Graham Number Screen Shows Wide Margin of Safety in 8 Stocks

If you have ever walked through a clearance sale, you know the feeling. A decent product marked down 50% makes you pause. That is roughly what the Graham Number screen did on 8 October 2026. It flagged eight NSE/BSE stocks trading below their Graham Number, a conservative estimate of intrinsic value. Indegene showed the widest margin of safety at 61.2%. LIC Housing Finance came in at 55.8%, Sammaan Capital at 53.2%, and REC and PFC both at 47.2%. For readers new to the metric, the Graham Number is a formula Ben Graham popularised. It takes the square root of 22.5 multiplied by earnings per share and book value per share. The 22.5 comes from Graham's rule that a stock should trade at no more than 15 times earnings and 1.5 times book. When price sits below this number, the market is offering a margin of safety. That does not mean the stock is safe. It means the arithmetic is working in your favour if your earnings and book value estimates hold. What the Graham Number screen found The screen threw up a curious mix. Indegene is a life sciences and healthcare technology company. The 61.2% discount suggests the market has repriced it hard from growth to value territory. That can happen when order visibility weakens or when a good company's stock simply falls faster than its fundamentals. [Indegene](/stock/INDGN) (NSE: INDGN) is not the same kind of borrower as [LIC Housing Finance](/stock/LICHSGFIN) (NSE: LICHSGFIN) or [Sammaan Capital](/stock/SAMMAANCAP) (NSE: SAMMAANCAP), which are housing finance and credit names. LIC Housing at 55.8% below Graham Number reflects concerns about margins, asset quality, and competition from larger banks. Sammaan Capital's 53.2% gap is similar. The two power financiers caught my attention. [REC](/stock/RECLTD) (NSE: RECLTD) and [PFC](/stock/PFC) (NSE: PFC) both traded 47.2% below their Graham Number. These are not small, undiscovered companies. They lend to state utilities and private power producers. Their books are large, their divi...