European quality stocks: which ones are actually cheap?

2026-09-17 · By Lubin Danilo, founder of Lubin Investment

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I ran my quality filter, ten financial criteria, across every European stock and kept only the top scores. Of the eleven that qualify, eight trade at a discount to my fair buy price and three at a premium, but not one triggers my strict buy signal: quality never tells you the price.

The filter, applied across Europe

I score every stock on ten concrete financial criteria, regardless of country or size: is it profitable, do sales and free cash flow keep growing over time, does it buy back its own shares instead of diluting them, is its debt manageable. Price plays no role in that score. That is deliberate: I answer the quality question before I ever ask about price.

Running that filter across every European exchange and keeping only the 9s and 10s out of 10, the highest bar I measure, eleven names come up today: a Greek stock exchange operator, two British gold miners, a Dutch maker of the machines that etch the world's most advanced computer chips. For each one I then compare today's price with my fair buy price, a conservative five-year projection of the cash the business should generate. Below it, that's a discount; above it, a premium.

The full ranking

Here are the eleven, ranked from the widest discount to the steepest premium.

A 240% discount looks like a trap, not a bargain

At the top of the list, Fiera Milano organizes trade shows and exhibitions in Italy and abroad. On paper the gap is staggering: my model shows a 240% discount to the current price. I am always wary of a number like that. My calculation assumes, by default, that a company's free cash flow will grow 20% a year for five years, a reasonable assumption for a large, established group. On a 539-million-euro company like Fiera Milano, whose cash generation depends heavily on the trade-show calendar from one year to the next, that same assumption compounded five times over produces a wildly inflated price target. A gap that large usually means the assumption doesn't fit the company, not that a real bargain exists.

Proof I'm not making that up: my site also runs a stricter check, which I call an opportunity signal, that additionally requires the price to sit among the lowest levels the stock has ever traded at over five years. That signal doesn't fire on a single one of these eleven stocks, not even Fiera Milano with its triple-digit discount. Further down the table, Euronext Athens Holding shows a far more modest gap, 32%, and a sturdier story behind it: the operator of the Greek stock market, acquired at a 74.3% controlling stake by the Euronext group in late 2025 and rebranded Euronext Athens in April 2026, collects a fee on every trade at almost no extra marginal cost as volumes rise, and listed companies almost never switch exchanges. That's a real moat, not a modeling artifact.

The pence trap, and why the two gold miners don't tell the same story

Five of the eleven stocks in this ranking, including both gold miners, trade in London, where prices are quoted in pence, not pounds. A price of '628.5 GBp' for Lancashire Holdings means £6.285, not £628.50: miss that conversion and any market-cap or valuation math done by hand is off by a factor of 100, a trap I systematically correct for before publishing any number drawn from a UK stock. Morningstar's glossary entry on GBX documents this London Stock Exchange convention.

Once the conversion is made, Endeavour Mining and Fresnillo, the two gold miners on this list, tell opposite stories despite riding the same metal and the same cycle: a 6% discount for the former, essentially fair value, against 79% for the latter. A mining company's free cash flow tracks the price of gold and silver closely, not just its own output: a low P/FCF at the top of a commodity cycle can deflate on its own if prices pull back, with nothing changing at the mine itself. A discount on a miner deserves a look at the metal cycle, not just the ratio.

Why the market pays a premium elsewhere

At the other end of the ranking, ASML trades at a 13% premium. The Dutch company is the only one in the world that knows how to build the extreme ultraviolet lithography machines needed to etch the planet's most advanced chips, a near-monopoly without which the leading edge of the chip industry would grind to a halt. ASML closed fiscal year 2025 with €32.7 billion in net sales and a €38.8 billion order backlog, and expects growth to continue through 2026. My model actually grants it the most generous exit multiple in this ranking, 37 times free cash flow, against 8 times for a specialty insurer like Lancashire Holdings: the more durable a moat looks, the more the market is willing to pay for it.

Galderma, the Swiss dermatology group, and Amadeus IT Group, the travel industry's transaction processor, follow the same logic with premiums of 14% and 37%. In all three cases, the quality my filter measures is identical, 9 or 10 out of 10: what differs is how convinced the market is that the edge will last. The score never predicts the price.

What the whole set says

The table below sums up what's worth remembering from these eleven names.

What I do with this ranking

Just like my equivalent ranking of French quality stocks, I never turn a table like this into an automatic buy list, even less so here, where the strict buy signal doesn't fire on a single one of the eleven. What it gives you instead is a map: eleven companies worth a real look, each with a different reason for costing what it costs. That is exactly what my analysis tool does for any stock listed anywhere, in France, London, Athens or elsewhere, and you can check it yourself on my public screener.

FAQ

What does a discount or premium mean in this ranking?

My fair buy price is a conservative five-year projection of a company's free cash flow, discounted back at a target return. A discount means the current price sits below that price, a premium means it sits above it. It isn't a quality score or a prediction, just a valuation marker.

Why do the UK stock prices in this table look so huge?

Because London quotes share prices in pence (GBp), not pounds: you need to divide by 100 to get a price in pounds sterling. A market cap calculated without that conversion would be overstated by a factor of 100, an easy mistake to make on a foreign stock.

Does a discount of several hundred percent mean I should buy right away?

No. None of the eleven stocks in this ranking trigger my strict buy signal, which additionally requires a price among the lowest in the stock's own five-year history. An extreme discount on a small-cap in particular deserves a close look before being taken at face value. This is not investment advice, do your own research.

Related reading

• Dutch stocks: ASML isn't alone at the top
• UK Stocks: Plenty of Quality, Rarely at the Right Price
• When to Sell a Stock: Three Signals, One Trap

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About the author

Written by Lubin Danilo, founder of Lubin Investment. A self-taught individual investor, I find fundamental analysis fascinating, and it has delivered excellent results. For three years now, my performance has beaten the S&P 500. But analyzing every stock took too much time: sites with incomplete data, calculation methods and criteria never aligned with mine. And spotting the best stocks was just as time-consuming, even with my own well-defined checklist. So I put my software development background to work to build this software, base my investment strategy on its results, and share it with people who share the same passion as me. It judges a company's quality and its price separately, using criteria drawn from the financial literature (Warren Buffett, Michael Mauboussin, Aswath Damodaran).