WILEY Financial Modeling and Valuation: A Practical Guide to Investment Banking and Private Equity

Positives:- Very detailed step-by-step introduction to analyzing financial statements and build a 3-statement financial model.- Instead of just talking about theoretical steps in valuation, the author uses Amazon as a practical example so you can follow him step-by-step during the whole valuation process.- The Excel sheets (if you manage to find and open them) and the detailed description in the book make it easy to follow each step in Excel and actually learn how to make a financial model.Negatives:- The author is completely focused on the Amazon example and often neglects topics like for example dividends because they don't apply for Amazon. This sometimes makes it difficult to apply the concepts to other companies besides Amazon when you come across some new items in the cash flow statement for example.- Several times (for example when it comes to forecast and include dividends into the model) the author even wrote to look into his older version of the book where he valuates Walmart. This is not what I understand as a "Practical Guide to Financial Modeling and Valuation".- Later in the book there is almost too focused on the Excel sheets and instead of explaining what he's doing and why, the just refers to the cells in Excel and how to combine them. This makes it sometimes hard to follow and to understand. Maybe at some screenshots with explanations could improve the understandability of the book.

Eccellente in termini di darti una intro a cosa voglia dire modellare un bilancio. Non so però se sia il caso di prendere una società come Amazon come esempio (ed.2), dato che fare assunzioni cieche quando ci sono così tanti business models non sembra il caso. Sarebbe stato più utile prendere una azienda più piccola con meno linee prodotti in modo da avere più chiaro come prerequisito della valutazione sia avere una conoscenza approfondita dell’industria (i.e. oil E&P, retail clothing, cars etc.).