"...but still, the vast majority of debt trades in the 90-110 range." That's usually for freshly issued/on-the run or about-to-mature debt. It _used_ to be the

"...but still, the vast majority of debt trades in the 90-110 range." That's usually for freshly issued/on-the run or about-to-mature debt. It _used_ to be the case before the financial crisis that most debt traded near par - that has changed as the cost of repo financing has become disjoint of the risk-free rate since the crisis. EV/EBITDA is the multiple to compare - as you rightly pointed out. A naive EV comparison, as done by HackerCapital, is misleading. The description of leverage is also a bit simplified - typically, you would discount earnings with the weighted average cost of capital (WACC) = (cost of debt)(debt/EV) + (cost of equity)(equity/EV). So the discount factor does not simply "balance out" the leveraged (and volatile) returns - it depends on the relative cost of debt vs. equity _and_ the leverage ratio. It's in the (cost of equity) factor that you can normalize different sectors as (cost of equity) = risk_free_rate + historical_beta * (sector_return - risk_free_rate). Sector return would typically be from a benchmark equity index specific to the industry - whether tech or autos.