They care about anything that helps give insight into the future. Its still obtainable data but that is where the edge comes from, taking unique data and applying your way of thinking (models) to it. This could be anything and everything that relates to the company/industry you are looking at. You take lots of different bits of information and distill it into a model. If you are in the automotive space, maybe you care how US policy is looking for China.
To put it differently, historical financials, K/Qs are all data points that have been commoditized and you can pull it instantly.
It depends on whether you're publicly sharing your valuation work or confidentially advising a client about valuation.
The former is what equity research analysts do at major investment banks (like Morgan Stanley, BAML, JP Morgan, etc.) and boutique / middle-market research firms (Stifel, Cantor Fitzgerald, Raymond James, Guggenheim, etc.). Google has led me to this LinkedIn post with a long list of equity research firms which seems accurate and credible after skimming it briefly: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-comprehensive-list-sell-...
The latter is what I used to do as an M&A advisor. Basically the "I want to buy company X, how much should I pay?" or "I may be interested in selling / people are reaching out expressing interest in my company, how much am I worth?" type of scenarios, plus some other more complex but not necessarily more fun things like merger of equals and what have you. In these situations, the analysis tends to be more of a "let's look at it from all angles" which usually gets distilled into a one-page summary nicknamed "football field" showing ranges of values according to various methodologies. Things like DCF, discounted equity value, relative trading multiples (also called "comps"), LBO (also called the "floor valuation") all get featured and are the standard metrics on which an advisor's view is supported.
As an advisor, I never came up with my own projections for valuation, because that would open the door for litigation so it's just not done. Instead, we point to what "the street" is saying, by taking the consensus view (often some filtered average/mean of equity research projections usually provided by Bloomberg, FactSet or Capital IQ for liability reasons, but which may be "handspread" in some situations by actually pulling the specific numbers from the latest available research reports from several analysts and calculating the mean).
I hope that helps answer your question but happy to answer any follow-ups too since I'm always glad to share what I know about the topic
That’s super helpful - so basically what other deals are going on in the market and how they’re being structured?
Which makes sense - seems like Perplexity will always cater towards your average retail investor, there’s just too much complexity and cost to acquiring the type of data a professional cares about. Seems like that will need a to be its own platform.
> That’s super helpful - so basically what other deals are going on in the market and how they’re being structured?
That's one of the rows of the football field. Actually one I forgot to mention, often called "precedent transactions". You can see some examples of these slides if you scroll down to "Why these slides are made" here https://www.alexanderjarvis.com/investment-banking-slide-exa...
But when I mentioned relative valuation or trading comparables, I meant looking at similar public companies today and what their implied valuation is based on their current share price (more about that here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41862295)
Those relative valuation methodologies are different so-called "intrinsic" valuation methodologies like DCF or discounted equity value, which just look at the company you're valuing and do some math "in a vacuum" to get some implied value per share.
> Which makes sense - seems like Perplexity will always cater towards your average retail investor, there’s just too much complexity and cost to acquiring the type of data a professional cares about. Seems like that will need a to be its own platform.
I agree, but there's definitely a lot of room for automation in the professional space. Unfortunately I can only tackle one startup at a time so that's like ~third on my list of revolutionary ideas that I'll get to one day ;-)
Warren Buffett is famous for reading the annual reports, basically all of them and starting from the back where you tend to get the embarrassing stuff in small print.
