You can find

@_CreatingWealth sure, only request. Plz do not take it negative. Get over metric like PE, even if use it , at least take cash flow based PE. Many times, it would make worst investments attractive n decent one unattractive. It has lot of bias, limitation n constraint. 1 must know before using it

A thread: How to value? 🏦💰❓

Sharing my learnings from my journey so far.

Initially when I started out I used to ignore what anybody would have to say about their style of valuing a business and I would blindly copy what Benjamin Graham’s book, The Intelligent Investor had to say.

Later came a stage where I realized Benjamin style was not working.

Before we get into the learning, here is the background to it:

If you have been following me for the past 1 year you would have noticed how my valuation method has changed.

I used to struggle a lot with valuation and it would be at the back of my mind the whole day thinking what are these investors doing to value. I tried DCF but that didn’t work for me. (Don’t hate me for that, its my personal choice)

I used to attend Bloomberg Quint’s talk on Zoom, message investors, read books, etc. to figure out: How to value? (The frustration had got to a level that I took break from investing for 3-4 weeks)

Grateful to @AswathDamodaran for sharing his wisdom in this remarkable conversation with @veiled_value about the book, The Dark Side of Valuation.

Excerpts follow in this thread.
Members, access the full interview

On every investor's worst enemy:

On uncertainty:

On multiples vs. DCF:

On stories and valuation:

Paying 50-100x earnings for 'blue ocean' sectors has become normalized with promise of changing trends and immense future opportunity. Stock markets look forward, if the future opportunity is great, in most cases that 100x valuation already factors a 30x valuation in 3 years.

For investors, the question of where the buck stops is difficult to answer, because the goal post keeps changing. 30x is reasonable for one business, for another 70x is acceptable. So why not everything in between too?

Not every business captures the opportunity available. There is many a slip between the cup and the lip, as my English teacher used to say. When investors have seen valuations creep from 20x to 100x in a matter of a year or two, it is easy to to keep dancing to the same music.

But like we used to play musical chairs in childhood, someone will be left standing too. And here the rules aren't that 1 person gets eliminated at a time, hundreds get crushed at the same time. In childhood, we had a 1/X chance of being caught standing when the music stopped.

The margin of safety was high till you got down to the last 3-4 people playing the game. Similarly, your margin of safety reduces dramatically when valuation becomes irrelevant. A few months of underperformance and suddenly things don't look so rosy any more.

Never make the mistake of selling a great business just because it's overvalued.