Pitch the Perfect Investment The Essential Guide to Winning on Wall Street

Pitch the Perfect Investment combines investment analysis with persuasion and sales to teach you the "soft skill" so crucial to success in the financial markets. Written by the leading authorities in investment pitching, this book shows you how to develop and exploit the essential, career-advancing skill of pitching value-creating ideas to win over clients and investors. You'll gain world-class insight into search strategy, data collection and research, securities analysis, and risk assessment and management to help you uncover the perfect opportunity; you'll then strengthen your critical thinking skills and draw on psychology, argumentation, and informal logic to craft the perfect pitch to showcase your perfect idea. The ability to effectively pitch an investment is essential to securing a job on Wall Street, where it immediately becomes a fundamental part of day-to-day business. This book gives you in-depth training along with access to complete online ancillaries and case studies so you can master the little skill that makes a big difference.

It doesn't matter how great your investment ideas are if you can't convince anyone to actually invest. Ideas must come to fruition to be truly great, and this book gives you the tools and understanding you need to get it done.

• Persuade potential investors, clients, executives, and employers
• Source, analyze, value, and pitch your ideas for stocks and acquisitions
• Get hired, make money, expand your company, and win business
• Craft the perfect investment into the perfect pitch

Money managers, analysts, bankers, executives, salespeople, students, and individual investors alike stand to gain massively by employing the techniques discussed here. If you're serious about success and ready to start moving up, Pitch the Perfect Investment shows you how to make it happen.

Preface ix

Introduction 1

Part I The Perfect Investment 23

Chapter 1 How to Value an Asset 25

Chapter 2 How to Value a Business 43

Chapter 3 How to Evaluate Competitive Advantage and Value Growth 71

Chapter 4 How to Think About a Security’s Intrinsic Value 127

Chapter 5 How to Think About Market Efficiency 145

Chapter 6 How to Think About the Wisdom of Crowds 171

Chapter 7 How to Think About Behavioral Finance 223

Chapter 8 How to Add Value Through Research 267

Chapter 9 How to Assess Risk 299

Part II the Perfect Pitch 337

Chapter 10 How to Select a Security 339

Chapter 11 How to Organize the Content of the Message 371

Chapter 12 How to Deliver the Message 395

Acknowledgments 431

Art Acknowledgments 435

About the Authors 439

Index 441

PAUL D. SONKIN is an analyst and portfolio manager at Gabelli Funds and previously spent 14 years at the helm of The Hummingbird Value Fund. For 16 years he was an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School and is coauthor of Value Investing: From Graham to Buffett and Beyond.

PAUL JOHNSON runs Nicusa Investment Advisors and is an Adjunct Professor at Columbia Business School and the Gabelli School of Busi- ness at Fordham University. He is a contributing annotator to The Most Important Thing Illuminated (by Howard Marks), co-author of The Gorilla Game, and a contributing author to Columbia Business School: A Century of Ideas.