Investing Glossary — Moat, ROCE, DCF, EBITDA & More Explained | CMA Sandip Framework

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Plain-language explanations of the terms used across our scorecards — written to make sense while you're reading a report, not like a textbook.

Quality Concepts

What stops a competitor from just copying this company and taking its profits.

Capital Allocation

What management actually does with the company's profits — and whether that's smart.

Business Quality

Is this fundamentally a good business to own, separate from today's stock price?

Management Quality

Do you trust the people running this company to do right by shareholders?

Growth Visibility

How confident can you actually be that this company keeps growing — not just that it grew last year.

What could genuinely go wrong here, and how exposed is the business to it.

Our overall confidence level in the full picture, after weighing everything above.

Financial Ratios

ROCE (Return on Capital Employed)

For every ₹100 tied up in the business, how many rupees of profit does it generate?

ROE (Return on Equity)

How much profit a company makes for every rupee shareholders have put in.

Roughly, how much cash-like profit the core business generates before accounting and financing decisions muddy the picture.

PE Ratio (Price-to-Earnings)

How many years of current profit you're paying for, roughly, to own a share.

FCF (Free Cash Flow)

The actual cash left over after a company pays for everything it needs just to keep running and growing.

Free cash flow expressed as a percentage of what you'd pay to buy the whole company today.

DCF (Discounted Cash Flow)

A method of valuing a company today based on all the cash it's expected to generate in the future.

Instead of estimating what a company is worth, this asks: what growth would the current price actually require to be justified?

TVM (Time Value of Money)

₹100 today is worth more than ₹100 a year from now — this is the idea that underlies almost every valuation method.

CFE (Cash Flow to Equity)

The cash that's actually left over for shareholders specifically, after debt obligations are handled.

GNPA / NNPA (Gross & Net Non-Performing Assets)

What percentage of a bank or NBFC's loans have gone bad, before and after accounting for money already set aside to cover losses.

Promoter Holding

How much of the company the founders/founding family/controlling group still personally own.