Ticker Take

Does a trillion-dollar valuation alone make a stock worth buying? Aswath Damodaran doesn’t think so. The NYU finance professor, whom Wall Street calls the “dean of valuation,” walked us through his thinking in the latest episode of Ticker Take. He makes a distinction between pricing a stock and valuing it. Pricing is what most of the market is actually doing, driven by how many people want to buy or sell a stock at any given moment. Valuing a business is determining its worth, based on the cash it generates. More specifically: how much cash is coming in, how fast will it grow, and how much uncertainty surrounds it.