MicroCapClub

Club Conversation with Aswath Damodaran, the Dean of Valuation

Jan 12, 2026
Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor and valuation expert known for pragmatic, practice-focused teaching. He recounts his early life, explains valuation as structured storytelling, and shares lessons from big wins and losses. He debates passive versus active investing, questions AI’s monetization, and urges investors to build human-driven, qualitative edges.
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INSIGHT

Teaching The Thinking, Not Just Answers

  • Aswath Damodaran values teaching above specific subject matter and focuses on showing how to think through problems rather than giving answers.
  • He treats valuation as pragmatic storytelling grounded in numbers, combining creativity with discipline.
ADVICE

Be Bold But Grounded In Valuation

  • Be comfortable making forward-looking estimates and accept you'll be wrong sometimes when valuing companies.
  • Ground imaginative scenarios in business economics and use numbers to discipline storytelling.
ANECDOTE

Vale Mistake Led To Method Change

  • Damodaran recounts buying Vale during a macro downturn and later selling after a 60% drop while analyzing his mistakes.
  • He changed his methods to avoid using trailing twelve months for commodity firms and to model lagged commodity effects.
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