Graham Number Screen: Margin of Safety in LIC Housing, REC, PFC

The Graham Number screen just flagged eight Indian names where price sits well below the formula's fair-value line. The math is blunt: take the square root of 22.5 times trailing EPS times book value per share. The latest scan shows cushions between 41.8% and 61.2%. For every ₹100 of Graham Number fair value, the market is paying roughly ₹38.80 to ₹58.20. LIC Housing Finance (NSE: LICHSGFIN), REC (NSE: RECLTD), PFC (NSE: PFC), Indegene (NSE: INDGN), Sammaan Capital (NSE: SAMMAANCAP), J&K Bank (NSE: J&KBANK), Central Bank of India (NSE: CENTRALBK) and GIC Re (NSE: GICRE) appear on the list. A wide Graham discount is not a buy signal by itself. It is a data point. For financials, book value can be stale, overstated or exposed to credit costs. Source: FairStock.ai Graham Number screen, latest close. Where the Graham Number discount is concentrated Six of the eight names are state-linked financials. That's the pattern. Banks and non-bank lenders with low price-to-book ratios and high book equity produce large Graham Numbers. The screen ignores net interest margins and credit costs. It also ignores capital adequacy. For a lender, those variables decide whether book value is real or an accounting assumption. [LIC Housing Finance](/stock/LICHSGFIN) and [Sammaan Capital](/stock/SAMMAANCAP) sit in housing finance. The market is pricing slower loan growth and tighter spreads. The Graham math treats existing book equity as a floor; it isn't. Still, a 50% discount demands a look at collection efficiency and cost of funds. If collateral values hold, the cushion could be real. [REC](/stock/RECLTD) and [PFC](/stock/PFC) are power financiers with high dividend yields. Trailing EPS is strong and book value per share has compounded. The market still discounts the pair because of exposure to state power utilities. The screen shows this as a wide margin of safety. Whether that cushion is real depends on receivables turning into cash. [GIC Re](/stock/GICRE) is a different case. Bo...