The Imitation Game: Defending against AI's Dark Side!

    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 to me). I was not surprised, since I have lived with imitations for years, but I was bemused, since I don't have an Instagram account and have not posted on Facebook more than once or twice in a decade. In the last few days, those warnings have been joined by others, who have noted that there is now a video that looks and sounds like me, adding to the sales pitch with promises of super-normal returns if they reach out, and presumably send their money in. (Please don't go looking for these scams online, since the very act of clicking on them can expose you to their reach.)

    I would like to think that readers of my books or posts, or students in my classes, know me well enough to be able to tell that these are fakes, and while this is not the first time I have been targeted, it is clear that AI has upped the ante, in terms of creating posts and videos that look authentic. In response, I cycled through a series of emotions, starting with surprise that there are some out there who think that using my name alone will draw in investors, moving on to anger at the targeting of vulnerable investors and ending with frustration at the social media platforms that allow these fakes to exist. As a teacher, though, curiosity beat out all of these emotions, and I thought that the best thing that I can do, in addition to the fruitless exercise of notifying the social media companies about the fakes, is to talk about what these AI imitators got right, what they were off target on and what they got wrong in trying to create these fakes of me. Put simply, I plan to grade my AI imitator, as I would any student in my class, recognizing that being objective in this exercise will be tough to do. In the lead-in, though, I have to bore you with details of my professional life and thought process, since that is the key to creating a general framework that you will be able to use to detect AI imitations, since the game will only get more sophisticated in the years to come.

An Easy Target?

    In a post last year, I talked about a bot in my name, that was in development phase at NYU, and while officially sanctioned, it did open up existential challenges  for me. In discussing that bot, I noted that this bot had accessed everything that I had ever written, talked about or valued in my lifetime, and that I had facilitated its path by making that access easy. I will explain my rationale for the open access, and provide you with the links if you want to get to them, hoping to pre-empt those who will try to charge you for that content.

My Open Access Policy

    I have said this before, but there is no harm in saying it again, but I am a teacher, first and foremost, and almost every choice I make in my profession life reflects that mindset. A teacher, like an actor or singer, craves an audience, and the larger and more enthusiastic that audience, the better. When I started teaching in 1986, my audience was restricted to those in my physical classroom at NYU's business school, and my initial attempts at expanding that audience were very limited. I had video recorders set up to record my lectures, made three copies of each lecture tape, and put them on the shelves at NYU's library for patrons to check out and watch. The internet, for all of its sins, changed the game for me, allowing me to share not only class materials (slides, exams) but also my lecture videos, in online formats. Though my early attempts to make these conversions were primitive, the technology for recording classes and putting them online has made a quantum leap. In spring 2025, every one of my NYU classes was recorded by cameras that are built into classroom, the conversions to online videos happened in minutes, right after the class is done, and YouTube has been a game changer, in allowing access to anyone with an internet connection anywhere in the world.

    As the internet has expanded its reach, and social media platforms have joined the mix, I have also shared the other components that go into my classes more widely, starting with the data on industry averages that I need and use in my own valuations, the spreadsheets that contain these valuations and blog posts on markets and companies and any other tools that I use in my own analyses. While I am happy to receive compliments for the sharing and praise for being unselfish, the truth is that my sharing is driven less by altruism (I am no Mother Theresa!) and more  by two other forces. The first is that, as I noted in my post on country equity risk premiums last week, there much of what I know or write about is pedestrian, and holding it in secret seems silly. The second is that, while I am not easily outraged, I am driven to outrage by business consultants and experts who state the obvious (replacing words you know with buzzwords and acronyms), while making outrageous claims of what they can deliver and charging their customers absurd amounts for their advice and appraisals. If I can save even a few of these customers from making these payments, I consider it to be a win.

My Sharing Spots

    Everything that I have ever written, worked on or taught is somewhere online, almost always with no protective shields (no passwords or subscriptions), and there are four places where you can find them:

