Regulation and professional norms give the financial industry a fundamental role in the allocation of resources, considering that it is the place where efficient markets are created, with prices reflecting all the information available about companies and hence their true value. The analysis of valuation methods shows that they are multiple, interdependent, and contradictory, and that they are applied by different professions and companies, within relations of hierarchy, cooperation, and competition. Yet, in all these cases, the notion of true value, defined both technically, as the result of the application of procedures, and politically, as a hierarchy of social activities, legitimizes the distributive effects of the financial industry.