The market is always estimating longterm interest rate and inflation through Growth stocks.
Growth stocks are nothing but leverage bets on above two factors.
Be careful always betting on Growth stocks as there is huge embedded MACRO bet coupled with micro.
Stagflation, take care.

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)

Why is Tasty bite at 90 PE with 15% sales growth and 20-22% ROCE.

Why not at 20-30 PE?

1/ Howard Marks once said that before buying an asset, above anything, he wants to know “the amount of optimism that’s in the price.”

All investors can do this with a handy tool: The Reverse DCF.

I'll also leave a download link to my compact DCF Model at the end of this thread.

2/ We all know a regular DCF. But's what a "Reverse DCF"?

If we consider that a DCF is a Linear Equation, we could say the 'X' (The unknown variable) is the Intrinsic Value.

In a Reverse DCF, we start with the Market Price and try to find some other variable, say Sales Growth.

3/ Let's start by taking an example: VST Industries, a Cigarette-maker based in India.

I valued them on my blog a while ago. I'll be retaining the old assumptions, but using the latest financials.

So please note that the Valuation isn't accurate

4/ This is a "Regular DCF" of VST Industries. The Assumptions I've made indicate an Overvaluation.

The Intrinsic Value is Rs. 3,012, but the Market Price is Rs. 3,492.

Let's not dwell on whether this is correct, since we discussed earlier that this isn't an accurate Valuation.

5/ If we want to do a "Reverse DCF" instead, we need to pick a different variable to 'find'. Say, I will pick the Sales Growth numbers.

I will now remove the Sales Growth numbers from the Model and assume that Sales Growth is the same across the years for ease of calculation.

Accidents happens when one doesn't look at valuations.

A supposedly platform stock listed in 2019. OFS price was 320 Rs. High of 6396 made yesterday.

Mcap crossed 1 lac crore.

Company was affected by CoVid so will talk a bit on pre-CoVid nos.

1/3

Sales of 2300 cr in FY20. NP 730 cr. Company has a monopoly given by the govt. Business is good and many extensions taking place, which will take time to bear fruit, if at all. But valuation-wise it had gone bonkers.

2/3

Stock corrected 40%+ in 2 days. This is what can happen when one doesn't heed valuations. And ignores the risks to the business. And only looks at blue sky scenario.

A good company may not be a good investment, at any price.

3/3

Pay attention. not only the loss making tech continues to get decimated but is joined by the generals of Market.