Public company comparables, comparable companies, public comps, or simply comps are all terms referring to publicly traded companies that share key business and financial characteristics with the company assessed the valuation analysis. Companies in similar lines of businesses tend to trade at roughly similar multiples of their respective financial results (such as price to earnings or enterprise value to EBITDA). Even when they don’t, there are often specific quantitative and qualitative characteristics of the comparable companies that correlate with differences in valuation multiples. Since it is possible to calculate market values and multiples for public companies using public share prices and accounting information, a robust set of public comps provides very useful data points for valuing a private company.