My Motives for Teaching
- I like the stage: I believe that every teacher, to some extent, has a little bit of a repressed actor in him or her, and I do enjoy being in front of an audience, with the added benefit that I get to review the audience, with the grades that I given them, rather than the other way around.
- I like to make a difference: I do not expect my students to agree with all or even much of what I have to say, but I would like to think that I sometimes change the way they think about finance, and perhaps even affect their choice of professions. I am lucky enough to hear from students who were in my classes decades ago, and to find out that my teaching made a difference in their lives.
- I like not having a boss: I would be a terrible employee, since I am headstrong, opinionated and awfully lazy, especially when I must do things I don’t like to do. As a teacher, I am my own boss and find my foibles completely understandable and forgivable.
My Teaching Process
- Class narrative: This may be a quirk of mine, but I stay away from teaching classes that are collections of topics. In my view, having a unifying narrative not only makes a class more fun to teach, but also more memorable. As you look at my class list in the next section, you will note that each of the classes is built around a story line, with the sessions building up to what is hopefully a climax.
- Bulking up the reasoning muscle: When asked a question in class, even if I know the answer, I try to not only reason my way to an answer, but to also be open about doubts that I may have about that answer. In keeping with the old saying that it is better to teach someone to fish, than to give them fish, I believe it is my job to equip my students with the capacity to come up with answers to questions that they may face in the future. In my post on the threat that AI poses to us, I argued that one advantage we have over AI is the capacity to reason, but that the ease of looking up answers online, i.e., the Google search curse, is eating away at that capacity.
- Make it real: I know that, and especially so in business schools, students feel that what they are learning will not work in the real world. I like to think that my classes are firmly grounded in reality, with my examples being real companies in real time. I am aware of the risks that when you work with companies in real time, your mistakes will also play out in real time, but I am okay with being wrong.
- Straight answers: When I was a student, I remember being frustrated by teachers, who so thoroughly hedged themselves, with the one hand and the other hand playing out, that they left me unclear about what they were saying. I would like to think that I do not hold back, and that I stay true to the motto that I would rather be transparently wrong than opaquely right. It has sometimes got me some blowback, when I expressed my views about value investing being rigid, ritualistic and righteous and the absolute emptiness of virtue concepts like ESG and sustainability, but so be it.
My Class Content
While my class schedule has been filled with these two courses, I developed a third course, investment philosophies, a class about how to approach investing, trying to explain why investors with very different market views and investment strategies can co-exist in a market, and why there is no one philosophy that dominates.
My endgame for this class is to provide as unbiased a perspective as I can for a range of philosophies from trading on price patterns to market timing, with stops along the way from value investing, growth investing and information trading. It is my hope that this class will allow you to find the investment philosophy that best fits you, given your financial profile and psychological makeup.
Class | NYU Spring 2025 | Online (free) | NYU Certificate | WhatsApp Discussion Group |
---|---|---|---|---|
Corporate Finance | Link | Link | Link (Fall) | Link |
Valuation | Link | Link | Link (Spring & Fall) | Link |
Investment Philosophies | NA | Link | Link (Spring) | Link |
Corporate Life Cycle | NA | Link | NA | Link |
Accounting | NA | Link | NA | |
Foundations of Finance | NA | Link | NA | |
Statistics | NA | Link | NA |
Corporate Finance | Valuation | Investment Philosophies | Corporate Life Cycle | |||
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Applied Corporate Finance (Wiley, 4th Ed): This is the book that is most closely tied to this class and represents my views of what should be in a corporate finance class most closely. | Investment Valuation (Wiley, 3rd Ed, 4th ed forthcoming): This is my only valuation textbook, designed for classroom teaching. At almost 1000 pages, it is overkill but it is also the most comprehensive of the books in terms of coverage. | Investment Philosophies (Wiley, 2nd Ed): This is the best book for this class, and provides background and evidence for each investment philosophy, with a listing of the personal characteristics that you need to make that philosophy work for you. | Corporate Life Cycle (Penguin Random House, 1st Ed): This is the most recent of my books and it introduces the phases of the corporate life cycle and why business, management, valuation and investment challenges change with each phase. | |||
