Walk me through the price-target math for a simple long pitch: EPS of $5.00, market at 14x, you argue for 16x.

At consensus-style pricing the stock trades at 14x times $5.00 of forward EPS, or $70. Your thesis — say, margin expansion that improves earnings quality and growth — justifies a re-rating to 16x on the same $5.00, giving a $80 target. That is $80 versus $70, roughly 14% upside (80 / 70 − 1 = 14.3%). The discipline this forces: you must articulate WHY the multiple expands — here, because the market is treating a structural margin improvement as temporary — and you should sanity-check that 16x is inside the stock's own historical range and the peer range. Multiple-expansion-only pitches are weaker than estimate-driven ones, so ideally you also argue EPS is beatable.