In the period 1991-2010, the S&P 500 destroyed value for the shareholders ($4.5 trillion). In 1991-1999 it created value ($5.1 trillion), but in 2000-2010 it destroyed $9.6 trillion. The market value of the S&P 500 was $2.8 trillion in 1991 and $11.4 trillion in 2010.We also calculate the...

I review 150 textbooks on corporate finance and valuation published between 1979 and 2009 by authors such as Brealey, Myers, Copeland, Damodaran, Merton, Ross, Bruner, Bodie, Penman, Arzac… and find that their recommendations regarding the equity premium range from 3% to 10%, and that 51 books...

We report 2,510 answers from professors from 65 countries and 934 institutions. 1,791 respondents use betas, but 107 of them do not justify the betas they use.97.3% of the professors that justify the betas use regressions, webs, databases, textbooks or papers (the paper specifies which ones),...

We compute the correlations of the annual stock returns (1989-2008) of the Dow Jones companies with a) β Rm; and with b) Rm; and find that the second correlation (assuming beta = 1 for all companies) is higher than the first one, on average, and for all companies except Caterpillar and General...

This is an annotated appendix that accompanies the paper. In this note, we provide detailed commentary on a numerical example that illustrates the ideas that we discuss in the main paper. The numerical example is in Table18.10, Chapter 8, page 656, of the third edition of Corporate Finance,...

In this note, we extend a numerical example in the textbook by Berk & DeMarzo that matches methods for only when K_TS is equal to K_D. We show that there is a generalized formulation for the return to levered equity K_E that works for any value of K_TS, the appropriate discount rate for the tax...

This is a draft of Chapter 1 for an upcoming book on Financial Modeling & Valuation. Informally, the chapter introduces the basic concepts in cash flow valuation. It reviews the different types of finite cash flows and discusses the cost of capital with and without taxes in a world with perfect...

This paper contains the statistics of a survey about the Risk-Free Rate (RF) and the Market Risk Premium (MRP) used in 2019 for 69 countries. We got answers for 84 countries, but we only report the results for 69 countries with more than 8 answers.Due to “Quantitative Easing”, many...

In this rejoinder, we note that the complaint against the classic FCF WACC is misplaced because it incorrectly identifies the real source of the problem. The fault for the discrepancies, dear colleagues, lies not in the classic formulation of the FCF WACC. The real reason for the discrepancies...

In this short note, we present a nontechnical retrospection on the unbearable longevity of the classic WACC (Weighted Average Cost of Capital) for the Free Cash Flow (FCF) in perpetuity. Over the past two decades, researchers in finance have increased greatly our understanding of the properties...