Trailing Price-To-Earnings - Trailing P/E

See: Trailing Earnings. See: Price-to-Earnings-Ratio.

It's how you value stocks: The company whatever.com just reported $1.02 in earnings. The quarter before, they reported 98 cents, the quarter before that was 90 cents, and the quarter before that was 80 cents. So the trailing P/E, with the stock at $100, was 100/3.7, or about 28x earnings, with that trailing $3.70 a share in reported earnings.

This number doesn't adjust for balance sheet issues, like companies with tons of cash and no debt, and vice versa. To do that, you need to look at Enterprise-to-EBITDA valuation metrics. So, um, do that.