Corporate Valuation Modeling: A Step-by-Step Guide

Preface

Another book about financial modeling? You might be rolling your eyes and muttering under your breath, “Why? Aren’t there plenty of books that cover this topic?” Yet, you still chose to look inside and see what this one is about. The motivation behind looking at financial modeling books is most likely related to a desire to learn financial modeling in an easy-to-understand, time-efficient, low-cost manner. However, after poring over a few books with the words Financial Modeling in the title, you might be left feeling like you know more about specific skills and topics, but not a working financial model. Perhaps these books have given you an understanding of how the model should work, but you are confused as to how to practically implement the information provided. Ultimately, an easy-to-understand, integrated analysis still eludes you.

There’s a vast sea of approaches authors take with financial modeling books. Some try to encompass every concept in finance and provide examples of how to implement each concept in Excel. Those are the cookbooks of finance. Introduce a topic, show an Excel example, and then move on to the next topic. Others take a similar approach, but vary the medium. Rather than use Excel, they offer books on financial modeling entirely in code with languages such as VBA or C++. Although many of these books can be highly informative, they often leave it up to the reader to figure out how to connect the individual concepts.

The answer, some say, is books ...