Creator Post Archive
Aswath Damodaran
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Jun 18, 2026
The Indexing Question: Should SpaceX, OpenAI and Anthropic be in the S&P 500?
The creator discusses the potential inclusion of major AI companies like SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic in the S&P 500. He outlines arguments against their inclusion from active investors, investment experts, and politicians, while also explaining how indices are constructed and the purpose of the S&P 500 as a large-cap US company index.
Jun 4, 2026
The Numbers are in: A Post-Prospectus SpaceX Valuation!
Aswath Damodaran revisits his valuation of SpaceX using its recently released prospectus. He notes that while the operating numbers were close to his estimates, revenues from XAI were higher than anticipated due to compute space leasing. Despite a larger operating loss than expected, the net debt is negative due to substantial cash reserves, leading to minimal changes in his overall valuation.
May 6, 2026
An Ode to Restraint: Lessons from the Tim Cook Legacy!
This video discusses the legacy of Tim Cook as CEO of Apple, contrasting his understated leadership style with more flamboyant "empire builders" like Jack Welch. The creator uses Tim Cook's tenure as a platform to examine how CEOs are perceived and valued, highlighting Cook's critical role in Apple's success despite not being the visionary founder. The discussion delves into Apple's history, including Steve Jobs's initial struggles and eventual triumphant return, and how Cook complemented Jobs's vision.
Apr 23, 2026
To Trillion(s) and Beyond: The SpaceX IPO Odyssey
Aswath Damodaran discusses the upcoming IPO of SpaceX, highlighting its unique position as a real futuristic company, the influence of its founder Elon Musk, and its potential to be the most valuable IPO ever. He provides a historical overview of SpaceX's development, its early challenges, key milestones like the Falcon 9 and Starlink, and its competitive advantages in space transportation costs.
Apr 1, 2026
The Market's Narrative: How Investors are pricing in the Iran War!
The creator discusses how investors priced in the Iran war in March 2026, focusing on the market narrative driven by oil prices. Both Brent crude and West Texas Intermediate saw significant price increases, with Brent experiencing a larger premium due to geographical supply chain concerns related to the Strait of Hormuz. The market narrative suggests a near-term oil price shock that is expected to fade over time, with futures prices reflecting less sustained increases than spot prices.
Mar 24, 2026
Finding your Investing Lodestar: In Search of an Investment Philosophy!
Aswath Damodaran discusses the origins and importance of developing a personal investment philosophy, drawing from his 40 years of teaching. He highlights the difficulty of consistently beating the market and the challenge of distinguishing luck from skill among successful investors, referencing Michael Mauboussin's work.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 35 (of 42): The Case for Passive Investing - Active Investors' Track Record
The creator discusses the shift towards passive investing, highlighting that active investors, both individual and professional, have collectively underperformed the market. While a small subset of individual investors do beat the market by staying within their circle of competence, professional money managers have not shown superior performance despite theoretical advantages.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 25 (of 42): Information Trading - Earnings Reports
This video discusses how markets react to earnings reports, emphasizing that reactions are based on news relative to expectations, not just absolute numbers. It highlights that stock prices often drift in the days leading up to an earnings announcement, suggesting potential information leakage or market forecasting.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 10 (of 42): Temporal Price Patterns
The creator discusses temporal price patterns in stock markets, focusing on the January effect and the weekend effect. The January effect, where January historically shows the highest returns for US stocks, is found to be primarily a small-cap phenomenon and is observed across countries. Potential explanations include fund flows, window dressing, and tax-loss selling, though none fully explain the effect. The weekend effect, where Mondays are historically the worst days to invest, is also highlighted.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 18 (of 42): Get in on the ground floor - The IPO Story
This video discusses the Initial Public Offering (IPO) process, focusing on how private companies go public and the opportunities for investors. It explains the traditional IPO structure involving investment banks, prospectuses, and pricing, and highlights the phenomenon of IPO underpricing, where shares are often offered at a discount, leading to first-day price jumps. The creator also touches upon alternative methods like direct listings and SPACs.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 8 (of 42): Market Efficient II - Testing market-beating schemes and strategies
The creator discusses methods for testing market efficiency, focusing on strategies that aim to beat the market. He explains that any test of market inefficiency is a joint test of the strategy and the expected return model used. Various benchmarks and risk/return models like the Sharpe ratio, Information Ratio, Jensen's alpha, and Treynor index are presented as ways to assess if a strategy generates excess returns relative to its risk. The discussion then moves to three forms of market efficiency tests: event studies, portfolio studies, and investor group studies.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 6 (of 42): Trading Costs and Taxes
The creator discusses trading costs, breaking them down into brokerage fees, bid-ask spreads, price impact, and opportunity costs. He uses the example of Value Line's timeliness ranks and their subsequent fund performance to illustrate how trading costs can erode theoretical gains, highlighting the difference between paper returns and actual execution.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 7 (of 42): Market Efficiency I - Laying the Groundwork
The creator discusses the concept of market efficiency and its implications for investors. He explains that if markets are efficient, prices reflect true value, making it difficult to find mispriced stocks. Conversely, inefficiencies allow investors to potentially exploit deviations between price and value. The creator outlines three forms of market efficiency: weak, semi-strong, and strong, each relating to the type of information reflected in stock prices.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 42 (of 42): The Grand Finale
The creator discusses how to find the right investment philosophy by understanding personal characteristics like patience, risk aversion, individual vs. group thinking, available time, and age. He also introduces three tests: the sleep test, life changed days test, and avoiding FOMO/ROMO, to ensure a philosophy aligns with one's needs and personality.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 41 (of 42): The Promise and Peril of Alternatives!
