Valuing and spotting value is harder than it sometimes seems

Despite the transparency and liquidity of the developed world’s largest stock markets, assessing value can prove challenging. There are many traps in trying to accurately do so. Nobody claims that valuation is an exact science, even if it is likely to be more exact for some types of companies than others.

It is impossible to generalise because of the vast differences between what is usually involved in valuing a property company, for example, ...