Counterpoint Global Insights

Everything Is a DCF Model

A Mantra for Valuing Cash-Generating Assets

CONSILIENT OBSERVER | August 3, 2021

Introduction AUTHORS

Matt Levine is a very talented journalist who writes the Money Stuff Michael J. Mauboussin
[email protected]
opinion column for Bloomberg. A trained lawyer and former banker,
Levine is smart, entertaining, and informative. 1 He also likes to use Dan Callahan, CFA
a handful of themes to create context for his observations about [email protected]
business, law, and the markets.
One of his favorites is “everything is securities fraud.” 2 The basic
idea is that whenever something bad happens to a company
causing its stock to decline, someone will accuse the management
of acting nefariously. In the same vein, we want to suggest the
mantra “everything is a DCF model.” The point is that whenever
investors value a stake in a cash-generating asset, they should
recognize that they are using a discounted cash flow (DCF) model.
This is important because an investor, from a venture capitalist to
a manager with a portfolio of large-capitalization stocks, owns
partial stakes in businesses. The value of those businesses is the
present value of the cash they can distribute to their owners.
This suggests a mindset that is very different from that of a
speculator, who buys a stock in anticipation that it will go up without
reference to its value. Investors and speculators have always
coexisted in markets, and the behavior of many market participants
is a blend of the two. But it is useful to keep in mind that these are
separate activities.
Note, too, that “everything is a DCF model” does not apply to
assets that do not generate cash flows, including cryptocurrencies,
art, wine, and gold.3 All of these assets may be of value and many
of them have appreciated over time, but they are not subject to
what John Burr Williams, an economist and author of the 1938
classic book The Theory of Investment Value, called “evaluation by
the rule of present worth.”4
The topic deserves attention because many market participants now, as in the past, don’t think that DCF models
are relevant.5 High valuations for many startups and companies with negative earnings, as well as the existence
of “meme stocks,” where gains and losses are determined more by online forums than fundamentals, make
thinking about cash flows appear quaint. Further, many practitioners use heuristics for value without recognizing
the purpose and limitations of the shorthands.

At the end of the day, the intrinsic value, determined by the present value of future cash flows, attracts the price
like a magnetic force. This means that investors always have to keep in mind the value drivers of a discounted
cash flow model. It is easy to forget but useful to remember.

The Wonder of Markets

Public stock exchanges are wondrous. When you buy a stock, you trade cash for a portion of the future cash
flows of a business. When you sell a stock, you trade the cash flows for cash. It’s a form of time travel: if you
buy a stock at a price less than its perceived value, you are essentially traveling into the future and judging that
today’s expectations for future cash flows are too low. Selling stock that is perceived to be overvalued is a
symmetrical move.

The founder, buyer, or holder of a business anticipates satisfactory returns based on the company’s distributable
cash flows over time. Cash flows are defined as the difference between profits after taxes and the investments
required to sustain or grow the business. This is as relevant for a small business in the local community as it is
for a company in the S&P 500. When an owner sells a business, the rights to the cash flow and the associated
risk and reward are transferred to the new holder.

Private markets are in some ways different than public markets, but the driver of value is the same. Private
markets generally have less liquidity, a measure of how cheap and easy it is to buy and sell stakes in companies,
than do public markets. As a result, investors in private markets expect an illiquidity premium, a little extra return
to pay them for the inability to transact cheaply.6 That premium is compensation for the friction of buying and
selling. But future cash flows still determine the value of the underlying assets.

Investors in private markets generally have more control over businesses than do investors in public markets.
For example, most venture capitalists work closely with the entrepreneurs in whom they invest, sitting on their
boards and making key introductions. Buyout firms also have tight control over their portfolio companies, allowing
the buyout firms to put in place strong governance practices, including an ability to make changes swiftly and
decisively. Control allows private equity investors to be proactive about placing a firm on a path to generating
strong long-term cash flows.

Another distinguishing feature of private markets is limited price discovery, a fancy way of saying that prices are
not set by a market with lots of willing buyers and sellers. For example, in venture capital the price of a new
round of financing is often set by the buyer who is willing to pay most for the stake, and those who think the price
is too high have no ready way to sell.

