Business, Legal & Accounting Glossary
The value of an investment at a point in time. Investment funds typically send statements twice a year showing the value of any investments or withdrawals during the period, including dividends paid or reinvested.
Valuation is the attempt to determine whether a stock is fairly priced. According to financial theory, a stock should be valued at the future cash flows it will generate, discounted by an appropriate rate. But both future cash flows and an appropriate discount rate are highly uncertain, and thus investors seek additional valuation methods. The most common valuation method is the price-earnings ratio (P/E), which is the price divided by earnings per share (EPS). But this valuation can miss the mark because of accounting vagaries and the time-span chosen for EPS. Moreover, an earnings-based valuation won’t work for a new company with loads of promise but no profits as yet. Other recognized valuation methods are similarly useful and similarly flawed. A valuation based on sales recognizes the firm’s revenue-generating power — but bankrupt firms too often have plenty of revenue. A valuation based on book value uses audited accounting figures, but historical asset values are often wrong. Thus investors tend to use a variety of valuation methods to decide whether the current stock price over- or undervalues a stock.
Valuation refers to the value an arms-length purchaser would pay for all of the outstanding stock and stock rights of a company. In a public company, valuation is also referred to as a company’s market capitalization or market cap, which is the value generated by multiplying the company’s outstanding stock by its trading value. For example, a company with 10 million outstanding shares trading at $22.50 would have a valuation or market cap equal to $225 million (10 million shares multiplied by $22.50).
Determining the valuation, or value, of a privately held company is more difficult than with a publicly-traded company because of the absence of an active market in private company securities. Methods frequently used to value growing private companies include the discounted cash flow method and the market price method, discussed elsewhere in this book.
As a short-hand method, entrepreneurs and investors frequently refer to the valuation of a venture capital-backed company by reference to the amount of money the venture investor paid for the percentage of ownership acquired in the investment. For example, when a venture capitalist purchases 25% of a company for $1 million, the parties may refer to the company’s valuation before funding as being $4 million, which is the value determined by dividing the amount invested by the percentage purchased. The post-money valuation is frequently determined by adding the amount invested to the pre-money valuation, in this adding $1 million to $4 million to get a $5 million post-money valuation.
Such tasks as accounting, risk management and business planning require that some or all of a business’s assets (or liabilities) be valued. How to actually assign a dollar value to something is a problem as old as accounting itself.
There are two basic approaches:
A strength of book valuation is the fact that it is formula-driven. Because accounting authorities specify detailed rules for calculating book values, there is usually little ambiguity in how assets should be assigned book values. Another strength of book valuation is its wide applicability. Traditionally, almost any asset could be assigned a book value. In recent years, this strength has been eroded. Financial innovation has introduced various derivatives or other financial instruments for which book valuation can be almost meaningless and—even worse—easily manipulated.
Another shortcoming of book valuation is the fact that the formula-driven approach can have little to do with economic reality. Suppose a firm acquires 1,000 ounces of gold at a price of USD 300 per ounce. A year later, gold is trading at USD 200 per ounce. If the firm used market value accounting, it will immediately report a USD 100,000 loss to shareholders. With book value accounting, it continues to value the gold at USD 300 per ounce. Only if it sells the gold will the firm report a book value loss to its shareholders.
Market value accounting also has shortcomings. One problem is the fact that market values represent values realized in recent transactions, but there is no guarantee that future transactions will realize similar values. Consider an example:
For years, the holdings of the US Gold Depository at Fort Knox have remained steady at 147.3 million ounces of gold held at a book value of USD 42.22 per ounce. That is a total book value of USD 6.22 billion. Suppose today’s market price of gold is USD 300 per ounce. Then that same gold has a market value of USD 44.20 billion, but this is misleading. The United States government can’t immediately sell the gold for that price. If it tried, the market price of gold would plummet. The government would receive only a fraction of the calculated market value.
This example is extreme, but the problem is common. An asset will be trading in small quantities at certain prices. A firm with a large position in that asset won’t know what value it will fetch in the market until it actually tries to unload the position.
Market valuation works best with assets that are actively traded in liquid markets. It becomes somewhat subjective if markets have limited liquidity—some assumptions must be made to assign a market value to a stock or bond that trades infrequently. Even worse, many assets do not trade in active markets. For certain real estate, intellectual property or artwork, market value is a meaningless concept. The only time those assets can be assigned a market value is when they actually are sold.
The process of calculating a market value for an asset is called marking-to-market. For less actively traded assets, this process can be highly subjective. Models may be used to project what market values might be, assuming an active market did exist. Reliance on such models has been disparagingly referred to as marking-to-model. During the late 1990s and early 2000s, Enron Corporation used mark-to-model valuation extensively as a means of manipulating its financial reporting.
Of course, book value accounting is also subject to manipulation. A firm can “manufacture” book value earnings by selectively selling assets whose market values exceed their book values while continuing to hold assets whose market values are less than their book values. Such selective realization of gains is called gains trading. It is frequently done by corporations that want to boost their reported earnings. The reverse strategy—selectively realizing losses—can be used to reduce a corporation’s taxes.
Traditionally, accounting has been based on book valuation. This can be ascribed to the historically general applicability of that approach. Even today, book valuation is the norm. An exception is financial institutions. Some can use market values for certain of their assets and liabilities. For example, a brokerage firm may carry its computers and office furniture at book value, but its securities holdings will be carried at market value. Under the Basel Accords, banks can identify a portion of their balance sheet as a trading book. Financial assets or liabilities in the trading book are carried at market value. However, most of a bank’s financial assets—including its loans and any financial instruments hedging those loans—are carried at book value.
Because accounting is largely based on book valuation, it may fail to recognize deterioration in a firm’s financial condition that would be reflected in market valuations. It is this problem that largely motivated the adoption of asset-liability management techniques by financial firms in the 1980s.
Intrinsic value
Investment Valuation
The Dark Side of Valuation
Value investing
Valuation is used to refer to a stock’s value, e.g. how expensive or cheap a stock compared to its intrinsic value.
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This glossary post was last updated: 30th December, 2021 | 0 Views.