You can apply the q ratio to a company or the entire stock market.

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With the money printing Greenspan and Chairman Ben Bernanke have done since 2000, the q ratio might be moving up in a new long-term channel.

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And there is Tobin's q, a ratio of the stockmarket value to the replacement cost of its tangible assets an attempt to measure what it would cost to recreate a company from scratch.

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Such assets, it is argued, are either undervalued or ignored in the denominator of q, causing the ratio to be overstated.

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