Financial Modeling and Valuation: A Practical Guide to Investment Banking and Private Equity

Best book to get started with financial analysis. Detailed and the best part is the excel examples to give you a crystal clear picture about how these financial methods work and what is the whole purpose of financial modeling and valuation..

This book literally taught me how to model. It's incredible. It takes you step by step through a valuation of Walmart, which is a fairly complicated company to model. It has an accompanying spreadsheet, and the book provides complete instructions on every key to enter, with helpful tables to compare results with in case you make a mistake. I was then able to use the spreadsheet and this book to value other companies. I don't write a ton of reviews, you can look at my profile to make sure this isn't a fake review, but I will write one when I feel credit is due and I want to give back a bit to the author. Maybe the best part of the book is that the author outlines step by step instructions for how to fix a balance sheet that isn't balancing! As a novice I had tried constructing financial statements and oftentimes had difficulty here. It may be that I'm sloppy, but the commonsense technique the authors showed allowed me to fix a balance sheet in less than an hour. Finally, walking through the example really helped me understand how the different financial statements interact in a way I hadn't before, even though I had studied them for a lot of time. There are a few typos here and there, but overall this book is ten stars in my opinion.

At first, as skimming throughout the entire book, I was not very happy because there are too many tables that occupies almost 40% of pages. However, after finishing this book, I changed my mind. Those tablets worth every penny.Although the content of this book is what I already know. However, I still highly value this book because it, in general, summarizes all the knowledge logically, step by step. I would say that I did many financial analysis during my courses as required projects; however those analysis lacked of consistency. This book helps me look back with my prior analysis and see my drawbacks.After reapply what I learn from this book and compare it with my prior analysis, I can say that my analysis are much more logical and questions that lecturers asked in those project are now fully answered in those analysis.If you are a students, regardless your experience in financial analysis, it is my recommendation to buy this book. It worth every penny.Another book "Leverage Buy-out" is also my recommendation after purchasing this one.Thank you Paul for this book

The book is detailed, but, easy to follow and understand. I found it really useful in developing a model for a complex business in readiness for submission to investors

Great book! I am a student who has spent a couple summers interning in M&A and this book was the best introduction I could ask for!Very simple step by step instruction with an explanation of why each thing is done. This is the base from where I have been building my knowledge of modeling and valuation and also connects my finance and accounting classes together.In comparison to other Wall Street training tools such as Wall Street Prep and Training The Street, the Pignataro one is rather basic. I would say this is best used as an introductory book. WSP and TTS go much more indepth on the concepts, modeling, and goes over LBO, Acc/Dil, Precedents, and Comps. But these packages are $400+, for $70 you can't beat this book.