Well, Trimester 1 has finally ended, and that means that I can finally stop being productive! (Just Kidding).
Onsets of Senioritis aside (JK), this Trimester is going to be LIT, and even more so than our Lit reviews. I'm really looking forward to crafting my methods and actually getting into my research!
The last couple of weeks have been especially hectic, but I'm happy to finally write blog posts again.
I learned A LOT in the past trimester, and looking back I can't believe how much my project actually changed. I went into the class only knowing that I wanted to analyze stocks through different valuation methods, and now my project has become far more well-defined. Most of the trimester was spent learning everything that I could about stocks and the way investors valued and priced them. I learned about intrinsic valuation methods and comparable firms approaches, the drawbacks of each approach in different situations, and how they were actually implemented. I managed to focus on the Social Media industry, and (thanks to some lucky timing), a specific event that would give my research increased context (the future IPO of Snapchat). More importantly than everything I personally learned in just raw information, I learned to actually explain my area of research clearly and concisely, so that any person who could read my paper could understand it with the definitions I presented. I think the biggest problem for me was this, and usually I would resort to using general, meaningless phrases to attempt to convey meaning to certain explanations. Mostly, though, it just came out as useless information. Revising this information truly helped me grasp my topic better and fully understand the material that I was working with. Now I can clearly explain to someone that because intrinsic valuation methods use inaccurate models to predict financial variables, which are difficult to predict in the Social Media industry itself, the comparable firms approach to pricing social media firms is more effective.
So thank you Mrs. Haag for working this through with me and not getting mad at the numerous morning meetings that I held with you!
Looking into the future, I need to figure out the methods with which I am going to conduct my analysis. I know I need to do a quantitative analysis, but I am unsure over how to justify which specific comparable firm multiples to use, because in the literature (from my point of view), it seems like the justification for the multiples used is rather arbitrary. Additionally, in the methods section of several other papers that I have read, papers tend to exclude several companies or general data points from their analyses (I'm not fully remembering which ones), and I need to mimic these provisions for testing the accuracy of comparable firm multiples as well in my study.
Anyways, that's what the future of my methods section holds (or at least what I think it holds). Hopefully, it works out like I'm hoping college apps will! (504)
Akash
Onsets of Senioritis aside (JK), this Trimester is going to be LIT, and even more so than our Lit reviews. I'm really looking forward to crafting my methods and actually getting into my research!
The last couple of weeks have been especially hectic, but I'm happy to finally write blog posts again.
I learned A LOT in the past trimester, and looking back I can't believe how much my project actually changed. I went into the class only knowing that I wanted to analyze stocks through different valuation methods, and now my project has become far more well-defined. Most of the trimester was spent learning everything that I could about stocks and the way investors valued and priced them. I learned about intrinsic valuation methods and comparable firms approaches, the drawbacks of each approach in different situations, and how they were actually implemented. I managed to focus on the Social Media industry, and (thanks to some lucky timing), a specific event that would give my research increased context (the future IPO of Snapchat). More importantly than everything I personally learned in just raw information, I learned to actually explain my area of research clearly and concisely, so that any person who could read my paper could understand it with the definitions I presented. I think the biggest problem for me was this, and usually I would resort to using general, meaningless phrases to attempt to convey meaning to certain explanations. Mostly, though, it just came out as useless information. Revising this information truly helped me grasp my topic better and fully understand the material that I was working with. Now I can clearly explain to someone that because intrinsic valuation methods use inaccurate models to predict financial variables, which are difficult to predict in the Social Media industry itself, the comparable firms approach to pricing social media firms is more effective.
So thank you Mrs. Haag for working this through with me and not getting mad at the numerous morning meetings that I held with you!
Looking into the future, I need to figure out the methods with which I am going to conduct my analysis. I know I need to do a quantitative analysis, but I am unsure over how to justify which specific comparable firm multiples to use, because in the literature (from my point of view), it seems like the justification for the multiples used is rather arbitrary. Additionally, in the methods section of several other papers that I have read, papers tend to exclude several companies or general data points from their analyses (I'm not fully remembering which ones), and I need to mimic these provisions for testing the accuracy of comparable firm multiples as well in my study.
Anyways, that's what the future of my methods section holds (or at least what I think it holds). Hopefully, it works out like I'm hoping college apps will! (504)
Akash
Hey Akash, I'm going to ignore the basic LIT review comment, but nonetheless, I concur, it will be lit. Furthermore, I actually really love your project and I cant wait to see exactly where you end up! Alright so now about your methods, why exactly do you think it is arbitrary in terms of the justification? Also, with the exclusions of the companies in other papers, is there a specific way they go about excluding corporations? If so, I think that would be a great place to limit your scope in terms of exactly what comparable companies you would be looking into! Other than that, I would love to see where you are after the methods assignment, and regarding what you said in class today about yourself, WHY??
ReplyDeleteHi Akash!! Haha, I really enjoyed reading your blog post! I completely agree that you have made tremendous strides in your research project (and listening to your conversations with Mrs. Haag is always entertaining). I'm glad that in doing this reflection you have pointed out how you realize that esoteric wording and definitions are really the biggest struggle you had, but I think that you have definitely worked around that. I would just say to keep this point of reflection in mind as you move on to your methods section, because I have a sense that even the methods can become difficult to understand if you don't word it properly. Also, when you said that other papers tend to exclude several companies or data points from their analyses, are the same companies removed from all the papers, or are there patterns you will have to identify as to why those companies were removed? I hope I'm making sense... However, overall, I think if you dedicate yourself to closely reading into the papers in your field of research, you will absolutely be able to figure it out! (186)
ReplyDeleteAkash, I really enjoy our conversations, no matter how stubborn you are, so I'm glad to hear that they've been helpful to you. I think from the conversations we've had that you've been able to find some literature that has been more helpful to you in justifying the multiples, so I hope that's the case. Also, I agree with Divya, that in the absence of explicit justifications, it might be useful to look for trends across studies to see if you can discern an implied justification.
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