Free Download of Valuation and Common Sense Book

RISKVIEWS recently got the material below in an email.  This material seems quite educational and also somewhat amusing.  The authors keep pointing out the extreme variety of actual detailed approach from any single theory in the academic literature.  

For example, the table following shows a plot of Required Equity Premium by publication date of book. 

You get a strong impression from reading this book that all of the concepts of modern finance are extremely plastic and/or ill defined in practice. 

RISKVIEWS wonders if that is in any way related to the famous Friedman principle that economics models need not be at all realistic.  See post Friedman Model.

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Book “Valuation and Common Sense” (3rd edition).  May be downloaded for free

The book has been improved in its 3rd edition. Main changes are:

1. Tables (with all calculations) and figures are available in excel format in: http://web.iese.edu/PabloFernandez/Book_VaCS/valuation%20CaCS.html
2. We have added questions at the end of each chapter.
3. 5 new chapters:

Chapters	Downloadable at:
32 Shareholder Value Creation: A Definition	http://ssrn.com/abstract=268129
33 Shareholder value creators in the S&P 500: 1991 – 2010	http://ssrn.com/abstract=1759353
34 EVA and Cash value added do NOT measure shareholder value creation	http://ssrn.com/abstract=270799
35 Several shareholder returns. All-period returns and all-shareholders return	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2358444
36 339 questions on valuation and finance	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2357432

The book explains the nuances of different valuation methods and provides the reader with the tools for analyzing and valuing any business, no matter how complex. The book has 326 tables, 190 diagrams and more than 180 examples to help the reader. It also has 480 readers’ comments of previous editions.

The book has 36 chapters. Each chapter may be downloaded for free at the following links:

Chapters	Downloadable at:
Table of contents, acknowledgments, glossary	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2209089
1  Company Valuation Methods	http://ssrn.com/abstract=274973
2  Cash Flow is a Fact. Net Income is Just an Opinion	http://ssrn.com/abstract=330540
3  Ten Badly Explained Topics in Most Corporate Finance Books	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2044576
4  Cash Flow Valuation Methods: Perpetuities, Constant Growth and General Case	http://ssrn.com/abstract=743229
5   Valuation Using Multiples: How Do Analysts Reach Their Conclusions?	http://ssrn.com/abstract=274972
6   Valuing Companies by Cash Flow Discounting: Ten Methods and Nine Theories	http://ssrn.com/abstract=256987
7   Three Residual Income Valuation Methods and Discounted Cash Flow Valuation	http://ssrn.com/abstract=296945
8   WACC: Definition, Misconceptions and Errors	http://ssrn.com/abstract=1620871
9  Cash Flow Discounting: Fundamental Relationships and Unnecessary Complications	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2117765
10 How to Value a Seasonal Company Discounting Cash Flows	http://ssrn.com/abstract=406220
11 Optimal Capital Structure: Problems with the Harvard and Damodaran Approaches	http://ssrn.com/abstract=270833
12 Equity Premium: Historical, Expected, Required and Implied	http://ssrn.com/abstract=933070
13 The Equity Premium in 150 Textbooks	http://ssrn.com/abstract=1473225
14 Market Risk Premium Used in 82 Countries in 2012: A Survey with 7,192 Answers	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2084213
15 Are Calculated Betas Good for Anything?	http://ssrn.com/abstract=504565
16 Beta = 1 Does a Better Job than Calculated Betas	http://ssrn.com/abstract=1406923
17 Betas Used by Professors: A Survey with 2,500 Answers	http://ssrn.com/abstract=1407464
18 On the Instability of Betas: The Case of Spain	http://ssrn.com/abstract=510146
19 Valuation of the Shares after an Expropriation: The Case of ElectraBul	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2191044
20 A solution to Valuation of the Shares after an Expropriation: The Case of ElectraBul	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2217604
21 Valuation of an Expropriated Company: The Case of YPF and Repsol in Argentina	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2176728
22 1,959 valuations of the YPF shares expropriated to Repsol	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2226321
23 Internet Valuations: The Case of Terra-Lycos	http://ssrn.com/abstract=265608
24 Valuation of Internet-related companies	http://ssrn.com/abstract=265609
25 Valuation of Brands and Intellectual Capital	http://ssrn.com/abstract=270688
26 Interest rates and company valuation	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2215926
27 Price to Earnings ratio, Value to Book ratio and Growth	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2212373
28 Dividends and Share Repurchases	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2215739
29 How Inflation destroys Value	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2215796
30 Valuing Real Options: Frequently Made Errors	http://ssrn.com/abstract=274855
31 119 Common Errors in Company Valuations	http://ssrn.com/abstract=1025424
32 Shareholder Value Creation: A Definition	http://ssrn.com/abstract=268129
33 Shareholder value creators in the S&P 500: 1991 – 2010	http://ssrn.com/abstract=1759353
34 EVA and Cash value added do NOT measure shareholder value creation	http://ssrn.com/abstract=270799
35 Several shareholder returns. All-period returns and all-shareholders return	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2358444
36 339 questions on valuation and finance	http://ssrn.com/abstract=2357432

I would very much appreciate any of your suggestions for improving the book.

Best regards,
Pablo Fernandez

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LIVE from the ERM Symposium

(Well not quite LIVE, but almost)

The ERM Symposium is now 8 years old.  Here are some ideas from the 2010 ERM Symposium…

• Survivor Bias creates support for bad risk models.  If a model underestimates risk there are two possible outcomes – good and bad.  If bad, then you fix the model or stop doing the activity.  If the outcome is good, then you do more and more of the activity until the result is bad.  This suggests that model validation is much more important than just a simple minded tick the box exercize.  It is a life and death matter.
• BIG is BAD!  Well maybe.  Big means large political power.  Big will mean that the political power will fight for parochial interests of the Big entity over the interests of the entire firm or system.  Safer to not have your firm dominated by a single business, distributor, product, region.  Safer to not have your financial system dominated by a handful of banks.
• The world is not linear.  You cannot project the macro effects directly from the micro effects.
• Due Diligence for mergers is often left until the very last minute and given an extremely tight time frame.  That will not change, so more due diligence needs to be a part of the target pre-selection process.

