The Six Most Common Valuation Mistakes

When famous value investors like Seth Klarman or Dan Abrams talk about value investing, they typically focus on the psychological and behavioral aspects of it: the confidence to bet against the market, and the honesty to acknowledge when your thesis hasn’t panned out and you need to cut your losses. That assumes investors have the technical skills necessary to calculate a company’s value, but drawing on thousands of valuations he’s reviewed during his career University of Navarra professor of finance Pablo Fernandez has found that people often make the same avoidable errors.

Basic errors when calculating valuations

The first three errors in Fernandez’s list are all problems...