Something similar is true for buyouts. If a buyout firm seeks to acquire a public company, it may have to contend
with competing bids from other buyout funds or strategic buyers. But in most cases, the highest bidder wins the
auction. As with venture capital, there are lots of potential buyers but only one seller. Price discovery is weak in
private markets because the optimists can buy but the pessimists can’t sell.

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The decision to be private or public boils down to the tradeoff between better governance for companies held by
private equity firms and a lower cost of capital for public companies in a portfolio. 7

Private equity investments are generally riskier than those in public markets. Risk for venture capital firms comes
from investing in new or young businesses that have yet to demonstrate their long-term viability. Risk for buyout
firms is the result of financial leverage.

These observations are borne out in the distribution of returns for individual investments across the asset
classes. From the mid-1990s to 2018, about 60 percent of venture capital investments lost money, but the
handful that did exceedingly well allowed the overall asset class to generate competitive returns. Roughly 27
percent of buyout deals lost money, the median investment approximately doubled, and some did very well
(though not as well as venture deals). From 1985 to 2019, nearly 25 percent of public market investments lost
money over 5 years, and the losses were on average less severe than those in private equity. 8 But the lower
risk meant lower returns, with the upside outliers contributing less to returns than in private equity.

Private equity funds have to sell their investments eventually to realize returns for their fundholders. And when
they sell, they essentially transfer the problem of assessing future cash flows to the new buyers, whether a
company, another fund, or an active portfolio manager. Everything is a DCF model.

Why Doesn’t Everyone Believe?

The time value of money, the idea that money today is worth more than an identical amount of money in the
future, is one of the first concepts taught in a finance class. As a discounted cash flow model formalizes this
concept, it stands to reason that it should be the primary method for investors to value financial assets, including
stocks, and for corporate managers to allocate capital. 9

However, a recent survey of professional equity analysts found that “market multiples” were “[b]y far the most
popular approach to valuation” among nearly 2,000 respondents. 10 Specifically, these analysts said that when
valuing companies they used price-earnings multiples 88 percent of the time and enterprise value-to-earnings
before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) multiples 77 percent of the time.

The discounted cash flow model was the second most popular approach to valuation, albeit more popular in
regions outside the Americas. While this sounds encouraging, there are two substantial caveats.

The first is that analysts commonly use an enterprise value-to-EBITDA multiple to estimate the continuing value,
also known as the terminal or residual value, in a DCF model. 11 The continuing value often represents 70 to 80
percent of corporate value.12 That means that what drives the DCF model is for the most part a dressed up
multiple.

The second concern is that many DCF models are done poorly, having errors related to theory and dubious
economic judgments.13 Errors include the use of a faulty risk-free rate and assuming unrealistic growth rates in
the calculation of continuing value. An example of a poor judgment is an explicit forecast period that is too short.
These shortcomings speak poorly not about the approach but rather to how it is applied.

We think there are a number of reasons a DCF model is not used more consistently and properly, in private and
public markets:

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• The public markets are pretty good at valuation. Markets are not completely efficient, of course, but by
and large markets are reasonably effective at reflecting known information in prices. While price and value
can and do diverge, the wisdom of crowds reminds us that the collective opinion of the market is generally
a better judge of price than a single person’s estimation.14
Charley Ellis, founder of Greenwich Associates and a luminary in the investment industry for more than a
half century, writes playfully, “If you could have anyone—and everyone—you ever wanted as colleague-
investors working with you all day, every day, which great investors would you include on your investor’s
dream team?” He goes on, “. . . today’s professional-dominated stock market reflects the accumulated
expertise of all those diligent experts making their best judgments on pricing all the time.” 15

Because the market is likely to be better at valuation than they are, most investors can defer to its ability to
reflect what’s out there. They can then turn their attention to whether a company’s fundamental results will
be better or worse than the market’s expectations. The problem is that without a clear understanding of
what is priced in, there is no easy way to know how changes in the consensus will affect the stock price.

• Small changes in assumptions for a DCF model can lead to large changes in value. As a result, many
investors are more comfortable using multiples of earnings or cash flow as proxies for valuation. Multiples
are a shorthand for the valuation process that have the benefit of saving the user time at the cost of buried
assumptions.
John Burr Williams anticipated concerns about the inputs into a discounted cash flow model. In chapter 15
of his book, called “A Chapter for Skeptics,” he wrote, “. . . the old-fashioned methods of appraisal in reality
took cognizance of all the factors which give such intricacy to the new formulas, but the old methods did so
implicitly, whereas the new methods do so explicitly.”16

In other words, valuation using multiples does not avoid the drivers of long-term cash flows but rather
obscures them. Williams argues that it is better to make your assumptions explicit and debate them than to
make them implicit and ignore them.

