I have now completed my three views of broader and deeper skills. This is the time to draw some conclusions about these three recent views and also about the book overall. The conclusions will deal with the two main sources of value that this book has to offer and then turn to the one area where I believe their application can offer the greatest potential to create value through improving the quality of financial decision-making.

Although the three views are directed in very different directions they do, in my view, help to reinforce a single message. This is that good decisions are a balance between judgement and rational analysis. We have considered three topics but have discovered in each case that deeper skills do not allow us to achieve more accuracy in our calculations. Hopefully, though, the views of deeper and broader skills have contributed to a wiser understanding of the nature of the questions which we try to solve when we calculate value, and to some new ways of thinking about value and how it can be maximised.

In my opinion, the deeper skills simply serve to warn that accuracy in this area is a chimera. There is no point, I suggest, in searching for absolute accuracy when several of the assumptions on which any valuation will have to be based will, at best, only be rough guesses. Now, in direct contrast to the ‘accuracy brigade’, some decision-makers use this situation as the justification for leaving everything to judgement. This too, should be rejected because, despite the inaccuracy, a structured approach to decision-taking still has a lot to contribute.