The ASA NorCal chapter is excited to kick off its 2021-2022 year with a special webinar, The Price of Risk: Looking Backward and Forward, featuring Professor Aswath Damodaran on Thursday, September 9, 2021
The webinar is a joint event sponsored by the ASA NorCal chapter and the Financial Executives International SF Bay Area chapter.
Event logistics are as follows:
Date: Thursday, September 9
Time: 4:30pm to 6pm PT
Format: Zoom webinar
Cost: Complimentary
Register at: https://bit.ly/210909Pres
CE and CPE credits available
The Price of Risk: Looking Backward and Forward
Risk On, Risk Off …
During the September 9 event, Professor Aswath Damodaran, NYU professor at the Stern School of Business, author, and frequent commentator on CNBC will serve as our “sensei” on value – and will focus on the impact of risk on company valuations.
Investors are constantly in search of a single metric that will tell them whether the market is under or over valued, and consequently whether they should be buying or selling holdings in that market. With equities, one of the metrics that has long been in use is the Price-to-Earnings (“PE”) ratio. The PE ratio, though, has been signaling that stocks have been over valued for most of the last decade – a ten-year period when stocks delivered blockbuster returns (even despite the COVID-19 pandemic). The failures of the metric have been variously attributed to low interest rates, the lack of linkage of profitability (or unprofitability) to company valuations (in particular in the technology sector), and, according to the Professor, by some to “animal spirits.”
During his presentation, Professor Damodaran will discuss an alternative metric that he believes provides not only a comprehensive measure of pricing, but also operates as a barometer of ups and downs in the market. This metric, the equity risk premium, is utilized extensively in the business valuation world and the Professor will provide his detailed insights on its use as an indicator of risk and its impact on value.
In addition to discussing the Price of Risk, Professor Damodaran will also cover the power of story as a driver of corporate value – and the importance of narrative to understanding different valuations. He will cover a detailed case study on value drivers for a company which went public in August 2021.
Background on Professor Damodaran
Aswath Damodaran is the Kerschner-Chaired Professor of Finance at the Stern School of Business at New York University, where he teaches corporate finance and valuation to MBAs, executives, and practitioners. He has been at NYU since 1986, and was elected as the most popular business school professor in the U.S. by MBA students across the country in a 2011 survey by Business Week.
Professor Damodaran has written five books on valuation, three on corporate finance, and three on portfolio management, and his most recent book is Narrative and Numbers. His blog, Musings on Markets, was selected by the Times of London as one of the top ten stock market blogs in the world.