• Webpage: The oldest platform for my content remains my webpage, damodaran.com, and while it can be creaky, and difficult to navigate, it contains the links to my writing, teaching, data, spreadsheets and other tools. 
• Teaching: I teach two classes at Stern, corporate finance and valuation, and have four other classes - a lead-into-valuation accounting class, a made-for-finance statistics class, a class on investment philosophies and one on corporate life cycles, and I described these classes in a post on teaching at the start of 2025. You can find them all by going to the teaching link on my webpage, https://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/teaching.html including my regular classes (class material, lecture notes, exams and quizzes and webcasts of the classes) in real time, as well as archived versions from previous semesters. In addition, the online classes are at the same link, with material, post- class tests and webcasts of sessions for each class. This is also the place where you can find links to seminars that I teach in the rest of the world, with slides and materials that I used for those classes (though I have been tardy about updating these).
• Data: At the start of every year for the last three decades, I have shared my analysis of data on publicly traded companies, breaking down the data into corporate finance and valuation categories. This link, https://people.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/data.html, will take you to the entry page, and you can then either access the most recent data (from the start of 2025, since I update only once a year, for most datasets) or archived data (from previous years). My raw data comes from a variety of sources, and in the interests of not stepping on the toes of my data providers, my data usually reflects industry averages, rather than company-specific data, but it does include regional breakdowns: US, Europe, Emerging Markets (with India and China broken out individually, Australia & Canada & New Zealand) and Japan.  
• Spreadsheets: I am not an Excel ninja, and while my spreadsheet-building skills are adequate, my capacity to make them look polished is limited. I do share the spreadsheets that I use in my classes and work here, with my most-used (by me) spreadsheet being one that I use to value most companies at this link, with a webcast explaining its usage.
• Books: I have written eleven books and co-edited one, spread out across corporate finance, valuation and investing, and you can find them all listed here. Many of these books are in their third or fourth editions, but with each one, you should find a webpage that contains supplementary material for that book or edition (slides, answers to questions at the end of each chapter, data, spreadsheets backing the examples). This is the only section of the spreadsheet where you may encounter a gatekeeper, asking you for a password, and only if you seek access to instructor material. If you are wondering what is behind the gate, it is only the powerpoint slides, with my notes on each slide, but the pdf versions of these slides should be somewhere on the same page, without need for a password.
• Papers: I don't much care much for academic research, but I do like to write about topics that interest or confound me, and you can find these papers at this link. My two most widely downloaded papers are updates I do each year on the equity risk premium (in March) and country risk premiums (in July). Much of the material in these papers has made its way into one or more of my books, and thus, if you find the books unaffordable, you can get that material here for free.
• Blog posts: I will confess that when I write my first blog post on September 17, 2008, I had no idea what a blog was, what I was doing with it, and whether it would last through the following week. In the years since, this blog has become my first go-to, when I have doubts or questions about something, and I am trying to resolve those doubts for myself. In short, my blog has becoming my therapy spot, in times of uncertainty, and I have had no qualms about admitting to these doubts. During 2020, as COVID made us question almost everything we know about markets and the economy, for instance, I posted on where I was in the uncertainty spectrum every week from February 14, 2020 (when the virus became a global problem, not one restricted to China and cruise ships) to November 2020, when the vaccine appeared. You can get all of those posts in one paper, if you click on this link. While my original blog was on Google, in the last two years, I have replicated these posts on Substack (you need to be a subscriber, but it is free) and on LinkedIn. If you are on the latter, you are welcome to follow me, but I have hit my connections limit (I did not even know there was one, until I hit it) and am unable to add connections.
• YouTube: For the last decade, I have posted my class videos on YouTube, grouping them into playlists for each class. You can start with the link to my YouTube channel here, but if you are interested in taking a class, my suggestion is that you click on the playlists and pick on the one that corresponds to the class. Here, for instance, are my links to my Spring 2025 MBA valuation class and my Spring 2025 Corporate Finance class. Starting about a decade, I have also accompanied every one of my blog posts with a YouTube video, that contains the same material, and you can find those posts in its own (very long) playlist. 
• X (Twitter): Some of you have strong feelings about X, with some of those feelings reflecting your political leanings and others driven by the sometimes toxic posting on the platform. I have been a user of the platform since April 2009, and I have used it as a bulletin board, to alert people to content being posted elsewhere. In fact, outside of these "alert" posts, I almost never post on X, and steer away as far away as I can from debates and discussions on the platform, since a version of Gresham's law seems to kick in, where the worst and least informed posters hijack the debate and take it in directions that you do not want it to go.

I cannot think of a single item of content that I have produced in the last decade that is not on one of these platforms, making my professional life an open book, and thus also accessible to any AI entity. The Damodaran bot that I wrote about last year has access to all of this material, and while I signed off on that and one other variant, there are multiple unauthorized versions that have been works-in-progress. 

The Commonalities

    My content has taken many forms including posts, videos, data and spreadsheets, and is on multiple platforms, but there are a few common features that they share:

