General

General

@darius
1 year ago

Opinions of online Stock Intrinsic Value calculators?

Asking this here on behalf of @gabaktrader who requested the same in the Learn course comments.

What do we think about them? Have we found any good ones?

My intuition and experience tells me they're somewhat unreliable to derive truly meaningful value from, and most of the great investors I've followed/studied in the past express the same sentiment toward them.

I believe they may be useful as a quick sanity check, but typically the underlying math behind them is easy to replicate yourself - and more importantly you are acutely aware of the assumptions being made rather than relying on a generic formula which may vary significantly between industries and the maturity of companies.

If valuation companies was possible via some simple algorithms of FCF and other metrics, we would have absolutely no edge against the army of Wall Street quants as individual investors. If you can find a tool online which allows you to quickly adjust your assumptions and spit out an outcome, great! Personally I think the more menial task of building it yourself in a simple excel file and running the calculations manually will serve you better in both the long and short run.

That's just my opinion though, what do others think? Have you found a calculator online that you like?