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Rating: Summary: Great book Review: Be Careful! It is just a CD including an Excel File. You need to have two other add-ins installed to run the file. I can't judge how flexible this model is. But I couldn't apply this to my current valuation class in MBA program.
Rating: Summary: Great book! Review: For investment banking professionals, "Valuation" is an excellent tool book to keep, to study, to look up for reference, and the like...I strongly recommend investment banking pros to have one. It helps!!!
Rating: Summary: Good but bad Excel support Review: Hmm I wonder if those giving this book five stars actually work for McKinsey. As a practioner, I don't know anyone in the industry who has actually read this book. It looks impressive on the bookshelf, but the content is anything but impressive. A lot of topics are covered, but each one only superficially and the writing is extremely dry and boring. I actually found reading this volume *painful*, and I'm supposed to like this stuff since I do it for a living! My advice for any potential buyer is read a few chapters first before you shell out for it.
Rating: Summary: Adequate, but not Original Review: I hoped that McKinsey would have something new to say on this subject. There are two corporate finance texts and various finance books that cover the ground better or at least as well, so it is hard to see why this book was written. In light of recent corporate shenanigans with off-balance sheet products, it is unforgiveable that this book doesn't address how lack of value can be disguised using off-balance sheet products. Total return swaps, an off-balance sheet financing tool, isn't discussed, and credit derivatives, another off-balance sheet tool aren't even discussed. For coverage of these topics and offshore vehicles, read "Credit Derivatives" by Tavakoli.
Rating: Summary: Good but bad Excel support Review: I liked this book. In Russia it is one of the most popular books on valuatuion. But when I can get the perfect excel support for Investment Valuation by Aswath Damodaran or good web support for Valuation Methods and Shareholder Value Creation by Pablo Fernandez, I ask the authors, why don't they put supporting material in disk? I think that the price of their sowtware ($94.50) is too high compairing with the book ($56 with discount), because there is no supporting materials - only 1 spreadsheet (from my point of view does not conform to McKinsey, as the leader of consulting business). I hope, for the 4-th edition we will have a good excel support.
Rating: Summary: The cover and paper quality, and graph color are not good Review: The book's content is rich and meaningful. But the quality of the paper is very low. Especially the cover paper is not durable. When you open and close the book, the cover paper cracks and becomes as if it is hardly worn. The lines will be formed right at the corner where paper bends. And the cover paper is not hard, when you wear in the back-pak the corners of the pages including cover paper's will be bent easily. The book will look very old fastly. The graph has not different colors other than black and white. Only black color is used in the graphs. You know that in order to understand different variables in the graph, one should seperate those variables by colors, but publishers or whoever did not do this, which is very bad. That is it PS Maybe Mr. Tom Copeland did not want his book be printed in such low quality papers and black and white color graphs, but his works should be published in high quality papers including graphs.
Rating: Summary: Superficial and lacking in depth Review: The first part of the book covers very basic material that may be found anywhere on the Internet or in a beginner's finance text book. This portion will be valuable only to introductory students of the subject. The second two parts, which deal with actual valuation techniques, are very verbose, but lacking in organization and depth. This half assumes that you are already familiar with concepts such as WACC, Free Cash Flows, and other accounting and valuation terms. Although several valuation techniques are indeed discussed, by no means is the list comprehensive. Furthermore, no systematic approach to deriving or explaining the formulas is available, and often, terms not introduced earlier are used. On the positive side, however, the book makes easy reading and focuses on a more practical, rather than academic or theoretical, discussion of valuation. This book may not provide much value to a serious student of valuation. Furthermore, I do not believe it will make an ideal reference for the experienced professional either. At best, it will make a good second reference for a graduate level course in valuation.
Rating: Summary: Logic jumps Review: This book is useful if you're already quite familiar with common valuation methods and can fill in the jumps & gaps. However, if any of the areas you're looking at is new to you or if you would like a more logical, well-reasoned approach or simply a discussion of all the various valuation methods in use, buy Damodaran's text instead. This book was the prescribed & provided reference in the Corporate Finance department I worked in but most of my colleagues and I purchased our own copies of Damodaran's text "Investment Valuation, Wiley, Aswath Damodaran", which is superior in breadth as well as logical description of valuation processes.
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