Musings on Markets: For the fun of it: An Open House for my Spring 2025 Classes

I am a teacher at heart, and every year, for more than two decades, I have invited people to join me in the classes that I teach at the Stern School of Business at New York University. Since I teach these classes only in the spring, and the first sessions for each of the classes will be in late January, I think this is a good time to provide some details on the classes, including content and structure. If you have read these missives in prior years, much of what I say will sound familiar, but I have added new content and updated the links you will need to partake in the classes.

My Motives for Teaching

I was in the second year of my MBA program at UCLA, when I had my moment on grace. I had taken a job as a teaching assistant, almost entirely because I needed the money to pay my tuition and living expenses, and in a subject (accounting) that did not excite me in the least. A few minutes after I walked in to teach my first class, I realized that I had found what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, and I have been a teacher ever since. Since that was 1983, this will be my forty first year teaching, and I have never once regretted my choice.

I know that teaching is not a profession held in high esteem anymore, for good and bad reasons, and I will not try to defend it here. It is possible that some of the critics are right, and I teach because I cannot do, but I like to think that there is more to my career choice than ineptitude. My motivations for teaching are manifold, and let me list some of them:

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.

I know that teaching may not be your cup of tea, but I do hope that you enjoy whatever you do, as much as I do teaching, and I would like to think that some of that joy comes through.

My Teaching Process

I do a session on how to teach for business school faculty, and I emphasize that there is no one template for a good teacher. I am an old-fashioned lecturer, a control freak when it comes to what happens in my classroom. In forty years of teaching, I have never once had a guest lecturer in my classroom or turned my class over to a free-for-all discussion.

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.

I am aware of things that I need to work on. My ego sometimes still gets in the way of admitting when I am wrong, I often do not let students finish their questions before answering them, I am sometimes more abrupt (and less kind) than I should be, especially when I am trying to get through material and my jokes can be off color and corny (as my kids point out to me). I do keep working on my teaching, though, and if you are a teacher, no matter what level you teach at, I think of you as a kindred spirit.

My Class Content

In my first two years of teaching, from 1984 to 1986, I was a visiting professor at the University of California at Berkeley, and like many visiting faculty around the world, I was asked to plug in holes in the teaching schedule. I taught six different classes ranging from a corporate finance class to undergraduates to a central banking for executive MBAs, and while I spent almost all of my time struggling to stay ahead of my students, with the material, it set me on a pathway to being a generalist. Once I came to NYU in 1986, I continued to teach classes across the finance spectrum, from corporate finance to valuation to investing, and I am glad that I did so. I am a natural dabbler, and I enjoy looking at big financial questions and ideas from multiple perspectives.

There are two core classes that I have taught to the MBAs at Stern, almost every year since 1986. The first is corporate finance, a class about the first principles that should govern how to run a business, and thus a required class (in my biased view) for everyone in business.

If you are a business owner or operator, this class should give you the tools to use to make business choices that make the most financial sense. If you work in a business, whether it be in marketing, strategy or HR, this class is designed to provide perspective on how what you do fits into value creation at your business. If you are just interested in business, just as an observer, you may find this class useful in examining why companies do what they do, from acquisitions to buybacks, and when corporate actions violate common sense.

The second is valuation, a class about how to value or price almost anything, with a tool set for those who need to put numbers on assets.

Again, I teach this class to a broad audience, from appraisers/analysts whose jobs revolve around valuation/pricing to portfolio managers who are often users of analyst valuations to business owners, whose interests in valuation can range from curiosity (how much is my business worth?) to the transactional (how much of my business should I give up for a capital infusion?)

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.

In 2024, I added a fourth course to the mix, one centered around my view that businesses age like human beings do, i.e., there is a corporate life cycle, and that how businesses operate and how investors value them, changes as they move from youth to demise.

I have used the corporate life cycle perspective to structure my thinking on almost every class that I teach, and in this class, I isolate it to examine how businesses age and how they respond to to aging, sometimes in destructive ways.

In my corporate finance and valuation classes, the raw material comes from financial statements, and I realized early on that my students, despite having had a class or two on accounting, still struggled with reading and using financial statements, and I created a short accounting class, specifically designed with financial analysis and valuation in mind. The class is structured around the three financial statements that embody financial reporting - the income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flows - and how the categorization (and miscategorization) of expenses into operating, financing and capital expenses plays out in these statements.

As many of you who may have read my work know, I think that fair value accounting is not just an oxymoron but one that has done serious damage to the informativeness of financial statements, and I use this class to explain why.

