general

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.

This book provides excellent information about the DCF Valuation process. The reader will learn how to develop the model and where to input the various data, as well as understand how to justify some of the assumptions such as cost of equity. The disk that accompanies the hardcover addition will be very useful to some practitioners, although analysts with strong modeling skills will likely want to create their own spreadsheet. The book, however, is not a comprehensive guide to valuation, as it does not discuss other methods such as the peer group comparison. Nonetheless, it is an excellent reference book on the topic of DCF Valuation, and it belongs on every financial analyst's desk.

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.