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The Art and Science of Valuation
How to value a home, an education, a project, or a company
Whether you’re buying stock, acquiring a company, buying a house, or investing in education, you need to go through a process of valuation. Is the proposed investment justified? How much should you pay? These are all fundamentally questions of valuation, and finance has a rigorous set of tools for thinking about how to make those decisions. Consider the following examples:
In late 2012, Facebook reportedly made a $3 billion offer to purchase Snapchat. By 2016, Google had reportedly valued Snapchat at $30 billion. By mid-2018, the equity markets were valuing Snap at $17 billion. What were these wildly different numbers based on?
In mid-2018, Disney ...
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