1. Low tech: I am decidedly low tech, and it shows in my sharing. My website looks like it was designed two decades ago, because it was, and contains none of the bells and whistles that make for a modern website. My blog remains on Google blogger, notwithstanding everything I have been told about how using WordPress would make it more attractive/adaptable, and my posts are neither short nor punchy. Every week, I get people reaching out to me to tell me that my YouTube videos are far too long and verbose, and that I would get more people watching with shorter videos and catchier descriptions, and much as I appreciate their offers to help, I have not taken them up on it., In addition, I shoot almost every one of my videos in my office, sometimes with my dog in the background, and often with ambient noise and mistakes embedded, making them definitely unpolished.  On twitter, I have only recently taken to stringing tweets together and I have never used the long text version that some professional twitter users have mastered. In my defense, I could always claim that I am too old to learn new tricks, but the truth is that I did not start any of my sharing as a means to acquiring a larger social media following, and it may very well be true that keeping my presence low-tech operates as a screener, repelling mismatched users.
2. Process over product: In my writing and teaching, I am often taken to task for not getting to the bottom line (Is the stock cheap or expensive? Should I buy or sell?) quickly, and spending so much time on the why and how, as opposed to the what. Much as my verbosity may frustrate you, it reflects what I think my job is as a teacher, which is to be transparent about process, i.e., explain how I reasoned my way to getting an answer than giving you my answer.
3. Pragmatism over Purity: Though I am often criticized for being an “academic”, I am a terrible one, and if there were an academic fraternity, I would be shunned. I view much of an academic research as navel gazing, and almost everything I write and teach is for practitioners. Consequently, I am quick to adapt and modify models to make them fit both reality and the available data, and make assumptions that would make a purist blanch. 
4. No stock picks or investment advice: In all my years of writing about and valuing markets and individual stocks, I have tried my best to steer away from making stock picks or offering investment advice. That may sound odd, since so much of what I do relates to valuation, and the essence of valuation is that you act on your estimates of value, but here is how I explain the contradiction. I value stocks (like Meta or Nvidia or Amazon or Mercado Libre) and I act (buy or sell) those stocks, based on my valuations, but it is neither my place nor my role to try to get other people to do the same. That said, I will share my story and valuation spreadsheet with you, and if you want to adapt that story/spreadsheet to make it your own, I am at peace with that choice, even if it is different from mine. The essence of good investing is taking ownership of your investment actions, and it is antithetical to that view of the world for me or anyone else to be telling you what to buy or sell.
5. No commercial entanglements: If you do explore my content on any of the platforms it is available on, you will notice that they are free, both in terms of what you pay and how you access them. In fact, none of them are monetized, and if you do see ads on my YouTube videos, it is Google that is collecting the revenue, not me. One reason for this practice is that I am lazy, and monetizing any of these platforms requires jumping through hoops and catering to advertisers that I neither have the time nor the inclination to do. The other is that I believe (though this may be more hope than truth) that one of the reasons that people read what I write or listen to me is because, much as they may disagree with me, I am perceived as (relatively) unbiased. I fear that formalizing a link with any commercial entity (bank, consultant, investor), whether as advisor, consultant or as director, opens the door to the perception of bias. The one exception to the "no commercial entranglements' clause is for my teaching engagements, with the NYU Certificate program and for the handful of valuation seminars I teach in person in the rest of the world. I am grateful that NYU has allowed me to share my class recordings with the world, and I will not begrudge them whatever they make on my certificate classes, though I do offer the same content for free online, on my webpage. I am also indebted to the people and organizations that manage the logistics of my seminars in the rest of the world, and if I can make their life easier by posting about these seminars, I will do so.    

The Imitation Game

    Given that my end game in sharing is to give access to people who want to use my material, I have generally taken a lax view of others borrowing my slides, data, spreadsheets or even webcasts, for their own purposes.

• For the most part, I categorize this borrowing as good neighbor sharing, where just as I would lend a neighbor a key cooking ingredient to save them the trouble of a trip to the grocery store, I am at peace with someone using my material to help in their teaching, save time on a valuation or a corporate finance project, prepare for an interview, or even burnish their credentials. An acknowledgement, when this happens, is much appreciated, but I don't take it personally when none is forthcoming. 
• There are less benign copycat versions of the imitation game - selectively using data from my site to back up arguments, misreading or misinterpreting what I have said and reproducing large portions of my writing without acknowledgement. To be honest, if made aware of these transgressions, I have gently nudged the culprits, but I don't have a legal hammer to follow up.
• The most malignant variations of this game are scams, where the scammers use my content or name to separate people from their money - the education companies that used my YouTube videos and charge for classes, the data sites that copy my data or spreadsheets and sell them to people, and the valuation/investment sites that try to get people to invest money, with my name as a draw. Until now, I have tried, as best as I can, to let people know that they are being victimized, but for the most part, these scams have been so badly designed that they have tended to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions.

It is clear to me that AI is now going to change this game, and that I will have to think about new ways to counter its insidious reach. To get a measure of what the current AI scams that are making the rounds get right and wrong, I did take the time to take a closer look at both the Instagram post and the fake video that are making the rounds. 

• What they get right: The Instagram post, which is in shown below, uses language that clearly is drawn from my posts and an image that is clearly mine.
  
  
  
  Not only does this post reflect the way I write, but it also picked Nvidia and  Palantir as the two firms to highlight,  the first a company that I own and have valued on my blog, and the second a company that I have been talking about as one that I am interested in owning, at the right price, giving it a patina of authenticity. The video looks and sounds like me, which should be no surprise since it had thousands of hours of YouTube videos to use as raw data. Using a yiddish word that I picked up in my days in New York, I have the give the scammers credit for chutzpah, on this front,, but I will take a notch off the grade, for the video's slickness, since my videos have much more of a homemade feel to them.

