Wondering why your company's stock trades the way it does?Looking for ways to improve the price of your stock? MarketTopographer is a new product that aims to help companies diagnosewhat's going on with their stock by looking at 12 core factors,including financial leverage, the dividend payout ratio, historicalearnings stability and expected future growth in earnings.

“It's the only thing out there like it right now to allowcompanies to dig in and understand their relative value,” saysJonathan Greenberg, who developed the Market Topographer stockanalysis platform.

Greenberg says that in his 13 years as an investment banker atLehman Brothers and Salomon, corporate clients had two mainquestions: how to boost their stock price and why their valuationwas weaker than that of their peers. He left Wall Street to work ontechnology to help answer those questions.

Market Topographer's model “measures in essence the relativevalue of all stocks in the market, and we're able to statisticallyattribute differences to exposure to different factors,” Greenbergsays. The company offers a report called Comps Companion that usesthe multifactor analysis to benchmark the performance of acompany's stock against that of its peers.

“We have 20 years of market dynamics to help companiesunderstand the evolution of their multiple,” Greenberg says. “Wecan go back 20 years and generate reports analyzing the differencein relative value for them or their peers vs. the group at anypoint over the last 20 years.”

Greenberg says financial leverage is an influential factor.“It's not nearly as important as a year and a half ago, but it'sstill very important,” he says. “Companies with higher leveragehave lower valuations because it is riskier and makes their equitythat much riskier.”

Greenberg says Market Topographer's analysis can be helpful forinvestor relations groups: “It allows companies to understandbetter how much of the trading multiple is within their control andallows them to communicate that better to their investors.”Corporate development and corporate finance teams can also use theanalysis, for example if the company is considering a transactionand wants to understand how it's positioned, he says.