Like Gary Trugman, I have been valuing businesses for longer than I sometimes care to remember. I do remember that when the second edition of Shannon Pratt's Valuing a Business came out in 1989,1 a very smart and experienced colleague read the 700-plus page book in less than two days. Today, I'm not sure how long it would take him to get through the more than 1,200 pages of the fifth edition of Mr. Trugman's book, Understanding Business Valuation: A Practical Guide to Valuing Small to Medium Sized Businesses (UBV), but I know he would find it a compelling read.
Part primer (there is a statistics brush-up lesson in chapter 7), part advanced description of newer techniques (chapter 25, which has been added since the fourth edition, covers option pricing models, fixed income valuation, early-stage company valuation, and the backsolve method), the book is a comprehensive, even-handed...