  

  
  
• What they struggled with most: The scam does mention that Palantir is "overhyped", a word that I use rarely, and while it talks about the company’s valuation, it is cagey about what that value is and there is little of substance to back up the claim. Palantir is a fascinating company, but to value it, you need a story of a data/software firm, with two channels for value creation, one of which looks at the government as a customer (a lower-margin, stickier and lower growth business) and the other at its commercial market (higher margin, more volatile and higher growth). Each of the stories has shades of grey, with the potential for overlap and conflict, but this is not a company where you can extrapolate the past, slap numbers on revenue growth and profitability, and arrive at a value. This post not only does not provide any tangible backing for its words in terms of value, but it does not even try. If these scammers had truly wanted to pull this off, they could have made their AI bot take my class, construct a plausible Palantir story, put it into my valuation spreadsheet and provide it as a link. 
  
  
  
• What they get wrong: To get a sense of what this post gets wrong, you should revisit the earlier part of the post where I talk about my sharing philosophy, and with as much distance as I can muster, here are the false notes in this scam. First, this scam pushes people to join an investment club, where I will presumably guide them on what to buy or sell. Given that my view of clubs is very much that of Groucho Marx, which is that I would not be belong to any club which would admit me as a member, the notion of telling people which stocks to buy cuts against every grain of my being. Second, there is a part of this scam where I purportedly promise investors who decide to partake that they will generate returns of 60% or higher, and as someone who has chronicled that not only do most active investors not keep up with the market, and argued that anyone who promises to deliver substantially more than the market in the long term is either a liar or fraud, this is clearly not me. 
  

In sum, there is good news and bad news in this grading assessment. The good news is that this AI scam gets my language and look right, but it is sloppily done in terms of content and capturing who I am as a person. The bad news is that it if this scammer was less lazy and more willing to put in some work, even with the current state of AI, it would have been easy to bring up the grades on content and message. I will wager that the Damodaran Bot that I mentioned earlier on in this post that is being developed at NYU Stern would have created a post that would have been much more difficult for you to detect as fake, making it a Frankenstein monster perhaps in the making. The worse news is that AI technology is evolving, and it will get better on every one of these fronts at imitating others, and you should prepare yourself for a deluge of investment scams.

An AI Protective Shield

    I did think long about writing this post, wondering whether it would make a difference. After all, if you are a frequent reader of this blog or have read this post all the way down to this point, it is unlikely that you were fooled by the Instagram post or video. It remains an uncomfortable truth that the people most exposed to these scams are the ones who have read little or none of what I have written, and I wish there were a way that I could pass on the following suggestions on how they can protect themselves against the other fakes and scams that will undoubtedly be directed at them. 

1. "Looks & sounds like" not good enough: Having seen the flood of fake AI videos in the news and on social media, I hope that you have concluded that “looks and sounds Iike” is no longer good enough to meet the authenticity test. This remains AI’s strongest suit, especially in the hands of the garden variety scammer, and you should prepare yourself for more fake videos, with political figures, investing luminaries and experts targeted.
2. Steer away from arrogance & hype: I have always been skeptical of the notion that there is “smart” money, composed of investors who know more than the rest of us and are able to beat the market consistently, and for long periods. For the most part, when you see a group of investors (hedge funds, private equity) beating the market, luck is more of a contributor as skill, and success is fleeting. In a talk on the topic, I argued that investors should steer away from arrogance and bombast, and towards humility, when it comes to who they trust with their money, and that applies in spades in the world of AI scams. Since most scammers don’t understand the subtlety of this idea, screening investment sales pitches for outlandish claims alone will eliminate most scams.
3. Do your homework: If you decide to invest with someone, based upon a virtual meet or sales pitch, you should do your homework and that goes well beyond asking for their track records in terms of performance. In my class on investment philosophies, I talk about how great investors through the ages have had very different views of markets and ways of making money, but each one has had an investment philosophy that is unique, consistent and well thought through. It is malpractice to invest with anyone, no matter what their reputation for earning high returns, without understanding that person’s investment philosophy, and this understanding will also give you a template for spotting fakes using that person’s name. 
4. Avoid ROMO & FOMO: In my investing classes, I talk about the damage that ROMO (regret over missing out) and FOMO (fear of missing out) can do to investor psyches and portfolio. 
1. With ROMO (regret over missing out), where you look back in time and regret not buying Facebook at its IPO price in 2012 or selling your bitcoin in  November 2013, when it hit $1000, you expose yourself to two emotions. The first is jealousy, especially at those who did buy Facebook at its IPO or have held on to their bitcoin to see its price hit six digits. The second is that you start buying into conspiracy theories, where you convince yourself that these winners (at least in the rear view mirror) were able to win, because the game was fixed in their favor. Both make you susceptible to chasing after past winners, and easy prey for vendors of conspiracies.
2. With FOMO (fear of missing out), your overwhelming concern is that you will miss the next big multi-bagger, an investment that will increase five or ten fold over the next year or two. The emotion that is triggered is greed, leading you to overreach in your investing, cycling through your investments, as most of them fall short of your unrealistic expectations, and searching for the next “big thing”, making you susceptible to anyone offering a pathway to get there.

