Reading the reports tells you what a company is; valuing it tells you what its shares are worth. The two questions answer each other — a strong franchise can still be a poor investment at the wrong price — and the gap between them is where active stock pickers attempt to earn their keep. The frameworks below are the standard toolkit: a model of required return (CAPM and its factor extensions), then a small family of valuation models that translate cash flows, earnings, or peer multiples into a target price.