If you have a absolute rule of I'll never buy a stock with a PE ratio greater than 25, God

help you because all you're going to be stuck with are dying companies and value traps in

your portfolio. I'm Mary Long and that's Aswath Demoterin, a leading professor of corporate finance and valuation at the Stern School of Business at New York University.

Bill Mann caught up with Demoterin for a wide-ranging conversation about how the wrong statistics can lead investors astray, what really drives

interest rates, and the difference between pricing a company and valuing one. I do want to start here at the beginning of 2024 by asking you I guess might what might be an unfair question given your

willingness to share with people online at the outset of the internet age, we believe that information

available to us would help us make better decisions and in a lot of realms of

our lives it has. What is your impression of how the instant availability of information has helped

the average investor if it has at all? I think we have to start by drawing a distinction between data and

information. We have a great deal more data now than we did 25 years ago. That's

without contest that is absolutely true. Our challenge now is to convert that data into information.

And here's the problem of facing, but drowning in data to the point that we give up.

I mean, psychologists have discovered that when you

provide people with too much data, they go to mental shortcuts. So in an ironic way, the more data we have available the more we fall back on

simplistic rules because we just can't handle the data so to me the challenge is

figuring out how to take those mountains of data we have available.

Nobody should ever say we don't have enough data anymore.

We have so much data and ask the question, how do we convert that data into usable

information? That requires discipline, it requires the structure of

thinking through data and that's partly what I've wrestled with. I won't

claim to have the answers but I wrestle with every year when I update the

data on my website is how do you convert that mountain of data into something that

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