Dark Side of Valuation, The: Valuing Young, Distressed, and Complex Businesses, Third edition

Preface to the Third Edition

The first edition of this book is showing its age and origins. The idea for this book was born at the end of 1999, toward the end of the Dot-com boom, and was triggered by two phenomena: the seeming inability of traditional valuation models to explain stratospheric stock prices for technology (especially new technology) companies, and the willingness of analysts to abandon traditional valuation metrics and go over to the “dark side” of valuation, where prices were justified using a mix of new metrics and storytelling. The publication of the first edition coincided with the bursting of that bubble. The second edition came ten years later, just after the 2008 crisis, precipitated by a housing bubble bursting and banks ...