• Lots of valuation is done by comparing. There are two ways to come up with a value for a financial
asset. The first is to calculate an intrinsic value by discounting future cash flows. If the stock market is
efficient, price and value will be the same. The second is to compare investments that are similar and buy
the relatively undervalued one and sell the overvalued one. If a sufficient number of investors are doing
this, few will outperform the market. The first approach assumes that prices are right while the second
posits only that it is hard to beat the market.17
Both of these approaches have deep roots in finance. Models based on general equilibrium determine
intrinsic value. Other models, including options pricing models, derive value from an underlying asset
without concern for whether it is priced correctly.

Arbitrage in its purest form involves comparing prices of the same asset, say on separate exchanges, and
simultaneously buying at the low price and selling at the high price to lock in a riskless profit. Such
opportunities are extremely rare. Often there are costs to implementing arbitrage that offset the gains.
Arbitrage activities today generally include buying and selling assets that are similar rather than identical,
which introduces more risk.18

Relying solely on comparison presents a pair of challenges. One is that investors often select comparable
assets to support the case they are making.19 For example, if an analyst wants to recommend that the

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 investment firm buy a stock, he or she will select the stocks of comparable companies that have high
valuations, making the focal stock look relatively inexpensive.

The more basic issue is that comparative analysis says nothing about intrinsic value. Something may look
relatively attractive but still may be absolutely overvalued. An investor can isolate a mispricing by going
long one asset and short another, removing exposure to absolute valuation. But this activity introduces new
challenges, including identifying stocks that are close substitutes and the mechanics and costs of shorting.

• Valuation is tricky early in a company’s life cycle. Start-ups are difficult to value using a discounted
cash flow model because the range of potential outcomes is so great. The dispersion of growth rates in
sales and profits narrows as companies get bigger, which makes the task easier as companies grow and
mature. But Aswath Damodaran, a professor of finance and expert in valuation, argues that a DCF model
can be used for start-ups and he provides a multi-step process to do so.20
Damodaran’s steps boil down to forecasting revenues, estimating profitability, assessing risk, and
considering base rates.

Forecasting a range of potential revenues benefits from a thoughtful assessment of total addressable
market (TAM). We believe that TAM can be estimated by a bottom up calculation of the market size,
application of a diffusion model, and reference to past results of similar businesses.21

The basic unit of analysis provides insight into how a company makes money. For example, the basic unit
of analysis in a subscription business is customer lifetime value, which estimates the cash flow a customer
will generate while active and subtracts the cost of acquiring the customer. 22 This step can take into
consideration potential benefits from operating leverage and economies of scale.

Risk includes an estimation of the opportunity cost of capital and how it changes over time. The risk and
expected return of a company’s stock tend to decline as the company moves through its life cycle.

Base rates, the results of an appropriate reference class of companies, are useful for assessing survival
and growth. This is a powerful and underutilized tool for forecasting.

• It is hard to value companies that have negative net income. Nearly 40 percent of public companies in
the United States had negative net income in 2020. Companies can lose money for two reasons. The first
is that costs exceed revenues and the company is fundamentally unprofitable. The second is the company
expenses investments today that are expected to generate attractive cash flows in the future.
The latter occurs as a quirk of accounting. Tangible investments, such as capital expenditures, are recorded
on the balance sheet and only the depreciation of the assets shows up on the income statement. Intangible
investments, such as marketing spending, are reflected in full on the income statement. This accounting
treatment of intangible assets overstates expenses and understates investment and therefore obscures the
economic picture.

Because investments precede sales and earnings, a profitable company reliant on intangible assets that is
growing rapidly will report negative net income even as its business is thriving. Indeed, companies should
invest more than they earn if the return on investment is attractive and they have access to capital.
Successful companies reliant on tangible assets such as Walmart and Home Depot had years of negative
free cash flow in their growth stages even as they were creating substantial shareholder value.

