Koller, Goedhart and Wessels build valuation from first principles, growth, returns on capital, cost of capital, and refuse every shortcut: multiples are useful only as compressed expressions of those drivers, and the acquisitions chapters apply the same machinery to the question of when a deal creates value for the buyer rather than only for the seller. The 2025 edition keeps the framework current through today’s topics without loosening it.
The Institute’s reading: this is the shelf’s reference standard for the valuation stage, the book to check any adviser’s work against. An owner does not need to work through all of it; the chapters on value creation and on acquisitions repay the effort many times, and pair naturally with Kaplan and Ruback’s evidence that doing the cash flow work is not academic piety but empirically the method that tracks real prices.