Professor Aswath Damodaran

It’s not every day you get to meet a legend. Probably sitting in the Top 1 of valuation experts in the world, the highly respected and extremely friendly Professor Aswath Damodaran at the Stern School of Business (University of New York) was gracious enough to allow our own Liam Bastick to buy him a cup of coffee.

Liam often states that he has been heavily influenced by this man’s thinking over the years and anyone that has ever been on any of our training courses will know that to be true from comments made, books recommended or topics discussed.

Interestingly, Professor Damodaran revealed that as part of his latest book that he is completing, he takes to task the over-importance placed on financial models in the valuation process to the extent that people simply believe the outputs, forgetting to check for reasonableness and consistency of story. Not that our opinion is worthy, but we couldn’t agree more.

If you’d like to know more about his latest book, we’ll let you know more when we have the details. In the meantime, books such as Applied Corporate Finance come highly recommended. SumProduct makes no secret of the fact that much of the website is inspired by Damodaran Online.

You will notice like ourselves, he gives considerable insights away for free and if you are a practitioner or just someone interested in the world of corporate finance and valuations, you’ll do very well to find a better online resource than his.