[halfninety]

Wrt the "the E you use to calculate P/E should actually be the long term expected earnings" comment I made..

I was not trying to say that the standard financial metric called P/E ratio should be calculated this way. Rather I think that ideally or principally it should be calculated this way, because what matters is "how many year will it take for me to recoup the money?", not "how many years will it take for me to recoup the money assuming that the company's earnings remains the same?".

But obviously you don't know the company's future earnings, so to make an actually computable metric you can only use the current earnings as an estimate.