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 The answer to this challenge is not to fall back on heuristics, such as multiples of price to sales, but to
adjust the financial statements to make them more accurate. This requires shifting intangible investments
from the income statement to the balance sheet, leaving only an amortization expense on the income
statement. The net result is higher earnings, a bigger balance sheet, and a better sense of the magnitude
of investment and return on capital.23

Each of these reasons helps explain why DCF models are not used more widely, but none of them stand up to
scrutiny. Even if you choose not to build a DCF model for every investment you make, it is useful to keep in mind
the factors that drive value. These include growth from investments that earn in excess of the cost of capital, the
competitive advantage or uniqueness of a business that keeps competitors at bay, and the opportunity cost of
capital. You have to earn the right to use a multiple, which happens when you can demonstrate the link between
value and the multiple.24

Another effective way to use the model is to ask what you have to believe about the value drivers to justify
today’s price. This approach singlehandedly addresses all of the common concerns about a DCF model. Instead
of an investor determining value, he or she needs only to assess whether the expectations embedded in the
shares are likely to be met.25

How DCF Models Apply More Broadly

The application of a DCF model in valuation is more prevalent in some assets than others. Corporate bonds are
an example where investors commonly use DCF models. A company that issues a bond makes a legal
commitment to make timely interest payments on the principal and to return the principal at maturity. The key
elements of a DCF model are the magnitude, timing, and riskiness of cash flows. Bonds specify by contract the
magnitude and timing of cash flows, leaving the risk that the company will not be able to meet its obligations as
the main source of judgment.

Bonds are different than stocks in that with a bond the company will meet all its commitments if everything goes
right. There is no upside, only downside if the company defaults. Bondholders get paid before stockholders,
which means that bonds generally have less risk than stocks.

A stock is a residual claim on cash flows, which means there is upside if the results are better than expected.
Bonds are more about not being wrong and stocks are more about being right. Benjamin Graham and David
Dodd, authors of the book Security Analysis that formalized the process of investing, said it this way: “. . . bond
selection is primarily a negative art. It is a process of exclusion and rejection, rather than of search and
acceptance. In this respect the contrast with common-stock selection is fundamental in character.” 26

The discounted cash flow model also works for real estate.27 Owners of commercial real estate commonly seek
to buy a building based on its potential net operating income (NOI), a measure of cash flow calculated as rental
or lease income minus operating expenses. These cash flows are discounted at a capitalization rate, or cap rate,
which is the investor’s required rate of return. For example, if a building has NOI of $50,000 and a market value
of $1 million, the cap rate is 5 percent. Cap rates capture the risk associated with a building’s cash flows.

We generally don’t think about valuing our homes using a DCF model, but in fact it applies to residential real
estate as well. Economists define cash flows as the rent the house would generate minus the expenses
associated with owning a home, including property taxes, insurance, and upkeep. They then estimate the rate
of return by combining these interim cash flows with lumpy cash flows, the entry and exit price. 28 This approach

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has tracked home price indices more closely than the estimates made by the economists at the Bureau of
Economic Analysis.29

Public equities have been the primary focus of our discussion, so there’s not much to add. But the topic of asset
value deserves a brief comment. One of the criticisms of a DCF model is its sensitivity to inputs, where small
changes in assumptions can lead to large changes in output. An alternate approach builds on layers of value,
including asset value, earnings power, and franchise value. The bedrock is asset value, deemed to be tangible
and reliable, which appears to sidestep the problem of garbage in, garbage out. 30

The calculation of asset value requires going through the balance sheet line by line and adjusting the figures
recorded by the accountants to reflect market or reproduction values. For example, if a company carries a
machine on its books at $100 that is worth $150, the company’s book value would increase by $50, all else
being equal.

The important insight is that asset values themselves are based on the present value of cash flows. Considering
what an asset might fetch in the market or what it might cost to build it anew goes right back to the problem of
forecasting and discounting cash flows. That this skirts the issue is an illusion.

The purchaser of a company in a leveraged buyout seeks a business with predictable cash flows and uses a
relatively large amount of debt to finance the deal. Buyout firms focus intently on improving cash flows during
the time they own a business, a median of five years, and often dedicate those cash flows to reducing debt. The
total return from the deal requires consideration of the entry price, the interim cash flows, and the exit price. Exit
multiples in recent decades have been on average higher than entry multiples, leading to satisfactory returns for
buyout funds.