Corporate Finance (Wiley, 2nd Ed): This is a more conventional corporate finance book, but it has not seen a new edition in almost 20 years. | Little Book of Valuation (Wiley, 2nd Ed): This is the shortest of the books, but it provides the essentials of valuation, and at a reasonable price. | Investment Management (Wiley, 1st Ed): This is a very old book, and one that I co-edited with the redoubtable Peter Bernstein, focused on writings on different parts of the investment process. It is dated but it still has relevance (in my view). | ||||
Strategic Risk Taking (Wharton, 1s Ed): This is a book specifically about measuring risk, dealing with risk and how risk taking/avoidance affect value. | Dark Side of Valuation (Prentice Hall, 3rd Ed): This is a book about valuing difficult-to-value companies, from young businesses to cyclical/commodity companies. It is a good add-on to the valuation class. | Investment Fables (FT Press, 1st Ed): This book is also old and badly in need of a second edition, which I may turn to next year, but it covers stories that we hear about how to beat the market and get rich quickly, the flaws in these stories, and why it pays to be a skeptic. | ||||
Damodaran on Valuation (Wiley, 2nd Ed): This was my very first book, and it is practitioner-oriented, with the second half of the book dedicated to loose ends in vlauation (control, illiquidity etc.) | ||||||
Narrative and Numbers (Columbia Press, 1st Ed): This was the book I most enjoyed writing, and it ties storytelling to numbers in valuation, providing a basis for my argument that every good valuation is a bridge between stories and numbers. |
- If you own a business, work in the finance department of a company, or are a consultant, you may find the corporate finance course alone will suffice, providing most of what you need.
- If you are in the appraisal or valuation business, either as an appraiser or as an equity research analyst (buy or sell side), valuation is the class that will be most directly tied to what you will do. I do believe that to value businesses, you need to understand how to run them, making corporate finance a good lead in.
- If you plan to be in active investment, working at a mutual fund, wealth management or hedge fund, or are an individual investor trying to find your way in investing, I think that starting with a valuation class, and following up with investment philosophy will yield the biggest payoff.
- Finally, the corporate life cycle class, which spans corporate finance, valuation and investing, with doses of management and strategy, will be a good add on to any of the other pathways, or as a standalone for someone who has little patience for finance classes but wants a framework for understanding businesses.
- The first is that, unless you happen to be a NYU Stern student, you will be taking these classes online and asynchronously (not in real time). As someone who has been teaching online for close to two decades now, I have learned that watching a class on a computer or display screen is far more draining than being in a physical class, which is one reason that I have created the online versions of the classes with much shorter session lengths.
- The second is that the biggest impediment to finishing classes online, explaining why completion rates are often 5% or lower, even for the best structured online classes, is maintaining the discipline to continue with a class, when you fall behind. While my regular classes follow a time line, you don't have to stick with that calendar constraint, and can finish the class over a longer period, if you want, but you will have to work at it.
- The third is that learning, especially in my subject area, requires doing, and if all you do is watch the lecture videos, without following through (by trying out what you have learned on real companies of your choosing), the material will not stick.
- Corporate Finance (NYU MBA): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastcfspr25.htm
- Valuation (NYU MBA): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcasteqspr25.htm
- Corporate Finance (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastcfonline.htm
- Valuation (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastvalonline.htm
- Corporate Finance (NYU Certificate): https://execed.stern.nyu.edu/products/corporate-finance-with-aswath-damodaran
- Valuation (NYU Certificate): https://execed.stern.nyu.edu/products/advanced-valuation-with-aswath-damodaran
- Investment Philosophies (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastinvphil.htm
- Investment Philosophies (NYU Certificate): https://execed.stern.nyu.edu/products/investment-philosophies-with-aswath-damodaran
- Corporate Life Cycle (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastCLC.htm
- Accounting 101 (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastacctg.htm
- Foundations of Finance (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastfoundationsonline.htm
- Statistics 101 (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcaststatistics.htm
- Corporate Finance: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C0yjIAWT2WdLozCHYctU9p
- Valuation: https://chat.whatsapp.com/LjQBQXcbyh11I17idz176k
- Investment Philosophies: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IolVsa3qScLJecUtu4uUKO
- Corporate Life Cycle: https://chat.whatsapp.com/J1V0vwFkIUoCblYp4J3ENs