A study of similar publicly traded companies that is conducted by an investment bank for the purpose of specifying the offering price of an initial public offering (IPO). In other words, the issuer in question is matched up with comparable issuers (known for short as comps) which have operated within the same industry and have the same fundamentals such as profitability, risk profile, growth prospects, etc. To that end, a number of comparable multiples (valuation multiples) are used, such as the P/E ratio. For example, the per share value of an issuer (i) can be imputed using the P/E ratio of a comparable issuer:

V_i = (P/E)_comp × E_i

Where: E_i is the earnings per share of issuer (i).

In addition to the P/E ratio, the most commonly used comparables are price-to-sales (P/S), the market-to-book value (M/B) ratio, etc.