If close to half the companies in the United States have price-to-earnings ratios below 16x, you may consider Cognizant Technology Solutions Corporation as a stock to potentially avoid with its 18.4x P/E ratio . There's an inherent assumption that a company should outperform the market to be considered reasonable . If we review the last year of earnings, dishearteningly the company's profits fell to the tune of 4.8% . Meanwhile, the rest of the