Venture capital is the other large part of private equity. We have already discussed the process to value a start-
up. But another important feature of venture funding is that it tends to go in stages. Each successive round of
funding, denoted as Series A, Series B, etc., tends to be contingent on a company meeting certain performance
metrics. This can be modeled as a series of real options. 31 An option is a right but not an obligation to do
something. Real options derive their value from real investments as opposed to financial investments such as
stocks.

Option pricing models create a portfolio that is a mix of the underlying asset and the risk-free rate to replicate
the cash flows of the option.32 The models then rely on arbitrage as the value of the option and the value of the
replicating portfolio should be the same. Options derive their value from another asset, but their value is still
pegged to expected cash flows.

Conclusion

The value of an asset that produces cash is the present value of the cash flows it generates over its life. Few
investors explicitly use a DCF model all the time, but it is useful to keep the drivers of the model in mind
constantly.

The ideas behind a DCF model have been around for a very long time. Warren Buffett, chairman and chief
executive officer of Berkshire Hathaway, suggests they were introduced more than 2,500 years ago: 33

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 “ . . . the formula for valuing all assets that are purchased for financial gain has been unchanged since it
was first laid out by a very smart man in about 600 B.C. (though he wasn’t smart enough to know it was
600 B.C.).

The oracle was Aesop and his enduring, though somewhat incomplete, investment insight was ‘a bird in
the hand is worth two in the bush.’ To flesh out this principle, you must answer only three questions. How
certain are you that there are indeed birds in the bush? When will they emerge and how many will there
be? What is the risk-free interest rate (which we consider to be the yield on long-term U.S. bonds)? If you
can answer these three questions, you will know the maximum value of the bush— and the maximum
number of the birds you now possess that should be offered for it. And, of course, don’t literally think birds.
Think dollars.”

Aesop knew that everything is a DCF model.

Please see Important Disclosures on pages 11-12

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Endnotes
1 Emily Flitter, “A Columnist Makes Sense of Wall Street Like None Other (See Footnote),” New York Times,
October 8, 2020.
2 For example, Matt Levine, “Everything Still Might Be Securities Fraud,” Bloomberg Opinion: Money Stuff, June

22, 2021. See www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-06-22/everything-still-might-be-securities-fraud.

3 Benjamin J. Burton and Joyce P. Jacobsen, “Measuring Returns on Investments in Collectibles,” Journal of

Economic Perspectives, Vol. 13, No. 4, Fall 1999, 193-212.

4 John Burr Williams, The Theory of Investment Value (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 55.
5 Here’s an example of a confused statement: “Those guys are morons,” says Palihapitiya of many value

investors. The historic way of determining value by looking at balance sheets and discounted cash flow no longer
works, he asserts.
“Today, when money has no value, because we’ve essentially printed all the money in the world and we’ll
continue to print it over and over, you have to find value in other parts of the balance sheet, so you have to go
to things like brand or intangibles,” he says. “And this is where their mathematical models break, and then their
brains explode.” See Michelle Celarier, “The Unusual Ambitions of Chamath Palihapitiya,” Institutional Investor,
May 31, 2020.
6 Taylor D. Nadauld, Berk A. Sensoy, Keith Vorkink, and Michael S. Weisbach, “The Liquidity Cost of Private

Equity Investments: Evidence from Secondary Market Transactions,” Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 132,
No. 3, June 2019, 158-181.
7 Gregory Brown, Andrea Carnelli Dompé, and Sarah Kenyon, “Public or Private? Determining the Optimal

Ownership Structure, UNC Kenan Institute of Private Enterprise Working Paper, July 28, 2020.
8 Gregory Brown, Robert S. Harris, Wendy Hu, Tim Jenkinson, Steven N. Kaplan, and David Robinson, “Private

Equity Portfolio Companies: A First Look at Burgiss Holdings Data,” SSRN Working Paper, March 3, 2020 and
FactSet.
9 Scott P. Dulman, “The Development of Discounted Cash Flow Techniques in U.S. Industry,” Business History

Review, Vol. 63, No. 3, Autumn 1989, 555-587.

10 Jerald E. Pinto, Thomas R. Robinson, John D. Stowe, "Equity Valuation: A Survey of Professional Practice,"

Review of Financial Economics, Vol. 37, No. 2, April 2019, 219-233.

