It's always worth keeping an eye on the earnings forecasts for your favourite companies, especially if you use forward price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio to gauge when to buy and sell your shares.

You never know, if City brokers have been revising their projections of late, your investments may not be as cheap -- or expensive -- as you think!

Today I'm looking at the earnings per share (EPS) forecasts for Lloyds Banking Group (LSE: LLOY.L - news) , the FTSE 100 (FTSE: ^FTSE - news) (UKX) high-street bank. All my figures are courtesy of S&P Capital IQ.

The consensus for 2012 is for earnings per share of 2p, which puts the 47p shares on a lofty forward P/E of 23.

The estimates also suggest earnings may rise to 4p per share for 2013 and then climb to 6p per share in 2014 before flattening off at that level the year after.

The data from S&P Capital IQ also indicates Lloyds Banking Group's revenues may struggle to reach the levels attained in 2011. They are expected to fall to £18.5b and remain largely unchanged for three years. Revenues could then climb to £19.1b in 2015.

All told, the forecasts aren't great, with earnings essentially predicted to go nowhere after 2014. But then again, that P/E of 23 looks like the market is hoping the forecasts may be too pessimistic.

Whether these projections make Lloyds Banking Group a buy, a hold or a sell is, of course, up to you. To put the company's multiple into perspective, the FTSE 100 at 5,967 trades on a P/E of around 11.

Further company comment is available at www.fool.co.uk.

Amazing performance & 50p looking likely before Xmas. Not sure if LLOY are part of the LIBOR scandal, but seems as though they have dodged that bullet so far.

http://money.uk.msn.com/lloyds-to-cut-rates-for-borrowers-1

Comment / Opinion concerning LLOY performance in 2013:

http://www.digitallook.com/news/2362/The_2013_Outlook_For_Lloyds.html?storysrc=motleyfool

50p bid!

03 Jan Lloyds Banking... LLOY Deutsche Bank Buy 0.00 49.69 66.00 66.00 Retains

66p SP Target.

04 Jan Lloyds Banking... LLOY Deutsche Bank Buy 49.47 49.71 66.00 66.00 Retains

SP Target 66p.

Just touched 52p!!!

UBS Buy Upgrade Tp raised from 50p -> 60p

seems to have some momentum

sp going well 53p+

Part of UBS note today:
"Recent developments such as the appointment of an outsider to become the next Governor of the Bank of England, easing of liquidity rules by the BIS as well as the introduction of the SLS and encouragement of the UK banks to run down excess cash reserves lead us to believe that the future regulatory agenda will be less aggressive than what we have experienced over the last 18 months.In our view, Lloyds investment strategy is simplest of the UK domestic banks. The story is defined with the group focussed on execution. In our view, Lloyds is clearly going to deliver rising margins, falling costs and falling provisions which should provide a very strong upswing to profitability and EPS momentum over the next few years.Unlike RBS and Barclays which have been lending strongly into the UK mortgage market while contracting balance sheets in other areas, Lloyds has been shrinking both its non-core assets in 2012 and its core lending into the UK mortgage market as well. In our UK Banks Monitor published today “Normal service is now being resumed” we see scope for this to reverse in 2013 which will provide an additional catalyst specific to Lloyds."

RSI looking a tad over bought gap @56p and a gap up this morning.

I believe the break-even price is around 63p, taking account the toxic protection exit fee LLOY paid HMG. I wonder if HMG might now be upping talks to divest their stake?

Breakeven is 74p.

From last March :- Fund managers shun RBS at breakeven price

Agreed Skinny but some consider the calculation this way Guardian dec12

kernow - bloody accountants :-)

@50p I'm (finally) in an overall profit on ALL of my LLOY - bought on the way down and on the way up.

Nice nice.........very nice.

ps got at least 3 full broker notes today. if ive got time Ill post em so that they can be redistributed.

Got the sister here for new year, well belated new year so a bit busy.

Well done Skinny. Traded in/out many times myself but need to improve my hindsight I feel. Confident hold atm imho.