Why Lazard stands out today

## Why Lazard (LAZ) stands out today

Lazard closed at $41.95. At that price, the combination of an elevated PAR and solid underlying fundamentals is exactly the kind of setup our sweet spot is designed to surface.

**The numbers**

We follow one PAR (Projected Annual Return, our five-year annualized return estimate combining price appreciation and dividends) for every company we track, and for Lazard that figure is hand-curated in our analyst file. Today it reads 19.3%, right at the top edge of our sweet spot, the band running from MIPAR (currently 9.4%, the median PAR across everything we follow) plus 5 points to plus 10 points, or 14.4% to 19.4%. Lazard's quality rank, a percentile score measuring financial strength, earnings stability, and relative sales growth and profitability against the rest of our database, stands at 93.3, in the top decile of names we cover.

The stock trades at a P/E of 9.3, with a current dividend yield of 4.87% (projected yield 4.5% looking ahead) and a growth forecast of 12.0%. Financial strength comes in at 82 out of 100, comfortably in solid territory. EPS stability, our 0-100 measure of how smooth annual earnings growth has been, sits at just 31.4, a reminder that Lazard's advisory-driven revenue can swing quarter to quarter with deal timing, and that's worth weighing against the otherwise attractive headline numbers. Summing quality, financial strength, and EPS stability gives a core score of 207 (out of a possible 300); that falls short of the 225 threshold we associate with a "core holding" candidate, largely because of that earnings variability.

At $41.95, the stock sits about 8.5% above its 52-week low of $38.67 and roughly 29% below its 52-week high of $58.75.

**Why today**

The low EPS stability score points to a real source of earnings variability that's worth carrying forward as a consideration for anyone studying this name further.

This is educational research, not a recommendation.