July 2009
Intermediate to advanced
600 pages
19h 50m
English
How do analysts deal with the valuation issues that characterize firms with intangible assets? In many cases, they ignore these issues and trust historical data or management-provided forecasts of the numbers. In some cases, they fall back on the defense that all the firms in a sector should be equally impacted by these accounting rules and that comparisons across the firms therefore should be unaffected.
The biggest problem with treating capital expenses (such as R&D, training, and brand advertising expenses) as operating expenses is that we lose the most potent tool that we have not only for estimating growth but also for checking for internal consistency. The growth rates we use for a firm have ...
Read now
Unlock full access