Intrinsic value
Intrinsic value is the answer to the only question that ultimately matters about an asset: what is it worth to own outright? For a business, that means the cash an owner could take out of it over its remaining life, discounted back to today. It’s a different thing from the market price, which is just the most recent opinion — the whole discipline of value investing lives in the gap between the two.
The honest part: intrinsic value can’t be computed precisely, by anyone. It depends on cash flows that haven’t happened yet. Every estimate — including ours — is a rough figure whose usefulness comes from conservative assumptions, not from decimal places.
How the Moat Index measures this
The Index does not label a formula output as intrinsic value. We normalize owner earnings from the company’s SEC filings and publish a low-to-high value range using a 9% discount rate, 0% growth at the low end, and capped growth and an 18× multiple at the high end. Company pages disclose every assumption. The site compares price with value if growth stopped today and describes only that observable model discount or premium. The range is educational, model-dependent, and neither a claim of intrinsic value nor a price target.