11 Paul Gompers, Steven N. Kaplan, and Vladimir Mukharlyamov, “What Do Private Equity Firms Say They

Do?” Journal of Financial Economics, Vol. 121, No. 3, September 2016, 449-476.
12 Doron Nissim, “Terminal Value,” Columbia Business School Research Paper No. 18-12, April 2019.
13 Jeremiah Green, John R. M. Hand, and X. Frank Zhang, “Errors and Questionable Judgments in Analysts’

DCF Models,” Review of Accounting Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2, June 2016, 596-632.
14 James Surowiecki, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective

Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies, and Nations (New York: Doubleday, 2004).
15 Charles D. Ellis, Winning the Loser’s Game: Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing, Eighth Edition (New

York: McGraw Hill, 2021), 43-44.

16 Williams, Theory of Investment Value, 186.
17 Nicholas Barberis and Richard H. Thaler, “A Survey of Behavioral Finance” in George Constantinides, Milton

Harris, and Rene M. Stulz, eds., Handbook of the Economics of Finance (Amsterdam: Elsevier, 2003), 1053-
1128.
18 Charles M.C. Lee and Eric So, “Alphanomics: The Informational Underpinnings of Market Efficiency,”

Foundations and Trends in Accounting, Vol. 9, No. 2-3, 2014, 59-258.

19 Gus De Franco, Ole-Kristian Hope, and Stephannie Larocque, “Analysts’ Choice of Peer Companies,” Review

of Accounting Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1, March 2015, 82-109.

20 Aswath Damodaran, Investment Valuation: Tools and Techniques for Determining the Value of Any Asset,

3rd Edition (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 643-665.
21 Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan, “Total Addressable Market: Methods to Estimate a Company’s

Potential Sales,” Credit Suisse Global Financial Strategies, September 1, 2015.

22 Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan, “The Economics of Customer Businesses: Calculating Customer-

Based Corporate Valuation,” Consilient Observer: Counterpoint Global Insights, May 19, 2021.

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23 Michael J. Mauboussin and Dan Callahan, “One Job: Expectations and the Role of Intangible Investments,”
Consilient Observer: Counterpoint Global Insights, September 15, 2020.
24 We take the concept of “earning the right to use a multiple” from Dave Zorub, founder of Parsifal Capital.
25 John Burr Williams also got to this early. He wrote (Theory of Investment Value, 188): “Those who feel it

unsound to use long-range forecasts under any circumstances may still use the new formulas another way, a
way that was almost impossible with the old methods. They may transpose the new formulas and use the actual
market price as a datum, instead of seeking the theoretical investment value as an answer. Then with the
transposed formulas they may deduce the particular rate of growth, the particular duration of growth, or the like,
that is implied by the actual market price, and see in this way whether the prevailing price is reasonable or not.”
For a contemporary discussion of this approach, see Michael J. Mauboussin and Alfred Rappaport, Expectations
Investing: Reading Stock Prices for Better Returns–Revised and Updated (New York: Columbia Business School
Publishing, 2021).
26 Benjamin Graham and David Dodd, Security Analysis, Second Edition (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1940), 79.
27 Damodaran, Investment Valuation, 739-763.
28 Margaret Hwang Smith and Gary Smith, “Bubble, Bubble, Where’s the Housing Bubble?” Brookings Papers

on Economic Activity, 1:2006, August 25, 2006, 1-67.

29 Marina Gindelsky, Jeremy G. Moulton, and Scott A. Wentland, “Valuing Housing Services in the Era of Big

Data: A User Cost Approach Leveraging Zillow Microdata,” NBER Chapters, in: Big Data for Twenty-First
Century Economic Statistics, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc., 2020.
30 Bruce Greenwald, “Basic Structure of Investment Process and Valuation,” Columbia Business School

Presentation, 2013. See http://csinvesting.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Greenwald-Earnings-Power-Value-

EPV-lecture-slides.pdf.
31 Yong Li, “Duration Analysis of Venture Capital Staging: A Real Options Perspective,” Journal of Business

Venturing, Vol. 23, No. 5, September 2008, 497-512.

32 Damodaran, Investment Valuation, 87-109.
33 Warren E. Buffett, “Chairman’s Letter to the Shareholders,” Berkshire Hathaway, 2000.

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IMPORTANT INFORMATION

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© 2021 Morgan Stanley. 3688086 Exp. 08/31/2022 12