As far as I’m concerned, building a financial model serves two major purposes: 1. To reverse-engineer share price to get shareholders’ expectation 2. Finding important factors that affect a company’s value Unfortunately, without a framework that could clearly link performance measurement with value, building a financial model would lack insights in serving those two big purposes. It could easily fall into an exercise just for the sake of formality. A good model gives valuable insights. Generally speaking, I have found that a model that serves the first point (reverse-engineer) is more useful for investing purposes. It may surprise you, but finding implied shareholders’ expectation is possible without making our own future projections. After all, shareholders’ already done that job for us. Read my other articles for this topic. In some specific situations however, namely a concerning negative EVA...
Notes on Corporate Finance and Technical Analysis in stock investment decision.