• For merger of mature businesses, cultural fit is most important.
• For newer businesses, retention of key employees is key

• Modelitis = running the model until you get the desired answer
• Most people when asked about future emerging risks, respond with the most recent problem – prior knowledge blindness
• Regulators are sitting and waiting for a housing market recovery to resolve problems that are hidden by accounting in hundreds of banks.
• Why do we think that any bank will do a good job of creating a living will?  What is their motivation?
• We will always have some regulatory arbitrage.
• Left to their own devices, banks have proven that they do not have a survival instinct.  (I have to admit that I have never, ever believed for a minute that any bank CEO has ever thought for even one second about the idea that their bank might be bailed out by the government.  They simply do not believe that they will fail. )
• Economics has been dominated by a religious belief in the mantra “markets good – government bad”
• Non-financial businesses are opposed to putting OTC derivatives on exchanges because exchanges will only accept cash collateral.  If they are hedging physical asset prices, why shouldn’t those same physical assets be good collateral?  Or are they really arguing to be allowed to do speculative trading without posting collateral? Probably more of the latter.
• it was said that systemic problems come from risk concentrations.  Not always.  They can come from losses and lack of proper disclosure.  When folks see some losses and do not know who is hiding more losses, they stop doing business with everyone.  None do enough disclosure and that confirms the suspicion that everyone is impaired.
• Systemic risk management plans needs to recognize that this is like forest fires.  If they prevent the small fires then the fires that eventually do happen will be much larger and more dangerous.  And someday, there will be another fire.
• Sometimes a small change in the input to a complex system will unpredictably result in a large change in the output.  The financial markets are complex systems.  The idea that the market participants will ever correctly anticipate such discontinuities is complete nonsense.  So markets will always be efficient, except when they are drastically wrong.
• Conflicting interests for risk managers who also wear other hats is a major issue for risk management in smaller companies.
• People with bad risk models will drive people with good risk models out of the market.
• Inelastic supply and inelastic demand for oil is the reason why prices are so volatile.
• It was easy to sell the idea of starting an ERM system in 2008 & 2009.  But will firms who need that much evidence of the need for risk management forget why they approved it when things get better?
• If risk function is constantly finding large unmanaged risks, then something is seriously wrong with the firm.
• You do not want to ever have to say that you were aware of a risk that later became a large loss but never told the board about it.  Whether or not you have a risk management program.

Does Bloomberg Understand Anything about Risk Management?

On December 18, Bloomberg posted a story about losses on interest rate swaps at Harvard.   The story says that in 2004, Harvard entered into long term swaps to lock in future rates for planned borrowing.  That seems like ok risk management.  But as it happened, interests did not rise, they fell.  So the hedge was not needed.  They type of hedging strategy that they chose had no initial cost.  The cost of risk management was incurred only if the hedged event did not happen.   If interest rated did risk, then the swaps would have resulted in a gain so that Harvard’s costs were limited to a predetermined amount.  If Interest rates fell, then Harvard would pay on the swaps, but save on the interest costs, bring the sum of interest paid on their borrowing and the swap payments to a fixed predetermined total in all cases.

However, Bloomberg chooses to say is this way:

Harvard was betting in 2004 that interest rates would rise by the time it needed to borrow.

The bulk of the story is about how Harvard lost their “bet” and how much money that they lost because they lost the “bet” when interest rates fell, and Harvard had to postpone their planned borrowing.

No wonder it is difficult for firms to disclose any information about actual risk management actions and plans.  If a reasonable, but not perfect risk management action is seen as a “bet”, rather than a move to stablize interest costs.

Every risk management action will have a cost.  Harvard’s real bad move, similar to the one by Soc Gen in January 2008, the choice to lock in losses, and at the worst time.  Interest rates cannot go below zero, so there is absolutely no reason to get out of those swaps, unless their cashflow was so, so poor that they had no way to pay the monthly interrest swap amount (even though they somehow had the cash to settle all of the swaps, presumably paying the present value of the long term swap amounts as viewed at a time ov very low interest rates).

Their other bad move was to fail to hedge the possibility that they would not even do the project and therefore not need the hedge.  To identify how to hedge that situation, they would have had to do some scenario testing of scenarios of extreme losses in their endownment that would have resulted in the situation that they now find themselves.  That analysis should have resulted in some far out of the money hedges on the investments in Harvard’s portfolio.  And the fact that much of their portfolio may be unhedegable should have been a warning about the wisdom of making forward committments like the swaps that presume that the endownment will not tank.

Seeing how wrongheaded the coverage of the transactions was, Harvard probably felt that they had long term reputational risk from paying the monthly payments.

Alternately, if as the article says, the swap markets are so much more liquid at periods for up to 3 years, they why didn’t they enter into trades to reverse the first 3 years of the payments?

No matter what the market says right this minute, I find it hard to believe that interest rates for Harvard will never again reach 4.72% that the swaps were locking in as the rate.

But that is not the point.  The point is that Bloomberg reports Risk Management as a “bet” implying that lack of risk management is not a “bet”.

But, how many companies are implicitly taking a “bet” that the future will never get worse than the present by not hedging anything?

Why is that NEVER a story?