My motivation for writing the book was simple. While I have three books on valuation - Investment Valuation, Damodaran on Valuation and The Dark Side of Valuation", they are all written for valuation practitioners. They are dense, not easy to read and require work to put into practice. I have always wanted to write a book for investors, many of seem to believe that valuation is far too complex for them to handle. That view makes them easy prey for valuation experts and analysts, who use a mixture of bombast, buzz words and numbers to intimidate.
As I started to write the book, I set myself two objectives. The first was to not short change readers, by assuming that they were not skilled enough to do valuation. I think valuation is fundamentally simple but that we choose to layer complexities on it. So, I wanted to provide investors with the tools to do a full fledged valuation of any type of company - young or old, mature or growth, cyclical or commodity. The second was to cut through the details of valuation models and identify the value drivers for any company. Even in the most complex valuation models, the value of a stock is determined by one or two key inputs. Knowing what those inputs are and how to estimate them is 90% of valuation. More importantly, if you know the drivers of value, you can create investment strategies that are built around those drivers, even if you choose not to do a full-fledged valuation. If you get a chance to take a look at the book, you will notice that the chapters are structured around different types of companies and that each chapter is centered around identifying the "value drivers" for that type of company and the "value plays" that emerge from these drivers.
Posts
Keine Kommentare:
Kommentar veröffentlichen