Much as we think of scammers as the criminals and the scammed as the victims, the truth is that scams are more akin to tangos, where each side needs the other. The scammer’s techniques work because they trigger the emotions (fear, greed) of the scammed, to respond, and AI will only make this easier to do. Looking to regulators or the government to protection will do little more than offer false comfort, and the best defense is “caveat emptor” or “buyer beware”. 

YouTube Video

Links

Webpage: https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/home.htm 

Blog: 

(1) Google: https://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.com 

(2) Substack: https://aswathdamodaran.substack.com 

(3) LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aswathdamodaran/ 

YouTube

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCLvnJL8htRR1T9cbSccaoVw X: https://x.com/aswathdamodaran?lang=en

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:

1. 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.
2. 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. 
3. 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.

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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. 
4. 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. 

1. 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. 
2. 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. 
3. 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. 

YouTube Video

Class list with links

1. Corporate Finance (NYU MBA): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastcfspr25.htm 
2. Valuation (NYU MBA): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcasteqspr25.htm 
3. Corporate Finance (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastcfonline.htm 
4. Valuation (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastvalonline.htm 
5. Corporate Finance (NYU Certificate): https://execed.stern.nyu.edu/products/corporate-finance-with-aswath-damodaran 
6. Valuation (NYU Certificate): https://execed.stern.nyu.edu/products/advanced-valuation-with-aswath-damodaran 
7. Investment Philosophies (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastinvphil.htm 
8. Investment Philosophies (NYU Certificate): https://execed.stern.nyu.edu/products/investment-philosophies-with-aswath-damodaran 
9. Corporate Life Cycle (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastCLC.htm 
10. Accounting 101 (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastacctg.htm 
11. Foundations of Finance (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcastfoundationsonline.htm 
12. Statistics 101 (Free Online): https://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~adamodar/New_Home_Page/webcaststatistics.htm

WhatsApp Groups for Classes

1. Corporate Finance: https://chat.whatsapp.com/C0yjIAWT2WdLozCHYctU9p
2. Valuation: https://chat.whatsapp.com/LjQBQXcbyh11I17idz176k
3. Investment Philosophies: https://chat.whatsapp.com/IolVsa3qScLJecUtu4uUKO
4. Corporate Life Cycle: https://chat.whatsapp.com/J1V0vwFkIUoCblYp4J3ENs

A Return to Teaching: The Spring 2023 Edition

    If, as you read this post, it feels like you have read it or a close variant before, it is because you have. Each year, ahead of teaching my classes at NYU's Stern School of Business in the spring, I invite readers to accompany me on my journey, and this year is no different. Starting in late January 2023, I will be back in the classroom, teaching valuation and corporate finance to the MBAs and valuation to the undergraduates, and these classes will continue through May 2023. If you are curious about the content of these classes, and may want to partake, I will use this post to lay out my teaching philosophy, to describe the classes that I teach and provide options that you may be able to use to take them.

Teaching Philosophy

    I have heard the old saying that "those who can do, and those who cannot teach", and I won't get defensive in response, because  it may be true. I would like to believe that I am capable of both doing and teaching valuation and corporate finance, but I will leave that judgment for you to make, since my valuations and corporate finance assessments are in the public domain (on my blog and in my lecture notes). If your query is why I would continue to teach rather than seek out more lucrative careers in investing or banking, my answer is a simple one. I love teaching and if you follow my classes, I hope it shows, and my teaching philosophy can be summarized in six precepts:

1. Preparation is key: Paraphrasing Edison, teaching is 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration. If you are prepared for your class, you are well on your way to being a good teacher.
2. Respect your students: I believe that anyone who sits on my classroom is as capable as I am, though perhaps not as experienced, and is passionate about learning.
3. Be fair: I don't believe that students dislike or punish tough teachers, but I do believe that they dislike and punish teachers who are unfair, either in the way they test students or in the way they grade them. I know that I will make mistakes, but as long as I keep an open door and correct my mistakes, I think that students will cut me some slack. 
4. Have empathy: It has been a long time since I was a student in a classroom, but I try to keep my memory fresh by remembering the things I disliked in my classes and trying not to repeat them.
5. Teaching is not just in the classroom: My impact on students does not come just from what what I do in the classroom. It is affected just as much but what I do outside the classroom, in my office hours and in my interactions (online and in person) with my students.
6. Have fun: If you look at the joy that young children show when they learn something new, it is obvious that human beings enjoy learning (though our education systems are often designed to stamp out that joy). I want my classes to be meaningful, impactful and profound, but I also want them to be fun. For that to happen, I have to have fun teaching and I will!

