Identifier: marketpricesurpl00ross (find matches)
Title: The market price, surplus, net earnings, and dividends of common stocks
Year: 1916 (1910s)
Authors: Ross, Kenneth Dwight
Subjects: Stocks Theses
Publisher:
Contributing Library: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Digitizing Sponsor: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

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With the exception ofthese two years the price has varied about 14 points--from 129to 143. Its general trend has been slightly upward, and thatwith no increase in either dividends or earnings, but a gradualpiling up of surplus. Peoples Gas Light and Coke CompanyPeoples Gas Light and Coke Company (figure 14) seems to bealmost as conservative a stock as the American Telephone andTelegraph. Its dividends have only varied from five to sevenand one-fourth per cent in the ten years. During all this timeearnings have shown a comfortable margin over the dividends. Thesurplus of Peoples Gas perhaps shows a closer correspondence toearnings than does the surplus of any other stock recorded. Itsprice has fluctuated a little more widely than that of AmericanTelephone and Telegraph. From 99 in 1904 to 123 in 1905 is aconsiderable rise. During 1907 and 1908 we see as usual theeffects of the Panic, and in the succeeding years, while th^rewas an unward tendency, the high point of 1906 was not reached.
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-23- IV. INDUSTRIALS Our list of industrials is not a long one, including as itdoes only nine corporations. All of these aret however, extremelylarge companies, and several, such as the United States SteelCorporation, have played an important part in our recent financialand industrial development. As a class, the industrials areconsidered more speculative than the other two groups, and althoughwe have not taken enough examples to furnish conclusive evidenceon this point, the cases we have considered seem to bear out thissupposition. The industrials which we have investigated seemsubject to wider fluctuations than the other two classes withregard to earnings, dividends, and surplus, and their price vari-ations appear to have been greater. In collecting the data forthe industrials, two classes of errors may be expected to be largerthan in the case of the railroads and other public utilities.These arise in the determination of surplus and earnings. Therailroads, as we have seen, being in

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