American Express (AXP)
Financials · NYSE · US
Fundamentals
Valuation and ratings
American Express trades at $358.44, which is 56% below the $559.10 our discounted cash flow model puts on the business. On that measure alone it screens as undervalued, though a DCF is an argument rather than a measurement, and the market is frequently right about why something is cheap.
Our moat model scores it 82 out of 100, which is a wide moat. A moat is a structural reason competitors cannot take the profits away, and it matters more to a long holding period than any single quarter's numbers do.
It changes hands at 21.9 times earnings. Be careful reading that in isolation: for a cyclical business a low P/E arrives at the top of the cycle, when profits are peaking and about to fall, which is exactly when the shares look cheapest and are not.
About American Express
American Express Company, together with its subsidiaries, operates as an integrated payments company in the United States, Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the Asia Pacific, Australia, New Zealand, Latin America, Canada, the Caribbean, and internationally. It operates through four segments: U.S. Consumer Services, Commercial Services, International Card Services, and Global Merchant and Network Services. The company offers credit and charge cards and complementary products and services, including travel, dining, and lifestyle and expense management products and services; and banking and other payment and financing products and services, including deposits and non-card lending. It also provides merchant acquisition and processing, servicing and settlement, fraud prevention, and point-of-sale marketing and information products and services, as well as network services. The company offers its products and services to consumers, small businesses, mid-sized companies, and large corporations through mobile and online applications, affiliate marketing, customer referral programs, third-party service providers and business partners, in-house sales teams, direct mail, telephone, and direct response advertising. American Express Company was founded in 1850 and is headquartered in New York, New York.
AXP passes 6 of our 30 screens today
Each screen prints the exact criteria it used, and the circumstances in which it is wrong.
Smart money ownership
31 of the funds we track reported a position in their latest SEC 13F filing. Largest first:
- Warren Buffett, BERKSHIRE HATHAWAY INC$45.86B · 17.4% of book
- Ken Fisher, Fisher Asset Management, LLC$2.80B · 0.9% of book
- Capital Research Global, Capital Research Global Investors$959.02M · 0.1% of book
- D. E. Shaw, D. E. Shaw & Co., Inc.$599.62M · 0.4% of book
- First Eagle, First Eagle Investment Management, LLC$502.91M · 0.8% of book
A word of warning on reading these figures: a 13F reports the market value of a holding, so a fund that traded nothing at all still appears to have sold when the price fell. We found 102 companies where the standard reading gives the opposite answer. Only the share count is honest.
Common questions
Is American Express (AXP) undervalued?
Against our discounted cash flow estimate of $559.10, AXP at $358.44 is 56% below fair value. That is one model's answer, not a recommendation, and most of a DCF's output sits in a terminal value nobody can forecast.
Which funds own AXP?
31 of the institutions we track reported a position in AXP in their most recent SEC 13F filing. A 13F is filed up to 45 days after quarter end, so it tells you what a fund held then, not what it holds now.
What is AXP's P/E ratio?
AXP trades at 21.9 times earnings. A low P/E is not automatically cheap: on a cyclical company it is usually a warning that earnings are at a peak.
The full research page for AXP, with financial statements, ownership detail, peer comparison and alerts, is free inside the app.
Data from company filings, exchange quotes and SEC EDGAR 13F disclosures. Quotes are delayed. Metrics we do not have are left out rather than estimated. Educational information, not financial advice.