Best Value Stocks: August 2026
MoatMap's Value factor combines the four most-tested measures of cheapness (earnings yield, EV/EBITDA, price-to-book, and shareholder yield) into a single percentile rank. The 25 stocks below score highest on Value globally. Read the Quality column carefully: the difference between a deep-value opportunity and a value trap is whether the cheapness is paired with a healthy business or a deteriorating one.
Updated ·How we score stocks·See all four pillars
Top 25 Value Stocks Right Now
Why Value Still Works in 2026
The Value premium has been the most-studied anomaly in finance since Fama and French formalised it in 1992. Cheap stocks, on average, outperform expensive stocks over long holding periods. The mechanism is mean reversion: prices over-extrapolate near-term news (good or bad), and the cheapest decile tends to mean-revert harder than the most expensive decile.
What changed in the 2010s: a long stretch of dominance by growth and quality factors made many investors declare Value 'dead'. The decade-long underperformance of cheap stocks vs. expensive stocks was real, but it was also the largest single drawdown in the Value factor's recorded history, which historically has preceded the strongest reversals. Since 2022, Value has outperformed Growth in every region we track. The premium isn't dead; it's normalising.
The danger with mechanical Value screens is the value trap: businesses that look cheap because they're permanently impaired (declining revenue, structurally low ROIC, balance-sheet stress). The MoatMap Value score is composite: it includes shareholder yield (buybacks + dividends), which filters out businesses that don't generate enough cash to return any to shareholders. But composite scores still pick up some traps. The cross-check that matters is Quality.
Best practice: look for stocks that score 80+ on both Value and Quality. The combination is rare; when it appears, it usually means the market has temporarily mispriced a fundamentally healthy business. That intersection is where the largest single-stock returns historically cluster.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What are the best Value stocks to buy in 2026?
- The table above ranks the 25 cheapest stocks by MoatMap's composite Value score (P/E, EV/EBITDA, P/B, shareholder yield) across the 20,000-stock global universe. Always cross-check the Quality column: a Value-only screen surfaces both deep-value opportunities and value traps in roughly equal measure. The ones that score 70+ on both Value and Quality are statistically the highest-conviction setups.
- What does MoatMap's Value score include?
- Value is a percentile composite of four measures. Earnings yield (inverse of P/E): the most-tested cheapness signal. EV/EBITDA: capital-structure-neutral (works for indebted businesses). Price-to-book: the original Fama-French Value measure, still works in financials and asset-heavy businesses. Shareholder yield: buybacks plus dividends as a percentage of market cap, filters out cash-burning businesses that look cheap on paper.
- How do I avoid value traps?
- Three filters: (1) Pair Value with Quality. A high-Value, low-Quality stock is a trap candidate. (2) Look at revenue trajectory. Cheap and declining is rarely a winner; cheap and stable usually mean-reverts. (3) Read the Momentum score. Deep-value stocks with negative momentum often have one more leg down before the re-rating. The strongest Value setups score high on Value, decent on Quality, and have Momentum that's stopped declining.
- Is P/E ratio the best way to find cheap stocks?
- P/E is the most popular cheapness measure but not the most robust. It breaks for cyclicals (earnings collapse mid-cycle make stocks look expensive at the bottom and cheap at the top), for high-leverage companies (P/E ignores debt), and for any company with non-recurring items in earnings. EV/EBITDA addresses the leverage problem; P/B handles cyclicals better. Composite Value scores combine all four to mute the failure modes of any single ratio.
- Value vs Growth: which works better in 2026?
- Both work over long periods, in different regimes. Value tends to outperform when interest rates are stable or rising and when the dispersion between cheap and expensive stocks is wide (it currently is). Growth outperforms when rates are falling and when a small number of mega-cap winners are taking market share (the 2015-2021 regime). MoatMap's Quality factor covers the 'profitable growth' angle separately, so a Value screen here doesn't mean ignoring growth entirely.
- Are international stocks cheaper than US stocks?
- Substantially, on every Value measure. Japan, Korea, Europe, and most emerging markets trade at ~half the P/E and ~half the P/B of the US S&P 500. MoatMap covers 30 markets, so the Value screen above will tend to be heavy in non-US names. This is correct, and historically the cheapest country indexes have outperformed the most expensive country indexes.
- How often does the Value ranking refresh?
- Daily. Value scores update as new financials are filed and as prices move. The page is cached for 1 hour at the edge.