Streetsmart Guide to Valuing a Stock

Read this book - and know what a stock is worth before you invest. Wall Street veterans know that the key to beating the stock market is to find, and buy, stocks trading at a discount to their true net worth. Yet, as recent events have proven, using the wrong valuation approach can be disastrous, often more dangerous than no approach at all."Streetsmart Guide to Valuing a Stock, Second Edition", introduces you to a simple and powerful valuation model that will help you calculate the true value of any stock and pay pennies on the dollar for some of today's most valuable companies. Anchoring stock valuation by using 10 proven principles of finance to help you intelligently manage your investments, this latest addition to McGraw-Hill's popular "Streetsmart" series will: show you the secrets to buying undervalued stocks and selling overvalued stocks; guide you in managing the risk of investing in stocks; demystify the often-confusing steps in the stock valuation process; and, help you differentiate between a stock's market price and its intrinsic value. The main reason that many investors consistently underperform the overall market is that, for the most part, they rely on "hot" tips and guesswork for their investment decisions.Let "Streetsmart Guide to Valuing a Stock" show you how to take the guesswork out of investing by knowing what you're buying - and always buying it at a discount. 'This book will make you a better informed, more intelligent, more profitable investor and will help you to understand why stocks such as Cisco trade at $14.45 and Berkshire Hathaway trade at $72,000 per share. Our valuation approach revolves around some very simple calculations that use only addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division - no calculus, differential equations or advanced math." - From the Preface. Value and trust are two of the biggest question marks in today's tumultuous stock markets. Value because investors burned by the recent tech collapse are once again insisting that stocks provide some meat along with the sizzle, and trust because, for obvious reasons, investors don't know who to trust anymore."Streetsmart Guide to Valuing a Stock" shows you how to satisfy both of those question marks. This straightforward guide introduces you to accurate, trustworthy, and proven techniques for valuing any stock, then shows you how to determine whether that stock is undervalued or overvalued by an emotion-driven marketplace. Let it show you how to: accurately value stocks using highly regarded, easy-to-use valuation methodologies; realize the greatest potential returns while reducing your exposure to risk; estimate important valuation concepts including growth, operating margin, and cost of capital; develop and use spreadsheets to dramatically improve your valuation speed and accuracy; locate and download all the valuation information you need at little or no expense; play different what-if games to see how changes in growth, profits, or interest rates affect a stock's value; and, test your knowledge using actual valuations of Citigroup, Berkshire Hathaway, and other high-profile stocks.As investors struggle to regain their footing - and rebuild their portfolios - after recent stock market fiascoes, they find themselves returning to the bedrock value principles of finance that have always been the true drivers of stock prices. Let "Streetsmart Guide to Valuing a Stock" introduce you to some of today's most trustworthy and accurate measures of value, and give you the knowledge you need to make your investment decisions based on numbers and reality - instead of smoke and mirrors.

Gary L. Gray is an Associate Professor of Engineering Science and Mechanics in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics at Penn State in University Park, PA. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering (cum laude) from Washington University in St. Louis, MO, an S.M. in Engineering Science from Harvard University, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His primary research interests are in dynamical systems, dynamics of mechanical systems, mechanics education, and multi-scale methods for predicting continuum-level properties of materials from molecular calculations. For his contributions to mechanics education, he has been awarded the Outstanding and Premier Teaching Awards from the Penn State Engineering Society, the Outstanding New Mechanics Educator Award from the American Society for Engineering Education, the Learning Excellence Award from General Electric, and the Collaborative and Curricular Innovations Special Recognition Award from the Provost of Penn State. In addition to dynamics, he also teaches mechanics of materials, mechanical vibrations, numerical methods, advanced dynamics, and engineering mathematics.

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