Older, though not wiser, as I start my 37th year teaching at NYU, I am looking forward to class just as much as I did the very first year that taught, as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley in the fall of 1984. 

Course Offerings

    I am a dabbler, someone who knows a little bit about a whole host of subjects, without being close to an expert on any one of them. In a world where specialization is the norm, this does put me at a bit of a disadvantage, since there are many who know a great deal more about almost any topic that I choose to talk about, but I do think that it gives me a big-picture perspective that helps me find answers. As you will see in this section, I teach a range of courses, and I hope that my teaching of each course is informed by thinking about and teaching of the other courses. 

1. Pre-game Prep

    If there is a lesson be learnt from the last few years of market mayhem, it is that far too many investors, professional as well as retail, seem to have lost their moorings (or never had them in the first place), when it comes to the basics of accounting, finance and statistics. In the last few years, I have created my own versions of each of these disciplines, reflecting the tools and skills that I draw upon in my valuation and corporate finance classes. 

a. Accounting

    Much of the raw data that you use in corporate finance and valuation comes from accounting statements, and if you do not understand the difference between operating and net income, you are fatally handicapped. If your accounting basics are strong, you can move right along, but if they are shaky, I have an abbreviated online accounting class, with twelve sessions that around built around using the financial statements (income statement, balance sheet and statement of cash flows) to assess a firm’s financial standing, as a prelude to analyzing or valuing it.

Link to accounting class

Just as a note of warning, this is my quirky version of accounting, and I don’t follow the accounting script in this class. I challenge what I see as indefensible practices in accounting, including the expensing of R&D (a capital expense) and inconsistencies in accounting ratios. 

b. Foundations of Finance

     I also have a 12-session foundations of finance class, where I introduce two structures that I draw on all through my classes - the financial balance sheet (as opposed to an accounting balance sheet) and a corporate life cycle. I provide an introduction to cash flows and risk, and how they play out in the time value of money, and the basics of valuing contractual cash flows (bonds), residual cash flows (equity) and contingent cash flows (options). Finally, I carve out simple (even simplistic) sessions on inflation, interest rates and exchange rate, three macro variables that we are exposed to in almost all financial analysis and valuations.

Link to Foundations class 

Again, if your finance basics are solid, and you understand the link between expected inflation, interest rates and exchange rates, you can skip this class.

c. Statistics

    The most recent addition to my class list is one on statistics, and it was motivated by the wanton misuse and misunderstanding of data that I see not only in investing, but in the rest of life. It is ironic, and perhaps telling, that our understanding of statistics seems to have hit rock bottom in the age of big data. In this class, I start by looking at data collection and data descriptives, before moving on to distributions and data relationships (correlations, covariances and regressions) and closing with probabilities and probabilistic tools.

Link to Statistics class

If you find yourself inundated by data in financial analysis, I hope this class helps you convert data to information, and data that matters from data that distracts.

2. Corporate Finance

    If the introductory classes in accounting, finance and foundations don’t exhaust you, you are welcome to my corporate finance class, which covers the first principles that govern how to run a business. The class starts with a question of what the end game should be for a business (profitability, value, social good?), and uses that endgame to cast light on the investing, financing and dividend decisions that all businesses, small or large, private or public, have to make. 

This is a big picture class, designed not for bankers and consultants, but for a much broader audience of business owners, entrepreneurs and investors. If you have struggled with why debt helps some companies and hinders others, or how stock buybacks affect shareholders, I hope that you will give this class a try. It is also a relentlessly applied class, where every concept that is introduced in class is applied on companies that range the spectrum: a multinational entertainment company facing leadership challenges (Disney), a family-group automobile company (Tata Motors), a bank with a storied past and a troubled present (Deutsche Bank), an emerging-market mining company (Vale), a Chinese search engine (Baidu) and a small privately owned bookstore in New York City. 

    Along the way, I will use the corporate life cycle to illustrate how the corporate finance focus of a business changes as it ages, from investing (in young companies) to financing (in mature businesses) to dividends (in declining businesses):

It will help make my case that companies that act in age-inappropriate ways (a young company that borrows large amounts, a mature company that relentlessly chases growth or a declining firm looking for reincarnation) destroy value, while making their bankers and consultants wealthy.

3. Valuation

    In 1986, when I taught the first semester-long valuation class at NYU, I was told that there was not enough material for a class that long. I persevered, and thirty seven years later, I think I can say, with some confidence, that I have enough material to fill a semester-long class. This is a class in search of pragmatic solutions, not purity or theory, and it is my intent is to value assets, companies and investments, not just talk about valuing them.