The creator discusses the trend of increasing investment in alternative assets by institutional investors over the past two decades, driven by a sales pitch promising better risk-return trade-offs. However, recent studies and expert opinions suggest that these promises have not materialized in practice, with some evidence indicating that adding alternative investments may have even detracted from portfolio performance. The creator plans to explore the reasons behind this gap between promise and delivery.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 40 (of 42): Bitcoin and Crypto
The creator discusses Bitcoin's origins during the 2008 financial crisis, highlighting its design based on distrust and crowd-checking transactions. He contrasts Bitcoin with traditional currencies and assets, questioning its classification as an asset due to the lack of cash flows, and notes its significant price appreciation over the last decade.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 39 (of 42): Collectibles!
The creator discusses collectibles and trophy assets as alternative investments, contrasting them with traditional stocks and bonds. He highlights that collectibles do not generate cash flows but derive value from scarcity, utility, and perceived future value. Pricing these assets is challenging due to illiquidity, lack of comparable transactions, and difficulty in controlling for differences. While artwork has historically lagged stock returns, its low correlation to stocks is presented as a potential diversification benefit, though illiquidity and pricing difficulties remain significant drawbacks.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 38 (of 42): Alternative Investments
The creator discusses alternative investments, contrasting them with traditional long-only financial assets like stocks and bonds. He categorizes alternatives into long-short strategies, private markets (venture capital, private equity), and other asset classes like real estate, collectibles, gold, artwork, NFTs, and cryptocurrencies. The attractiveness of these alternatives is attributed to perceived low correlation with traditional assets and the belief in the superior market-beating abilities of managers in these spaces.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 37 (of 42): Passive Investing Choices
The creator discusses passive investing strategies, contrasting them with active investing and highlighting the difficulty of outperforming the market. The focus is on classic index funds, their construction (market-cap weighted, revenue-weighted, equally weighted), and the concept of sampled index funds as an alternative to full replication. The evolution and increasing market share of index funds, particularly those offered by Vanguard, are also mentioned.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 36 (of 42): More on Investor Performance - Continuity and Consistency
The creator discusses the evidence on active versus passive investing, focusing on the continuity of money manager performance. The analysis suggests there is little evidence that good money managers consistently stay good or bad managers stay bad over time, with performance often shifting significantly between quartiles. The creator also touches on Morning Star ratings, noting they have limited predictive power for investors.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 34 (of 42): Market Timing - Does it work?
The creator discusses the difficulty and ineffectiveness of market timing, particularly for mutual fund managers and tactical asset allocation funds. Evidence suggests that cash holdings by mutual funds do not predict market movements, and tactical funds have historically underperformed simple 60/40 portfolios, failing to protect investors in down markets.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 29 (of 42): Not riskless, not even close - Pseudo or Speculative Arbitrage
The creator discusses pseudo or speculative arbitrage, distinguishing it from true arbitrage by highlighting the inherent risks involved. He uses the example of paired arbitrage, specifically mentioning GM and Ford as historical examples, to illustrate how these strategies rely on mean reversion and can fail when historical correlations break down, as seen with Long-Term Capital Management.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 32 (of 42): Market Timing - Mean Reversion and Macro Fundamentals
The creator discusses market timing strategies, focusing on mean reversion and macro fundamentals. He explains how PE ratios, normalized PE, and Schiller PE are used to assess whether stocks are over or underpriced relative to historical averages, noting that current PE ratios suggest stocks are overpriced.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 30 (of 42): Market Timing - Setting the Table
The creator discusses market timing as a concept in portfolio management, differentiating it from individual stock selection. He explains that market timing involves adjusting asset allocation based on perceived over or underpricing of markets (stocks, bonds, real assets) and highlights its significant impact on overall returns compared to picking individual stocks. The creator also touches on the psychological draw of market timing, referencing studies on its effect on performance variation.
Mar 24, 2026
Session 31 (of 42): Market Timing - Non-financial and technical indicators
The creator discusses market timing indicators, categorizing them into spurious and feel-good indicators. Spurious indicators, like the Super Bowl indicator, show correlation but lack economic rationale and are often driven by chance. Feel-good indicators, such as the demand for high-priced food in NYC by financial workers, reflect investor optimism and correlate with market performance.
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