Chapter | 8VALUATION

One of my first lessons on Wall Street was that to get ahead, you have to be creative. What I noticed was that successful investment bankers had a real knack for making something out of nothing. For example, when numbers didn’t look just right, a good banker could always tweak them a bit. No matter what a client desired—a higher selling price, a lower purchase price, stronger margins, lower capital costs—the banker could produce the numbers. A really good banker would earn the title “numerical masseuse,” and if you could send a masseuse to value a company, watch out!

The principles covered in this section apply not only to large corporate transactions but also to simple personal finance dealings. These principles lead to ...

Get The Wall Street MBA, Second Edition, 2nd Edition now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.