Since so much of finance is built around the time value of money (present value) and an understanding of financial markets and securities, I also have a short online foundational class in finance:

As you can see, this class covers the bare basics of macroeconomics, since that is all I am capable to teaching, but in my experience, it is all that I have needed in finance.

As our access to financial data and tools has improved, I added a short course on statistics, again with the narrow objective of providing the basic tools of data analysis.

A statistics purist would probably blanch at my treatment of regressions, correlations and descriptive statistics, but as a pragmatist, I am willing to compromise and move along.

As you browse through the content of these classes, and consider whether you want to take one, it is worth noting that they are taught in different formats. The corporate finance and valuation classes will be taught in the spring, starting in late January and ending in mid-May, with two eighty-minute sessions each week that will be recorded and accessible shorts after they are delivered in the classroom. There are online versions of both classes, and the investment philosophies class, that take the form of shorter recorded online classes (about twenty minutes), that you can either take for free on my webpage or for a certificate from NYU, for a fee.

The accounting, statistics and foundations classes are only in online format, on my webpage, and they are free. All in all, I know that some of you are budget-constrained, and others of you are time-constrained, and I hope that there is an offering that meeting your constraints.

If you are interested, the table below lists the gateways to each of the classes listed above. Note that the links for the spring 2025 classes will lead you to webcast pages, where there are no sessions listed yet, since the classes start in late January 2025. The links to the NYU certificate classes will take you to the NYU page that will allow you to enroll if you are interested, but for a price. The links to the free online classes will take you to pages that list the course sessions, with post-class tests and material to go with each session:

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

The last column represents WhatsApp groups that I have set up for each class, where you can raise and answer questions from others taking the class.

My Book (and Written) Content

Let me begin by emphasizing that you do not need any of my books to take my classes. In fact, I don't even require them, when I teach my MBA and undergraduate classes at NYU. The classes are self contained, with the material you need in the slides that I use for each class, and these slides will be accessible at no cost, either as a packet for the entire class or as a link to the session (on YouTube). To the extent that I use other material, spreadsheets or data in each session, the links to those as well will be accessible as well.

If you prefer to have a book, I do have a few that cover the classes that I teach, though some of them are obscenely overpriced (in my view, and there is little that I can do about the publishing business and its desire for self immolation.) You can find my books, and the webpages that support these books, at this link, and a description of the books is below:

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.

Finally, I discovered early on how frustrating it is to be dependent on outsiders for data that you need for corporate financial analysis and valuation, and I decided to become self sufficient and create my own data tables, where I report industry averages on almost every statistic that we track and estimate in finance. These data tables should be accessible and downloadable (in excel), and if you find yourself stymied, when doing so, trying another browser often helps. The data is updated once a year, at the start of the year, and the 2025 data update will be available around January 10, 2025.

A Class Guide

I would be delighted, if you decide to take one or more of my classes, but I understand that your lives are busy, with jobs, family and friends all competing for your time. You may start with the intent of taking a course, but you may not be able to finish for any number of reasons, and if that happens, I completely understand. In addition, the courses that you find useful will depend on your end game.

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.

As a lead-in to any of these paths, I will leave it to you to decide whether you need to take the accounting, statistics, and foundations classes, to either refresh content you have not seen in a long time or because you find yourself confused about basics:

If you find yourself overwhelmed with any or all of these paths, you always have the option of watching a session or two of any class of your choice. As you look at the choices, you have to consider three realities.

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.

I will be teaching close to 800 students across my three NYU classes, in the spring, and they will get the bulk of my attention, in terms of grading and responding to emails and questions. With my limited bandwidth and time, I am afraid that I will not be able to answer most of your questions, if you are taking the free classes online; with the certificate classes, there will be zoom office hours once every two weeks for a live Q&A. I have created WhatsApp forums (see class list above) for you, if you are interested, to be able to interact with other students who are in the same position that you are in, and hopefully, there will be someone in the forum who can address your doubts. Since I have never done this before, it is an experiment, and I will shut them down, if the trolls take over.

In Closing…

I hope to see you (in person or virtually) in one of my classes, and that you find the content useful. If you are taking one of my free classes, please recognize that I share my content, not out of altruism, but because like most teachers, I like a big audience. If you are taking the NYU certificate classes, and you find the price tag daunting, I am afraid that I cannot do much more than commiserate, since the university has its own imperatives. If you do feel that you want to thank me, the best way you can do this is to pass it on, perhaps by teaching someone around you.

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