the value sits on the balance sheet. For a bank, book value is the closest proxy to liquidation value, so P/B is the natural anchor. For a software company whose main asset is its code and customer relationships, book value may be near zero or even negative after buybacks, making P/B meaningless as a stand-alone metric. The P/E ratio and EV/EBITDA are better primary multiples for asset-light businesses; P/B serves as a cross-check.
When Below-Book Is a Trap
Not every sub-1× P/B stock is cheap. A P/B below 1× can mean the market expects write-downs that have not yet appeared on the balance sheet — real estate carrying properties at historical cost while market values have fallen, banks with unrecognized loan losses, or industrials with obsolete goodwill from over-priced acquisitions. Always ask: why is book value worth less than face? If the answer is cyclical pessimism and the underlying assets are genuinely productive, the discount may resolve. If the answer is structural decline, it may not.
Frequently asked questions
What is a good P/B ratio for a stock?
It depends heavily on the industry. For banks and other financial companies, 1–2× book is a typical fair-value range; below 1× is historically cheap and above 2× implies strong earnings expectations. For technology and consumer brands, 3–8× book is common because the assets themselves generate extraordinary returns. The tier filter in this screener lets you set the threshold that makes sense for the sector you are researching.
Why do some technology stocks have P/B above 20×?
Asset-light businesses — software companies, consumer franchises, financial intermediaries — generate most of their value through intangibles (brand, software, customer loyalty) that rarely appear on the balance sheet at market value. When a business earns 30%+ return on equity year after year, the market willingly pays many multiples of book because the economic franchise is worth far more than the accountants' number. High P/B in these names is not recklessness — it is the market pricing in compounding.
How does P/B relate to return on equity?
The sustainable P/B ratio for any business is roughly equal to its return on equity divided by the cost of equity, adjusted for growth. A business earning 20% ROE in a 10% cost-of-equity world should trade at roughly 2× book in steady state. When P/B and ROE are in alignment, the stock is fairly priced. When P/B is low relative to ROE — perhaps because of a sector sell-off or a one-time earnings miss — that gap is where value investors find opportunities.
Can P/B ratio be negative?
Yes, and it is meaningless when it is. Negative book value occurs when a company has accumulated more losses than its paid-in capital — or when share buybacks exceed retained earnings, leaving a negative equity balance. This is actually common at financially sound companies that have aggressively bought back stock (McDonald's and Boeing are examples). This screener filters out P/B ratios at or below zero precisely because a negative ratio cannot be interpreted as a valuation signal.
How do I use this screener to find ideas?
Sort by P/B ascending to surface the cheapest-to-book names, then filter by sector to narrow to areas you understand. Use the tier buttons to focus on Deep Value or Value names. Click any ticker to open the Basis Report stock intelligence page, where you can cross-reference the P/B with ROE, run a DCF, and generate a full research report. The screener is the first filter; the full report is where you decide.
Why are some tickers excluded from the screener?
The screener excludes tickers where Yahoo Finance returns a null, zero, or negative P/B ratio (these are mathematically invalid or indicate negative book value) and any ticker with a P/B above 50× (extreme outliers that usually indicate data errors or balance-sheet distortions from very small equity bases). Around 90 curated mid/large-cap names are in scope across seven sectors; the actual count in the table reflects those that pass the data-quality filter on any given run.