I have argued that valuation books and courses do a disservice by focusing all their attention on money-making publicly-traded companies, with long histories and mostly in developed markets, leaving readers and students with the false impression that you cannot value young companies., firms in emerging markets or private businesses. I claim, perhaps boastfully, in my first session of this class that this is a class about valuing or pricing just about anything, including private business, assets, collectibles and even cryptos. 

    I use the corporate life cycle to talk about how the challenges in valuing and pricing companies shift as you move from start-ups to companies in decline:

As with the corporate finance class, I cast my net wide, when it comes to my audience, and while the class will help prepare you for a valuation career, as an equity research analyst or appraiser, the class is designed for anyone who has ever struggled with understanding valuation and market pricing. This may surprise you, but we spend a significant amount of time in this class talking about telling business stories that pass the “fairy tale” test and tying stories to valuation inputs, and almost no time opening and closing spreadsheets. So, whether you are a number cruncher or story teller, I think you will find something to take away from the class. 

4. Investment Philosophy

    The last class that I teach, albeit only online, is one on investment philosophies, and it was born from two observing two investing realities. 

• The first is that notwithstanding the hundreds of books on how to beat the market and the thousands of cannot-miss trading strategies that exist on paper, there are only a handful of investors and traders who have consistently beaten the market over long periods. 
• The second is that these consistent winners have very little in common, in terms of market beliefs and strategies, with value investors, market timers and traders in the mix. 

My reading of these two realities is that there is no one best investment philosophy, that works for everyone, but there is one best philosophy for you, given your personal make up and investable capital. Consequently, this class lays out a menu of investment philosophies, from short-term (day) trading to long-term value investing, from passive to active to activist investing and from stock picking to market timing, with the intent of letting you find the investment philosophy that is right for you.

As with my corporate finance and valuation classes, I argue that your choice of investment philosophy will determine where in the corporate life cycle, you will find your investments.

If you believe that markets make mistakes in valuing assets-in-place, i.e., you are a value investor, your portfolio will be composed of mature companies. In contrast, if your view is that markets make mistakes in valuing growth assets, i.e., you are a growth investor, your investments will be primarily from growth companies. 

Choices, choices, choices...

    You have lives to live, work to do and families to be with, and it is unrealistic and arrogant of me to expect you to spend a large portion of your time, taking my classes. I will settle for what I can get, and offer my classes in multiple formats, tailored to different time constraints and diverse tastes. 

Formats

    There are three formats in which I offer my classes, though not all of the classes are available in every format. 

Regular classes (Free):  My corporate finance and valuation classes are taught, as semester-long classes, meeting twice a week for 80-minute sessions. While you need to be registered in the classes, as Stern students, to be able to sit in the classrooms, the sessions will be recorded and accessible by the end of the class day. You can take the class this upcoming semester, when the classes start late January 2023 and continue through May 2023, or watch the archived versions from spring 2022.

Class	Webpage for class	Spring 2023 (Real time)	Spring 2022 (Archived)
Corporate Finance	Link	Link	Link
Valuation (MBA)	Link	Link	Link
Valuation (Undergraduate)	Link	Link	Link

Note that the MBA and undergraduate valuation classes are identical in content, and you can take one or the other. If you decide to take the class, you will have access to everything that my students will have, from the slides that I use in the class, to the tests and exams that I give, with solutions that you can use to grade yourself, to the emails that I send my students on an almost daily basis. You can even do the projects (a corporate financial analysis in the corporate finance class or valuing & pricing a company in the valuation class) that are required for the classes. The downside is that this is the most time consuming of the choices, and much as I try, my 80-minute sessions cannot compete with The White Lotus for entertainment value. 

Online classes (Free): If you find yourself unable to invest the time needed to take my regular classes or find the long sessions unwatchable (I don't blame you..), I have online versions of these classes that compress the 80-minute sessions into 12-15 minutes. It is a testimonial to the bloat in MBA programs that I can do this without compromising much on content, and these sessions also come with supporting material. 

Online Class	Webpage for class	YouTube Playlist
Accounting	Link	Link
Foundations of Finance	Link	Link
Statistics	Link	Link
Corporate Finance	Link	Link
Valuation	Link	Link
Investment Philosophy	Link	Link

One downside is that many of these online sessions were recorded a few years ago, and you may find no mention of valuation challenges of today, from how the COVID crisis upended value and the steep fall in FANGAM stocks this year. Another is that even if you watch every video, take every post-class test and feel that you have mastered the material, I cannot offer you any official affirmation or certification for taking the class, but on the flip side, the courses are free!

Certificate classes (Not free): If certification is what you seek, New York University offers my three main courses as certificate classes. The content is similar to that in my online classes, but the videos are more polished, the classes follow a calendar and I do have an online meetup on zoom every two weeks:

Certificate Class	NYU Exec Ed Link	Semesters taught
Corporate Finance	Link	Fall Semester
Valuation	Link	Fall & Spring Semesters
Investment Philosophy	Link	Spring Semester

In keeping with the adage that there is no free lunch, you will have to pay for the certification privilege, and if the price gives you sticker shock, please remember that I have no role in that pricing decision and offer a free version, with the same content.

