Value Trap: Theory of Universal Valuation, Paperback/Brian M. Nelson

Descriere

Wall Street doesn't know it has a problem. Index and quantitative investors have been free-riding on the backs of active managers for years, but growth in price-agnostic trading may finally have reached the tipping point. Brian Nelson, former Director of Methodology at Morningstar and President of Investment Research at Valuentum, explains how enterprise valuation forms the Theory of Universal Valuation and why a focus on it may not only help you avoid value traps, but also save you from the next financial crisis. This is a 350 page book, including Preface, Notes, Bibliography and Index. The text is a response to many worrisome trends and processes in the investment management business today. The book strives to answer the question: what is the appropriate empirical evidence in evidence-based finance? Surely, not just any empirical evidence will do. The book is not meant to be controversial, but a discussion of the great contradiction of "explaining" stock return behavior between factor-based investing (which is based mostly on ambiguous, realized data within in-sample sets) and the efficient markets hypothesis (which is based on expectations of future data, realized or not) may make it so. The text is heavy in behavioral thinking and puts forth enterprise valuation as a behavioral framework in which to view stock prices and their movements. This book also shows how enterprise valuation is much more than a simple stock valuation tool, but rather that enterprise valuation is truly universal valuation, resting at the intersection of behavioral economics, quantitative theory, equity valuation, and therefore finance, itself. A reading of "The Data Dilemma and Valuentum Investing" in the Preface is necessary to understand the various types of data Nelson refers to frequently in this text: ambiguous, causal and impractical. Also emphasized in this book is the difference between in-sample, out-of-sample and walk-forward studies, the latter the author believes to be the mos