S&P 500 Sales per share - discrepancy?

All,

First off, Happy New Year and all the best for 2022!

I’m trying to work out the overall sales per share for the S&P500. Seems simply enough, however the values I’m getting don’t match up with other sources (i.e. off by an order of magnitude). If you look at Ycharts or Guru Focus, the last quarter sales/share for S&P500 is around 385:

https://ycharts.com/indicators/sp_500_sales_per_share

In P123, in aggregate series, you can look at this a few ways, but all seem to provide a much lower value (using S&P500 universe):

univsum(“true”, “salesq”)/univsum(“true”,"SharesFDq ") = 11.4
univsum(“true”, “salesq”)/univsum(“true”,“SharesQ”) = 11.6
univmedian(“true”,"SalesPSq ") = 8.8
univsum(“true”, “salesttm”)/univsum(“true”,"SharesFDTTM ") = 43.6

The units should be the same, i.e. sales in $M, shares also in M.

I know there were some issues in the past around share counts, but there is considerable discrepancy here. Or, I’m misinterpreting the output of the aggregate series calculations.

Any help would be much appreciated!

Thanks,
Ryan

Ryan - you might want to calculate the ratio for each stock individually, then average across the universe. I guess you are doing that with univmedian(“true”,"SalesPSq ") = 8.8. Maybe try mktcap weighted average…

S&P numbers are always calculated using the S&P divisor, an obscure index number that is currently around 8,500. YCharts is giving you the Q2 2021 number, so as of 7/3/21, UnivSum(“true”,“SalesQ”)/8500 was about 390. Perhaps the divisor was a little higher than 8,500 then.

That should be UnivSum ?

Yes, sorry for the typo. I’ll edit my post.

Hmm, interesting. Can you post a link for any info on this divisor? Thanks Yuval for bringing this to my attention!

Actually, here it is. Much more complicated than I imagined :wink:
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/methodologies/methodology-index-math.pdf