Sequencing

    If you are interested but are unclear about where to start, I am reproducing a flow chart I created last year to guide you through my classes. 

As you can see, the sequencing of classes depends upon your background, as well as your interests. Specifically, if you are mostly interested in running or helping to run a business, the only class that you may need is a corporate finance class, supplemented by, if necessary, one or more of the three prep classes (accounting, basic finance and statistics). If your interests lie in learning the craft of valuation, perhaps because your job requires it or because you are curious, my recommendation is that you take both the corporate finance and valuation classes. If investing is what rings your bell, the valuation class twinned with an investment philosophy class should get you to wherever you want to go. 

Supporting Cast

    Watching a video of a class is just the first step in learning. To help, I try to provide as much supporting material as I can. As you look down the list, please do not be intimidated by its length, since you may find a use for only a portion of what I offer:

1. Lecture Notes: The only material that I require for the students in my class are the lecture note slides that I use in the class, and the only reason I require it is to reduce the amount of note-taking during class. The slides are available as full packets for my regular classes, on the webpages for the classes (see above), but they are also available with each session as links. As you review these slides, you will note that I break every rule in creating slides, cramming in way too much information on each slide. I am sorry for doing so, but my intent is to allow these slides to be the equivalent of class notes.
2. Post-class test: Every session of each class comes with a post-class test. These tests take about 15 minutes to do, and are a review of the material covered during the class. If you have the time, it is worth taking these tests to reaffirm what you are learning.
3. Data: The data that I reference during the class are available in their most updated formats on my webpage, under current data, with the next update due at the start of 2023. 
4. Spreadsheets: I almost never open an excel spreadsheet during my classes and spend little time on financial modeling, but I do use my limited Excel skills, when valuing companies and doing corporate financial analysis. To save you the trouble of building spreadsheets from scratch, I leave my spreadsheets online for you to access, adapt and change.
5. Tools videos: As I noted earlier, my classes are applied, and to provide guidance on applying what I teach to real life, I have YouTube videos on almost every application, from how to read an annual report all the way to a full company valuation.
6. Blog Posts: If you find the material in my classes of interest, you can read my blog on Google Blogger and Substack. I don't post often, but when I do, my posts tend to focus on valuation, corporate finance and investment philosophy topics. 
7. Books: I have books on each of the topics that I teach, but you do not need any of them to get through these classes. Some of these books are obscenely over-priced, and I don't require them for any of my classes. 

Book	Publisher link	Webpage for book
	Valuation
Damodaran on Valuation	Link	Link
Investment Valuation	Link	Link
The Dark Side of Valuation	Link	Link
The Little Book of Valuation	Link	Link
Narrative and Numbers	Link	Link
	Corporate Finance
Corporate Finance	Link	Link
Applied Corporate Finance	Link	Link
Strategic Risk Taking	Link	Link
	Investment Philosophies
Investment Philosophies	Link	Link
Investment Fables	Link	Link
	All Classes
The Corporate Life Cycle	Forthcoming in 2023	Forthcoming in 2023

Group Work and Interaction

    Starting on an online class is easy, but finishing the class is difficult. One obvious reason is time and commitment, and I will have to leave it to you to figure that one out, but another is that a class is more than a collection of lectures. There is a peer-group component to learning that includes class discussions and group interactions that is often absent in big online classes, leaving you not only with unanswered questions, but also missing the critical part of learning that comes from explaining concepts to, and bouncing ideas off, others in the class.  

    I do not have the bandwidth to be able to provide direct support to everyone taking my classes, but a few months ago, I was approached by Sebastian Marambio, who has set up a neat site called We are six, allowing people to set up groups to work with, for online classes, with apps available for Android and iOS.  Once you register on the site, you can enter the class code for the class that you then proceed to create a group with others with similar time frames and compatible time zones for taking the class. Sebastian has been kind enough to set up free versions for my online classes and the links to them are below:

Class	Course Code (for We are Six groups)
Corporate Finance (Online)	ADCorp
Valuation (Online)	ADValu
Investment Philosophies (Online)	ADPhil

If you are taking the regular versions of my corporate finance and valuation classes, please hold off, and we may create versions for those classes. I am looking forward to seeing how this experiment unfolds, since it will fill a gap in all online classes for organized group interactions. 

YouTube Video

Class List

Subject	Online (Free)	Certificate (Not free)	Regular Class (Free to follow)
Accounting	Link	NA	NA
Foundations of Finance	Link	NA	NA
Statistics	Link	NA	NA
Corporate Finance	Link	Link	Link
Valuation	Link	Link	Link
Investment Philosophies	Link	Link	NA