Customer Reviews

Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset (Wiley Frontiers in Science)

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(4)

 

 

I have an MBA and work in investment banking and yet I have found Damodaran's book extremely useful. It's simply a great book on valuation that teaches exactly how to value companies by various techniques. Valuation by its very nature is a quantitative exercise. Anyone who thinks they can approach valuation in some non-quantitative fashion is just kidding themself. I highly recommend this book !!!

An outstanding book from the high-priest of valuation. Covers all major techniques and applications. However, not all that suitable for beginners or as an introductory text since some of the (slightly advanced) material is presented in a fairly condensed manner. Readers with a little experience in the area or students who have taken at least one finance course and understand the fundamentals of financial economics should find this book extremely useful, though. Great as a reference guide, too.

Good work, if only it was reliable... In a discipline where accuracy is so important, I am amazed it has been selling so well for so long. The book has plenty of formulae mistakes that make its reading and comprehension really difficult and painfully time-consuming as you need to go through correcting all those errors and read the chapters again and again. Still, even after such an arduous work, you end up not being 100% sure that what you have learnt is correct. Wiley should long ago have retired this edition from circulation and then market a new, thoroughly corrected one. Of course, those (many) unlucky readers who have bought this terrible (paperback) edition should receive a new one for free as soon as it is available. I feel I have been cheated!

This book has the potential to be an excellent resource on valuation analysis. It was well written and insightful. However, the typos contained in this book prevent it from reaching its true potential. Too often, formulas contained plus signs where there should have been a minus sign or an "is" should have been an "is not." Although the typos did not ultimately prevent me from understanding the material, I had to work harder than I should have to sort out some of the confusion.

Having an MBA and having worked in an investment bank, this is the best all around valuation book I've read. The most significant feature of this book is how the ideas are presented. The reader gathers new insights, and is exposed to the nuances of valuation technologies, which usually confuse even the practitioners. His website also contains several discussion points that supplement the well presented text. If you have to choose only one valuation book, this is it. This book rates highly not only because of the excellent coverage but more importantly how the examples and the ideas have been brilliantly crafted into a great learning experience. A great teacher surely shines in how he impart even the mundane ideas of basic valuation. Buy this book for the way he teaches, not only for the topics he discusses.

This is without doubt the best book on valuation since Graham and Dodd. It thoroughly explains the valuation process from the ground up with simplicity,intuitively and with just the right amount of math.All that one needs to get enchanted by this gifted teacher and writer is commonsense and an understanding of basic school level math.

However, I feel that the chapters on measuring growth as well as relative valuation were a bit skimpy. Dr. Damodaran has excellently covered some of these areas in the working papers available on his website. Together, his website and this book present the most powerful learning source that I have found in this fascinating area.

I'm a CEO of a high-growth tech company and former Goldman Sach banker. I've earned a JD and MBA from NYU. I've read countless books on valuation.

I believe that this book offers one of the most flexible approaches to valuing assets that I have yet encountered. Its primary objective is guiding the reader in valuing any asset, from an option on a company that manufactures high-tech drilling equipment to a neighborhood lemonade stand. It is intentionally simple, but simplistic. And that is why it is so valuable.

... This book teaches bare bones valuation... the bread and butter of valuation. Actually, it covers all the topics ...[giving] the same cursory attention that venture capitalist and investment bankers do... that is to say, that they deserve.

One note of caution, you should have a good understanding of discounted cash flow analysis to understant this book. I would recommend Essentials of Investing, which is a text book, but a good one.

Apologies to Mr Damodaran, further to my last 'scathing' review, I have since discovered that Mr Damodaran has conveniently posted the entire Solutions manual to this book on his website.

This is an excellent book in valuing assets. As a financial analyst, I highly recommend this book to students and analysts, although some parts of the book, especially these relating to real options are somewhat oversimplified. Nevertheless it is one of the books that everybody who is involved in valuation should have. What is the real contribution of the book to students and profesionals is that it stresses the drawbacks of the mentioned valuation methods. Buy this book, it is "Value for money".

This book is/was required for the CFA program.
Those requirers were required to print pages of errata.
Many essential formulas are simply wrong, presumably from sloppiness. Reading the book is a lot like correcting a high schooler's homework.
All this courtesy of an organization that publishes its own performance presentation standards and generally, high-handedly nitpicks.