At this juncture, and after all the thinking, mulling and silent contemplation on the trains and buses, I thought it timely for me to write down my thoughts on valuations and how I approach this slippery topic. With stock markets around the world going into a violent tailspin in the last 8 weeks, perhaps it is also a good time to revisit this topic and to deliberate on exactly how one should think about valuations. The reason for this is that valuations do not exist in a vacuum (unlike what analysts would love for you to believe) and are constantly in flux, changing as often as business conditions change (which is, to say, virtually all the time). Pinning down an exact valuation and projecting it into the future is always difficult, but during volatile and turbulent times this becomes even more of an impossibility. So how should an investor navigate ......