What does a negative ratio mean?

Asked by: Mariah Effertz  |  Last update: March 18, 2025
Score: 4.6/5 (9 votes)

A negative P/E ratio means the company has negative earnings or is losing money. Even the most established companies experience down periods, which may be due to environmental factors that are out of the company's control.

Should I buy a stock with a negative PE ratio?

A negative PE (Price/Earnings) means Earnings are negative,eaning the stock is loss making. So, do not buy the stock even by mistake.

What does a negative risk ratio mean?

A risk ratio or rate ratio of less than 1.0 indicates a negative association between the exposure and outcome in the exposed group compared to the unexposed group. In this case, the exposure provides a protective effect.

Can negatives be in ratios?

Yep, ratio data can have negative values. These lecture notes even describe your specific case of account balance. Your intuitions were right. Your bank account balance is another [example of ratio-scale data].

Can ratio data be negative?

Ratio Data is defined as quantitative data, having the same properties as interval data, with an equal and definitive ratio between each data and absolute “zero” being treated as a point of origin. In other words, there can be no negative numerical value in ratio data.

Negative P/E Ratios [Under 1:30!] | Finance Strategists

41 related questions found

What does a negative ratio indicate?

A negative P/E ratio means the company has negative earnings or is losing money. Even the most established companies experience down periods, which may be due to environmental factors that are out of the company's control.

Can a ratio ever be negative?

Since some of the integers are negative and some are positive, we can definitely have a negative ratio between them.

Can common ratios be negative?

The common ratio for a geometric sequence can be a positive number or a negative number, a whole number or a decimal, a number greater than 1, or less than 1.

Is ratio always positive?

The numbers in a ratio may be quantities of any kind, such as counts of people or objects, or such as measurements of lengths, weights, time, etc. In most contexts, both numbers are restricted to be positive.

Can ratios be negative in accounting?

A company's working capital turnover ratio can be negative when a company's current liabilities exceed its current assets.

What does a negative information ratio mean?

If the information ratio is negative, it means that investors would probably have achieved a better return by using a passive fund that tracks the benchmark. • If the information ratio is positive, the fund manager has added value through active management rather than simply by taking on more risk.

What does a negative current ratio mean?

A negative ratio is a red flag. It means the company has more current liabilities than assets and might struggle to pay its bills.

What if odds ratio is negative?

Positive odds ratios indicate that the event is more likely to occur, whilst negative odd ratios indicate the event is less likely to occur. Note that the coefficient is the log odds ratio.

Is a negative equity ratio good?

For investors, a negative stockholders' equity is a traditional warning sign of financial instability. It can damage a company's ability to secure financing or investment.

What is a healthy PE for a stock?

To give you some sense of what the average for the market is, though, many value investors would refer to 20 to 25 as the average P/E ratio range. And again, like golf, the lower the P/E ratio a company has, the better an investment the metric is saying it is.

What happens if my stock goes negative?

Can a stock go negative? Fortunately, it is not possible for a stock's price to go into the negative territory — under zero dollars in value, that is. Still, if an investor short sells or uses margin trading, they may lose more than they invested.

What is the golden rule of ratio?

Putting it as simply as we can (eek!), the Golden Ratio (also known as the Golden Section, Golden Mean, Divine Proportion or Greek letter Phi) exists when a line is divided into two parts and the longer part (a) divided by the smaller part (b) is equal to the sum of (a) + (b) divided by (a), which both equal 1.618.

Why is price ratio negative?

A negative P/E ratio means that the company reported either no earnings per share (EPS) or negative EPS. A negative P/E ratio suggests the company is currently unprofitable, as it has more expenses than revenue.

What can a ratio tell us?

A ratio expresses how much of one quantity is required as compared to another quantity. The two terms in the ratio can be simplified and expressed in their lowest form. Ratios when expressed in their lowest terms are easy to understand and can be simplified in the same way as we simplify fractions.

Can you have negative ratio data?

Key characteristics of ratio data

Ratio data have a 'true zero,' i.e. zero represents an absence of the variable, and you cannot have negative values. Because ratio data lack negative values, they can be added, subtracted, multiplied, and divided (unlike the other three types of data).

Can common ratio be zero?

(1) It is clearly mentioned that common ratio cannot be zero. That means, 8,0,0,0,⋯ is not a valid Geometric progression because common ratio is zero.

Can common equity be negative?

Negative shareholder equity is when a company owes more money to investors than its assets can cover. When a company accumulates more debt than it can pay, even after liquidating all of its assets, financial analysts describe its equity as negative.

Can a common ratio be negative?

Geometric sequences

in which each term is obtained from the preceding one by multiplying by a constant, called the common ratio and often represented by the symbol r. Note that r can be positive, negative or zero.

Is a negative current ratio bad?

For example, if you usually consider 2x as a good current ratio for a traditional business, a business following the negative current ratio model will not fit into this criteria but may not necessarily be a bad business.

Can negative numbers be ratios?

As long as you can represents the number with the ratio of two integers, it is a rational number. These ratios can be negative or positive, it doesn't matter. Real numbers that can't be represented as ratio of two integers are called irrational numbers.