CFROI Valuation [Hardcover]

Bartley J. Madden (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0750638656 | ISBN-13: 978-0750638654 | Publication Date: March 22, 1999 | Edition: 1

What generates shareholder value? How can it be evaluated? How can it influence investment decisions and corporate strategy? Cash Flow Return On Investment answers all these questions by detailing the pioneering financial research carried out by HOLT Value Associates, the leading consultancy in the field.

Read this book if you want to find out what really drives the wealth generation in any business, allowing you to pick which equities will succeed and which strategic initiatives are destined for high returns.

The CFROI model is an essential tool for professionals working in finance and corporate strategy. It clarifies how economic value is created in a firm and acts as a reliable guide to:

* making investment decisions
* taking key strategic decisions
* understanding economic value





Shows how to judge and compare individual equities across markets and company sectors
Cutting edge theory and practice
The leading book about shareholder value authored by one of the world's leading consultancies in the field

Editorial Reviews

Review

A reader from New York on Amazon.Com
CFROI explains stock prices better than P/E ratios
Best finance book I have read in years!
The book is a quick read and does a terrific job of explaining the investment framework employed by institutional portfolio managers world-wide. CFROI brings the concept of return on invested capital to a more robust level by providing the investor with a greater understanding of stock price movement and valuation.
This book is a must read if you expect to outperform the market. The increased complexity of accounting rules over the last decade has forced investors to apply an analysis process focused on a company's future cash flows. The accuracy of the CFROI valuation framework places traditional analysis and EVA at the bottom of the investor's toolbox. CFROI can help you avoid value trap stocks and step up to high PE stocks who are expected to create wealth for their shareholders.

'Bart Madden's path-breaking study of CFROI is one of the most important works on corporate finance to appear in the past three decades.' H. Thomas Johnson - Retzlaff Professor of Business Administration, Portland State University (Oregon)

'This is a well thought out and splendidly written handbook of the CFROI (Cash Flow Return On Investment) Valuation method.. I would expect to find this book on the desk of every corporate and investment financial analyst and manager.' George M. Frankfurter - Lloyd F. Collette Professor of Financial Services, Louisiana State University
'Written from a practitioner's perspective, this book nevertheless brings striking insights to academic debates on cost of capital, the handling of accounting items and cross-sectional differences in ROI fade rates.' Charles M. C. Lee - Henrietta Johnson Louis Professor of Management, Director, Parker Center for Investment Research, Cornell University

A reader from New York , June 29, 1999
CFROI explains stock prices better than P/E ratios
Best finance book I have read in years!
The book is a quick read and does a terrific job of explaining the investment framework employed by institutional portfolio managers world-wide. CFROI brings the concept of return on invested capital to a more robust level by providing the investor with a greater understanding of stock price movement and valuation.
This book is a must read if you expect to outperform the market. The increased complexity of accounting rules over the last decade has forced investors to apply an analysis process focused on a company's future cash flows. The accuracy of the CFROI valuation framework places traditional analysis and EVA at the bottom of the investor's toolbox. CFROI can help you avoid value trap stocks and step up to high PE stocks who are expected to create wealth for their shareholders.

About the Author

He has a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Southern California and an MBA from the University of California-Berkeley. He has been published in economics, finance, and engineering journals, and in the Wall Street Journal and other business publications. Bart's work on the CFROI valuation model dates back to the late 1960s. The Journal of Investing has published two of his recent articles. Appearing in the Summer 1996 issue, "The CFROI Life Cycle" is an empirical study that underpins the CFROI-model's fade rates. "The CFROI Valuation Model," published in the Spring 1998 issue, presents empirical support and argument for the CFROI-model's market-derived discount rate as superior to the conventional CAPM/beta approach used for estimating firms' costs of capital.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 356 pages
• Publisher: Butterworth-Heinemann; 1 edition (March 22, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0750638656
• ISBN-13: 978-0750638654
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #953,088 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Bartley J. Madden is an independent researcher whose current focus is on market-based solutions to public policy issues (see www.LearningWhatWorks.com). His writing about the proposed Dual Track system to circumvent the FDA's monopoly on access to not-yet-approved drugs has appeared in Regulation, Cancer Biotherapy & Radiopharmaceuticals, and Medical Hypotheses, as well as a monograph titled More Choices, Better Health published by The Heartland Institute.

After receiving a BS in mechanical engineering, working as an engineer, and spending time in the Army, Madden earned an MBA at the University of California - Berkeley. In 1969 he co-founded Callard, Madden & Associates, where his research was instrumental in developing what is known as the CFROI (cash-flow-return-on-investment) valuation model, which is widely used by large money management firms today.

