Second, managers should be wary of analyses claiming to highlight market deviations. Most of the alleged cases that we have come across in our client experience proved to be insignificant or even nonexistent, so the evidence should be compelling. Furthermore, the deviations should be significant in both size and duration, given the capital and time needed to take advantage of the types of opportunities listed previously.

Provided that a company's share price eventually returns to its intrinsic value in the long run, managers would benefit from using a discounted-cash-flow approach for strategic decisions. What should matter is the long-term behavior of the share price of a company, not whether it is undervalued by 5 or 10 percent at any given time. For strategic business decisions, the evidence strongly suggests that the market reflects intrinsic value.

About the Authors
Marc Goedhart is an associate principal in McKinsey's Amsterdam office, and Tim Koller is a principal in the New York office. David Wessels, an alumnus of the New York office, is an adjunct professor of finance at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. This article is adapted from Tim Koller, Marc Goedhart, and David Wessels, Valuation: Measuring and Managing the Value of Companies, fourth edition, Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2005.

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