Business-valuation

As a Real Estate Appraiser, this book is a big help in my profession every day. It is clear and concise when it comes to having to find information about a single family or multifamily resident. It is easy to figure out depreciation, and regional and local cost multipliers. I have found that this book is right in line with what the builders in my area are charging making my job easier when it comes to appraising new cosntruction.

Anthony Spare and Paul Ciotti make a logical, but uninspired, case for making Relative Dividend Yield part of one's equity valuation and also one's buy/sell decisions. The book is clearly written and offers ample graphs to substantiate the notion of buying equities when dividend yields are high, and selling them once they are low.

Actually, the graphs may be too ample...readers of this rather expensive 248-page book will quickly learn that the text is a bit long on charts showing individual equity dividend yields relative to stock indexes over time, and a bit short on specifics concerning the avoidance of issues whose yields are high for good reason.

That's the book's essential deficiency: the authors devote a mere twelve overly general pages to "Pitfalls and Preventative Measures" (Chapter 6). Also, since investors will likely have a difficult time constructing the kinds of charts the Relative Dividend Yield methodology requires, it would have been helpful to offer tips on a cost-effective means to make this methodology applicable in real-time. The authors do, however, provide graphs with prior relative dividend yield histories, with room to continue plotting these yields, on several "blue chip" dividend-paying equities.

This is a very comprehensive text. However, make no bones about it; the prose reflects a highly technical style of writing. If you have limited knowledge about differential equations, logic, and statistics, you will struggle to stay engrossed past the first few chapters. Hard reading is an understatment. I was hoping that this would be the book that could boil down what real options are and give me a straightforward approach to their applications. Reading this I feel like I am back in an astrophysics class at MIT.

This is an excellent book. I had been initially surprised by the critical reviews for Copeland et al. and Kulatilaka et al. (Copeland, especially, has strong credentials,) but now, having looked at those books, sadly I have to agree. Then I bought this book and found a gem. The approach is fresh and we are not just presented with the same familiar textbook routes; the best part of which is that real problems are not hammered into available but inappropriate analytical solutions. The structure of the book is unusual too: 4 chapters with the foundations (including some maths but fully accessible to managers - good diagrams and plenty of intuition), 6 chapters of case studies (one, "Dixpin" by Stark, written to link with Dixit & Pindyck, the others new and based on consulting/research - nice to see non-standard cases and also more than one underlying variable!), 4 more chapters (the title of the last, "Summary for executives", speaks volumes about the authors' helpful approach, even if you're not an executive!), and 5 appendices + glossary, etc. The appendices and cases are written in the same style as the chapters of main text and the result is a very flexible resource which, I think, will be helpful for beginners, thro' 2nd year MBA and up to quite advanced practitioners.

Even when standard techniques are shown they are given innovative explanations. For example, see pages 266-269 in Newton's Appendix 4, on numerical solution, which I believe is a genuinely new way of taking the well-known mathematical relationship between the Black-Scholes partial differential equation and the heat conduction equation but explaining it using common sense appreciation of heat and temperature (amazingly, he manages to obtain the combined call option payoff and stock price diagrams using a thought experiment in heat/temperature which I could actually understand!). In this single appendix are both the intuition for understanding the evolution of option prices and the details of finite difference calculations which any reader can readily reproduce. His explanation of the random walk for beginners (Appendix 5) is the best I have ever seen (I even liked the very British story about a drunken sailor taking a random walk near Her Majesty's Royal Naval Dockyard - fortunately, the book does not often digress with funny stories, but this one helped).

I am always wary of books with many co-authors (this one has seven) but here you could believe that one author wrote the whole book. Howell is the editor and presumably the author of the chapters which are not attributed; other parts are by different combinations of the seven. All are in the Real Options Group at Manchester Business School, England (Patel is at Cambridge) and that may explain the cohesion of the text.

In many ways this book is technically ahead of the game but you can tell that these guys are at a business school rather than a conventional university department - they know how to communicate with managers as well as students.