After managing portfolios for Harbor Capital Advisors for eight years, Madden joined HOLT Value Associates in the early 1990s, a firm created to extend the CFROI framework and provide consulting services to portfolio managers and corporate managers. HOLT was acquired by Credit Suisse in 2002, at which time Madden became a managing director of Credit Suisse/HOLT. He retired from Credit Suisse in late 2003.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

57 of 62 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The millenium stock selection model, November 21, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: CFROI Valuation (Hardcover)

Madden's text substitutes empirical fact for academic claptrap, clearing away the underbrush of neat-though-erroneous theories like CAPM and EVA, giving the conscientious professional and serious amateur a meticulous roadmap to superior understanding and investment returns. Or in Madden's words, "The employment of CAPM/beta and related procedures has become a ritual due not to empirical usefulness, but to its mathematical elegance - the touchstone of mainstream academic corporate finance." The justification for CFROIs demanding discipline is demonstrated early in the text in an example, wherein the past real record of a hypothetical firm with a stable 6.5 % ROI is converted into GAAP accounting numbers from which an ROI series is calculated. In re the accounting-based return history, Madden asks, "Who referring to (the chart) would not be misled about a firm's performance relying on the (ROI gyrating between + 24% and -10%) while the economic performance did not vary?" In short, if you don't know the facts, you can't solve the mystery. The predictive and interpretive powers of the system's valuation metric is the result of plain hard work, not the magical properties of some lazy man's statistical dowsing rod like Earnings Momentum. Last widely employed during the Tulip Craze of an earlier century, Earnings Momentum is based on the dubious concept that as long as accounting earnings, surreal and manipulable though they be, go up, the stock should go up as fast as it does go up, unless earnings don't go up as fast as expected, in which case we've been disappointed, so it's not worth anything until the bookies can reestablish the odds. Had we all expended the necessary effort on CFROI, we might have anticipated or at least understood to our financial benefit and peace of mind: IBM problems in the mid-80s to mid-90s that led to a restructuring; Wal-Mart's staggering gait beginning in the late 80's that produced unsatisfactory price action in the early 90's; Hewlett Packard's defiance of gravity in maintaining an exceptional internal rate of return; ditto Abbot Labs, Hershey and Wrigley's outperforming the market; the rebound of Analog Devices and the volatility of Advanced Micro Devices; and so on and on. The CFROI knowledge system dissects the firm and the value creation process, meticulously separating the past and present from the nebulous future, thereby establishing a mathematical basis for professional investment decision making. The CFROI valuation model applies dividend discount technique to inflation-adjusted cash flow growth projections, using a firm-specific risk premium plus the market-required rate of return to determine the firms warranted value and the equity's warranted price. CFROI resolves two fundamental equity valuation issues: the recognized fallibility of the Capital Asset Pricing Model and the inherent inconstancy of accounting data. The former supplying a counter-intuitive cost of capital or required rate of return; the other concealing the real prospects of the firm's wealth creating efforts. As the lengthy flow charts detailing the process required to turn accounting hash into economic reality attest, CFROI is not a black box of unexplained miracles. It's a sweatshop equipped with empirically-proven, high tech tools which give the driven amateur and dedicated professional the means to outrun the herd.

36 of 43 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars CFROI explains stock prices better than P/E ratios, June 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: CFROI Valuation (Hardcover)

Best finance book I have read in years!

The book is a quick read and does a terrific job of explaining the investment framework employed by institutional portfolio managers world-wide. CFROI brings the concept of return on invested capital to a more robust level by providing the investor with a greater understanding of stock price movement and valuation.

This book is a must read if you expect to outperform the market. The increased complexity of accounting rules over the last decade has forced investors to apply an analysis process focused on a company's future cash flows. The accuracy of the CFROI valuation framework places traditional analysis and EVA at the bottom of the investor's toolbox. CFROI can help you avoid value trap stocks and step up to high PE stocks who are expected to create wealth for their shareholders.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good primer for non-finance people; fun, light mental workout for practitioners, February 24, 2006

By 

Prof Steve Ahn - See all my reviews

This review is from: CFROI Valuation (Hardcover)

Madden's "CFROI Valuation" is a good primer on valuation, especially for non-financial practitioners, managers, and executives of public firms who have been pounded in the last decade with the goal of maximizing shareholder value today - even at the risk of tomorrow. A cursory review of numerous other books and articles on valuation shows that the topic has become somewhat of an art-meets-science cliché. Madden provides a relatively fresh approach on the topic using the cashflow return on investment (CFROI) perspective.

Standard valuation is largely driven by a measure of cashflows, the long and short term capital investment required to achieve such cashflows, the growth and sustainability of such cashflows, and a cost of capital used to fund such activities. Here the science begins to shift into art - to determine what to do with the cashflows - usually to discount them and/or to apply some metric to arrive at value.

Similar to other widely read valuation books such as Koller's "Valuation" published by McKinsey & Co. and "Damodaran on Valuation", I would recommend this book especially to non-financial managers and executives, as an informative, introductory primer on valuation. Madden provides easy-to-understand, step-by-step guidance on valuing a company including analytical assumptions (remember the art!). Though much of the book is presumably written from the perspective of an institutional investor analyzing stocks, Madden delves into CFROI with enough breadth to make valuation and other financial professionals ponder its broader applications.

With that said, I think practitioners including investment bankers, business appraisers, and valuations consultants as well as CFO's and heads of corporate development may find Madden's "CFROI Valuation" a fun work-out of the mind. The book provides useful frameworks around which to ponder current events and trends with a less conventional valuation approach.

In dispelling traditional valuation methods and practices, Madden helps to remind, though not explicitly stating such, that formulas and technical analysis may measure value but they don't determine value.