Is Stifel Financial Stock Still Attractive After Its Strong 2025 Share Price Run?
If you have been wondering whether Stifel Financial is still a smart place to put fresh money to work, you are not alone. This breakdown is going to focus squarely on what you are really getting for the current share price.
The stock has quietly kept rewarding patient holders, with shares up about 2.5% over the last week, 8.5% over the past month, 21.2% year to date, and 21.9% over the last year, on top of multi year gains.
Behind those moves, Stifel has been expanding its wealth management and investment banking footprint, adding financial advisors and increasing its presence in key US markets. The firm has also continued to invest in technology and platform capabilities that support higher margin advisory and capital markets work, which can help justify a richer valuation than in the past.
Even so, our structured valuation checks suggest Stifel only scores 2 out of 6 on undervaluation. That makes it important to unpack what different valuation methods are actually telling us about the potential upside from here, and to finish by looking at a more holistic way of thinking about value that goes beyond the usual models.
Stifel Financial scores just 2/6 on our valuation checks. See what other red flags we found in the full valuation breakdown.
The Excess Returns model looks at how much profit Stifel generates above the minimum return that equity investors require, then capitalizes those surplus earnings into a fair value per share.
For Stifel, the starting point is a Book Value of $49.74 per share and a Stable EPS of $6.82 per share, based on the median return on equity from the past 5 years. With an Average Return on Equity of 11.62% and a Cost of Equity of $5.01 per share, the model estimates an Excess Return of $1.82 per share. This implies the business is earning meaningfully more than investors demand on its equity base.
A Stable Book Value of $58.73 per share, drawn from weighted future book value estimates from 2 analysts, is then combined with those excess returns to derive an intrinsic value of about $93.28 per share. Compared with the current market price, this suggests the stock is roughly 37.9% overvalued under this framework.
For a profitable, established firm like Stifel Financial, the price to earnings ratio is a practical way to judge value because it links what investors pay directly to the company’s current earning power. In general, faster growth and lower perceived risk can justify a higher PE, while slower growth or higher risk should mean a lower, more conservative multiple.
Stifel currently trades on a PE of about 20.9x, which is slightly below the Capital Markets industry average of roughly 25.7x, and very close to the peer group average of around 21.2x. Simply Wall St’s Fair Ratio framework goes a step further by estimating what PE Stifel should trade on, given its specific mix of earnings growth, industry positioning, profit margins, market cap and risk profile. On this basis, Stifel’s Fair Ratio is 16.3x, meaning the shares are trading noticeably above what those fundamentals would typically warrant, even if they look reasonable against peers.
Earlier we mentioned that there is an even better way to understand valuation, so let us introduce you to Narratives, which are simply the stories investors tell about a company that are then tied directly to numbers like future revenue, earnings, margins and a fair value estimate. A Narrative on Simply Wall St links three things in one place: the business story, a financial forecast, and a resulting fair value per share, giving you a clear view of what needs to happen in the future for your thesis to be right. Narratives live inside the Community page on Simply Wall St, where millions of investors can build and compare their own views, and they update dynamically when fresh information such as news, earnings or guidance changes the outlook. This makes it easier to decide when to buy or sell, because you can continuously compare each Narrative’s Fair Value to today’s Price and see whether the gap is closing or opening. For example, some Stifel Narratives see upside to around $132 per share while others assume nearer $105, reflecting different expectations for adviser growth, margins and valuation multiples.
This article by Simply Wall St is general in nature. We provide commentary based on historical data and analyst forecasts only using an unbiased methodology and our articles are not intended to be financial advice. It does not constitute a recommendation to buy or sell any stock, and does not take account of your objectives, or your financial situation. We aim to bring you long-term focused analysis driven by fundamental data. Note that our analysis may not factor in the latest price-sensitive company announcements or qualitative material. Simply Wall St has no position in any stocks mentioned.
