Since early 1991, the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis has offered a wealth of authoritative data useful to valuation professionals, currently accessible through its online FRED database (located at http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/). FRED is valuable for both valuators who perform only a handful of engagements each year and those who need access to its unique breadth […]
Earlier this year, NACVA and Wiley published “Business Valuation: Fundamentals, Techniques, and Theory,” the authoritative guide to private enterprise valuation for both entry-level and seasoned business valuation professionals. The book collects in written form the core concepts NACVA has used to train more than 25,000 professionals on the ins and outs of business valuation. Among […]
Kroll has expanded the data available in the Kroll Cost of Capital Navigator, giving you access to new supporting datasets that provide greater transparency into our methodologies and more flexibility for your analysis. New Supplementary Data for International Equity Risk Premiums Access the underlying equity and bond market inputs behind historical international ERP calculations. The […]
With AI increasingly making its way into valuation professionals’ workflows, debate has naturally arisen over where to impose boundaries on its role, including in the context of writing valuation reports. Nancy McCarthy, a professional writer and former editor of The Valuation Examiner, has some valuable thoughts on the use of AI in report writing. “AI […]
Few issues generate more spirited conversation among valuation practitioners than the debate over whether to use Excel or a valuation software package. After all, many practitioners have invested hundreds, or thousands, of hours developing their own spreadsheets, templates, linked databases, and report-writing systems. Those systems may have served them well for years. The question isn’t […]
Welcome to the second installment in ValuSource Insider’s new seriesexploring the dozens of major valuation-related databases you can find on the BV Data University website. This month we’ll dig into Bizminer, a top-notch resource for benchmarking data in more than 9,000 lines of business in thousands of U.S. market areas, drawn from a database that […]
In last month’s issue, we shared several “prompt engineering” tips [link] from a recent NACVA webinar on effective GenAI “prompt engineering.” Presenter Colin Brown — the founder and chief technology officer of Syncnet, which helps consultants leverage AI and software — also provided some advice on how to revise prompts to obtain better results when […]
The question that looms over the market approach is “Did I select all or enough of the comparable transactions that my subject company might be similar to in this database?” Obviously, if the answer is no, the credibility of the analysis will wane. Selecting the right comparable sales transactions is fundamental to the market approach […]
I had the pleasure of attending the Global Excel Summit in London in May as an exhibitor with ValuSource, and I came away energized and more impressed than ever by the Excel community. For those of us in valuation, Excel isn’t just another software tool. We live and breathe Excel. It’s where our analysis takes […]
Most valuators are well aware of some of the benefits that large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, and CoPilot can have for them, but many worry about the privacy implications — specifically, the risk of uploading confidential documents. Those documents could, for example, become part of the “training” for commercial, cloud-based AI tools […]
