The man who literally teaches Wall Street how to value companies, for free. Damodaran posts every lecture, every spreadsheet and every valuation model on his website for anyone to download. He values Tesla, Nvidia and Bitcoin on his blog while well-paid hedge fund analysts read along. He even tells you when he buys and sells, and when he sold too early. The Dean of Valuation could have cashed in. He chose to be useful instead.
Net Worth
Not publicly disclosed
Verified Sep 2026
Nationality
Indian-American
Time Horizon
Long-Term
Risk Appetite
5 / 10
CAREER & BACKGROUND
Born in 1957 in Chennai, India. Studied accounting at Loyola College, then management at IIM Bangalore.
Earned an MBA and a PhD from UCLA. Taught at UC Berkeley for two years, then joined NYU Stern School of Business in 1986.
He has been there ever since, nearly 40 years at the same school, where he holds the Kerschner Family Chair in Finance Education.
He has won a pile of teaching awards at Stern and outside it, including the Herbert Simon Award in 2013. His corporate finance and valuation courses are among the most popular at the school.
His real influence exploded with the internet. He started posting full lecture videos, datasets and valuation spreadsheets online, all free.
His YouTube channel has millions of views. His blog, Musings on Markets, is read by professional investors worldwide.
He democratized valuation education before "democratize" became a tech buzzword.
COMPANIES & ROLES
NYU Stern School of Business is his institutional home. He is a professor of finance, not a fund manager.
His "company" is his body of work: more than a dozen books, hundreds of blog posts, thousands of hours of free lectures, and datasets covering tens of thousands of listed companies.
He updates those datasets every January on his website. They include cost of capital, equity risk premiums and financial ratios by country and industry.
Banks, consultants and students all use them. They are free.
He also teaches in the TRIUM Global Executive MBA program.
INVESTING STYLE & PHILOSOPHY
Damodaran values companies using discounted cash flow models, projecting future cash flows and discounting them back to present value. He believes every asset has an intrinsic value that can be estimated, even if the estimate is imprecise.
He draws a sharp line between "valuation" (estimating what something is worth based on fundamentals) and "pricing" (estimating what the market will pay based on comparables and momentum). Most of Wall Street does pricing.
He does valuation.
He invests his own money based on his valuations, mostly in individual stocks, and tells his readers when he buys and sells. In early 2024 he said he owned all seven of the big tech "Magnificent Seven" stocks.
He is candid about his misses.
THE PLAYBOOK
Risk Approach
Moderate. Damodaran invests in individual stocks based on his valuation models and trims positions when prices run far past his estimate of value, as he did with Tesla in 2020 and Nvidia in 2023.
He is not a leveraged trader. He is a professor with a personal portfolio who puts money behind his published valuations.
The stakes are modest compared to professional fund managers.
Money Habits
His wealth comes mainly from his NYU salary, his books and his investment returns, not hedge fund fees.
He gives away almost all his educational content for free: lectures, spreadsheets and datasets. He could easily charge for premium content.
He does not.
BIGGEST WIN
Nvidia. He bought it in 2018, years before the AI boom.
By 2023 the stock had run up so far that he sold half, telling CNBC he could not hold it in good conscience and still call himself a value investor. Even after selling early, the position multiplied many times over.
His willingness to publish the valuation, the trade and the reasoning in real time is the actual win. Almost nobody on Wall Street does that.
BIGGEST MISTAKE
Selling winners too early. He sold his Tesla shares at $640 in January 2020, and within days the stock blew past $900.
He wrote a whole blog post about it called "An Ode to Luck." He did the same with Nvidia, selling half in 2023 and more in early 2025, only to watch it keep climbing. He is honest that his models struggle with stocks where the story runs far ahead of the numbers, and he keeps writing about exactly where he got it wrong.
FINANCIAL PHILOSOPHY
Damodaran believes every asset has a value that can be estimated — but that the estimate is always uncertain. The goal isn't precision.
It's a reasonable range. If the market price is far outside that range, you might have an opportunity.
He also believes valuation is a craft, not a science. Two smart people can value the same company and get different numbers.
That's fine. What matters is that the assumptions are explicit, logical, and testable.
His deepest conviction: stories and numbers must work together. A valuation without a story is just a spreadsheet.
A story without numbers is just a fantasy.
FAMILY & PERSONAL LIFE
He keeps his family life private. His public persona is entirely professional, the professor who values companies and blogs about it.
He is active on X, where he posts his valuations and blog links.
EDUCATION
Born in Chennai, India. Bachelor of Commerce in accounting from Loyola College, Chennai (1977).
Post-graduate diploma in management from the Indian Institute of Management Bangalore (1979). MBA (1981) and PhD in finance (1985) from UCLA.
Taught at UC Berkeley from 1984 to 1986, then joined NYU Stern in 1986 and has stayed ever since.
BOOKS & RESOURCES
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