Self Teach Damodaran's?

A question for the masses:
I'm going into my sophomore summer and had a small HF gig that, due to market conditions, fell through. I am now going to work middle/back office for an Asset Manager in my area. Would it be beneficial for me to buy Damodaran's Book on Valuation and teach myself this summer? I am certainly aiming for an IB SA gig next year and figured without a strong front office internship this summer, combined with my non-target status, I need a good technical understanding. Let me know your thoughts.

 

Depends on how autodidactic you are...I love Damodaran (way better than McKinsey). The book is a little dense, though, especially if you haven't taken any finance courses or at least some accounting. If you have, you might be able to walk through it: he gives alot of great examples.

I read Domodaran (Investment Valuation) for a valuation class. It helped having the teacher help us through model building and incorporating what we learned in the book. Domodaran doesn't help you with that.

Best Response

Alphaholic: Sounds like I should be able to handle the book as I fared well in both my Financial and Managerial accounting classes along with Principles of finance.

Ideating: I in fact did offer to work for free, but in the words of the PM "This is not going to be an environment conducive to a productive internship." It was a small 80MM Small Cap Long/Short Equities fund that was definitely feeling the credit crunch. The PM then referred me to this Asset Manager which proceeded to have me come in to interview for their Middle/Back office type work. The front office gig is quite competitive and he flat out told me that my GPA was too low (3.0 Varsity Athlete at a T15 Biz School).

 

Watch the lectures in corporate finance and valuation - they're freely available, along with the powerpoint slides.

More important, do the exercises and quizzes to challenge yourself, then check against the solutions.

I did some self-teaching this way, for interview prep. Reading the book itself I found to be the least helpful, except as a reference when I needed to look up something specific. He's a talented speaker and teacher first - an author second, in my opinion.

www.damodaran.com

 
wildwestderivative:
Where do you get his quizzes and practice problems?

Click around, you need to find the home page for the courses. I usually go to "webcasts" link first, and then choose either the corporate finance or valuation course. From there you can link to all of the materials for the course.

Actually, if you scroll through the lectures, if there was a quiz that day, there's a direct link to it next to the link for the webcast.

 

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