Grateful to @AswathDamodaran for sharing his wisdom in this remarkable conversation with @veiled_value about the book, The Dark Side of Valuation.

Excerpts follow in this thread.
Members, access the full interview

@contrarianEPS Interesting. In India, people who give such suggestions get sued for 100 crores.

A word of advice and caution. When you buy a High Pe stock. Make sure that you are very certain about the growth. Plenty of good and bad examples

Eicher=Growth stopped, Got derated.

Pi Industries= At 52+Pe in 2015, growth continued (5bagger since then)

Symphony=Growth stopped as more competitors copied them, painful time correction.

Astral=Kept growing and entering newer adjacencies since 2015 when it was at 60+ Pe. (Been a 10 bagger since then)

Page Industries=Growth stopped as the company matured. No returns for last 4 yrs.

Bajaj Finance= Kept growing (barring Pandemic). Kept rerating with the earnings growth.

HDFC Life=Been absurdly valued since 2018. Leading to very poor returns.

Relaxo=Kept getting rerated on back of earnings growth.

High Pe means market is expecting strong earnings growth. What happens when it fails to come? Likely derating or painful time correction.

Paying a high multiple, you need to make sure that the growth is certain.

What I do to grasp such opportunities or to ignore them is to have a mix of deeply valued companies (like some financials I own) with Companies where I think they will grow at 30-35%+ (Navin).

This is what my framework is:-

Pf=High Pe+Already seen value+Strong earnings growth

@_CreatingWealth sure, only request. Plz do not take it negative. Get over metric like PE, even if use it , at least take cash flow based PE. Many times, it would make worst investments attractive n decent one unattractive. It has lot of bias, limitation n constraint. 1 must know before using it

In @HowardMarksBook's memo early this year, one key thing I realized is how wrong I was to dismiss some businesses because I thought they were overvalued simply after looking at the P/E, P/S ratio etc.

You can't determine a business is overvalued without knowing the in-depth qualitative fundamentals of the business, because otherwise where is your edge? Anyone in the world can simply look at a company's P/E ratio.

I know this seems obvious, but so many people on fintwit are very guilty of this - myself included.

Unless I really know and understand a business, even if it has a seemingly absurd P/E or P/S ratio, I will refrain from concluding it is overvalued. It's just lazy and wrong.

The weird thing about this is that when I'm normally researching a business, I totally understand this about valuation and do in-depth research and determine if it's undervalued. But then I'm quickly dismissive of a tech company that trades at 50x earnings and say it's overvalued