Valuation, corporate finance, and market analysis from Aswath Damodaran.
The war in Iran, oil prices and worries about a recession have all taken turns driving stock prices in 2026 but talk about interest rates and where they are going has been a constant concern all year. In the last few weeks, interest rate worries have come to t…
It is undeniable technology companies have found their most hospitable setting in the United States and while there are many reasons for the US dominance of technology, easier access to capital for young businesses has been a key ingredient. Venture capital in…
Foreword: I wrote and posted this piece on August 20, 2026, with the promise that I would listen to feedback and try to respond and incorporate ideas and suggestions. To keep this promise, I will edit this piece over time and reflect the changes I make. Origin…
Earlier this year, I was asked what I thought about Leopold Aschenbrenner and I admitted that I knew little about him other than what I had read about him, more in social media, than in the press - that he was a 25-year-old wunderkind who had started at OpenAI…
I am a lapsed academic, insofar as I have not submitted a paper for publication in more than two decades, but to acquire academic status, I did have to earn a PhD in the distant past. My doctoral dissertation, which like most doctoral theses is little noted an…
I am a creature of habit in my personal and professional life, and in the context of the content that I post online, there is a ritual that I follow with my data updates. I start the year with my general data update online, and follow up with a series of posts…
Over the last few weeks, attention has (rightly) been focused on three potentially trillion dollar companies all lined up to go public, and much of the discussion has been about what SpaceX, Anthropic and OpenAI are worth (and will be priced at). In parallel,…
A few weeks ago, I assessed the value of SpaceX ahead of its initial public offering, with the admission that I was making my estimates with drabs of data, some of it coming from unofficial sources. I also promised to revisit my valuation, when the prospectus…
Through time, we have glorified conquerors and empire builders in politics, civic life and business, from Alexander the Great and Genghis Khan to the tech titans of today. That is no surprise, since these individuals have oversized personas and often change th…
In 2001, A Space Odyssey, a movie that was well ahead of its time when it was released in 1968, Hal (the computer) famously responded to questions about his reliability with “it (mstakes) can only be attributable to human error”. I was reminded of my fallibili…
Markets play an expectations game, and in March 2026, we saw the process play out, with all of its upsides and downsides. The month started with a war in the Middle East, which quickly percolated into soaring oil prices and dropping stock prices, but the overw…
When uncertainty roils markets, as is the case right now, it is natural for investors to get knocked off balance, a when off-balance, to make investment decisions that they often regret later. It is during those times that it helps to have a core set of belief…
I start my valuation classes with a question of whether valuation is an art or a science, and I argue that it is neither; it does not have the precision that characterizes a science and unlike an art, it does come with principles that constrain you on what you…
When Chat GPT made its debut on November 30, 2022, it unleashed the hype of AI, and in the three years since, AI has taken on an outsized role not just in markets, but also in our lives. For much of the time, the AI story has been told by its advocates and its…
In the data update posts this year, I have wended my way from the macro (equities collectives, the bond market and other asset classes) to the micro, starting with hurdle rates and returns in posts five and six and the debt/equity choice in my seventh post. In…
In my fifth data update, I examined hurdle rates in 2025, and in my sixth data update, I looked at the profitability and return metrics for firms. Both hurdle rates and profitability metricsmcan be affected by how much debt companies choose to have in their fi…
Crass and mercantile though this may sound, the end game for a business is to make money, and a business that fails this simple test cannot survive for long, no matter how noble its social mission, how great its products and how much it is loved by its custome…
In my first four posts, I looked at markets - equity, debt and collectibles - in the aggregate performed in 2025. In this post, I turn my attention to divergences in risk across companies, looking at alternative measures of risk, some based on prices and other…
If you have read my first three data updates in 2026, I won’t blame you if you skip this one, because you found them long and boring. I won't take issue with you either if you viewed them as too US-focused, because I did spend my second data update, looking at…
In my last post, I talked about the disconnect between the bad news stories that we were reading and the solid performance of US equities during 2025. In this one, I want to focus specifically on four news stories from last year - the US announcement of puniti…
It was a disquieting year , as political and economic news stories shook the foundations of the post-war economic order, built around global trade and the US dollar. In fact, if you had been read just the news all through the year, and were shielded from finan…
In my musings on valuation, I have long described myself as more of a number cruncher than a storyteller, but it is because I love numbers for their own sake, rather than a fondness for abstract mathematics. It is that love for numbers that has led me at the b…
Stock markets have always rewarded winners with large capitalizations, and with each new threshold, the questions begin anew of whether animal spirits or fundamentals are driving the numbers. A few weeks ago, Nvidia seemed unstoppable as its market capitalizat…
I grew up in India in a time where if you had wealth, your investment options were limited. A stock market with sparse listings, accompanied by a lack of trust in financial assets, led investors to put their wealth into tangible assets. Real estate was the mos…
In December 1996, Alan Greenspan used the words "irrational exuberance" to describe the stock market at the time, and those words not only became the title of Robert Shiller's cautionary book on market bubbles, but also the beginnings of the belief that centra…
A few weeks ago, I started receiving a stream of message about an Instagram post that I was allegedly starring in, where after offering my views on Palantir's valuation, I was soliciting investors to invest with me (or with an investment entity that had ties t…
At the start of July, I updated my estimates of equity risk premiums for countries, in an semiannual ritual that goes back almost three decades. As with some of my other data updates, I have mixed feelings about publishing these numbers. On the one hand, I hav…
In this post, I will bring together two disparate and very different topics that I have written about in the past. The first is the role that cash holdings play in a business, an extension of the dividend policy question, with an examination of why businesses…
It is true that most investing lessons are directed at those who invest only in stocks and bonds, and mostly with long-only strategies. It is also true that in the process, we are ignoring vast swaths of the investment universe, from other asset classes (real…
I was on a family vacation in August 2011 when I received an email from a journalist asking me what I thought about the S&P ratings downgrade for the US. Since I stay blissfully unaware of most news stories and things related to markets when I am on the beach,…