Valuation in merger & aquiseation
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This document discusses discounted cash flow (DCF) valuation and provides examples of equity versus firm valuation using DCF. It covers key inputs needed for DCF such as cash flows, discount rates, terminal values and growth rates. It emphasizes the importance of matching cash flows and discount rates and discusses errors that can occur from mismatching them.
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Valuation in merger & aquiseation
- 1. Valuation: Part I Discounted Cash Flow Valuation
- 3. DCF Choices: Equity Valuation versus Firm Valuation Equity valuation : Value just the equity claim in the business Firm Valuation : Value the entire business
- 12. Generic DCF Valuation Model
- 15. Cashflow to Firm EBIT (1-t) - (Cap Ex - Depr) - Change in WC = FCFF Expected Growth Reinvestment Rate * Return on Capital FCFF 1 FCFF 2 FCFF 3 FCFF 4 FCFF 5 Forever Firm is in stable growth: Grows at constant rate forever Terminal Value= FCFF n+1 /(r-g n ) FCFF n ......... Cost of Equity Cost of Debt (Riskfree Rate + Default Spread) (1-t) Weights Based on Market Value Discount at WACC= Cost of Equity (Equity/(Debt + Equity)) + Cost of Debt (Debt/(Debt+ Equity)) Value of Operating Assets + Cash & Non-op Assets = Value of Firm - Value of Debt = Value of Equity Riskfree Rate : - No default risk - No reinvestment risk - In same currency and in same terms (real or nominal as cash flows + Beta - Measures market risk X Risk Premium - Premium for average risk investment Type of Business Operating Leverage Financial Leverage Base Equity Premium Country Risk Premium VALUING A FIRM
- 16. Discounted Cash Flow Valuation: The Inputs Aswath Damodaran
- 17. I. Estimating Discount Rates DCF Valuation
- 24. Test 2: A Riskfree Rate in Euros
- 27. Sovereign Default Spreads: January 2011 Rating Default spread in basis points Aaa 0 Aa1 25 Aa2 50 Aa3 70 A1 85 A2 100 A3 115 Baa1 150 Baa2 175 Baa3 200 Ba1 240 Ba2 275 Ba3 325 B1 400 B2 500 B3 600 Caa1 700 Caa2 850 Caa3 1000
- 31. Why do riskfree rates vary across currencies? January 2011 Risk free rates
- 35. Risk Premium for a Mature Market? Broadening the sample
- 39. Country Risk Premiums January 2011 Angola 11.00% Botswana 6.50% Egypt 8.60% Mauritius 7.63% Morocco 8.60% South Africa 6.73% Tunisia 7.63% Austria [1] 5.00% Belgium [1] 5.38% Cyprus [1] 6.05% Denmark 5.00% Finland [1] 5.00% France [1] 5.00% Georgia 9.88% Germany [1] 5.00% Greece [1] 8.60% Iceland 8.00% Ireland [1] 7.25% Italy [1] 5.75% Malta [1] 6.28% Netherlands [1] 5.00% Norway 5.00% Portugal [1] 6.28% Spain [1] 5.38% Sweden 5.00% Switzerland 5.00% United Kingdom 5.00% Canada 5.00% United States 5.00% Argentina 14.00% Belize 14.00% Bolivia 11.00% Brazil 8.00% Chile 6.05% Colombia 8.00% Costa Rica 8.00% Ecuador 20.00% El Salvador 20.00% Guatemala 8.60% Honduras 12.50% Mexico 7.25% Nicaragua 14.00% Panama 8.00% Paraguay 11.00% Peru 8.00% Bahrain 6.73% Israel 6.28% Jordan 8.00% Kuwait 5.75% Lebanon 11.00% Oman 6.28% Qatar 5.75% Saudi Arabia 6.05% United Arab Emirates 5.75% Australia 5.00% New Zealand 5.00% Bangladesh 9.88% Cambodia 12.50% China 6.05% Fiji Islands 11.00% Hong Kong 5.38% India 8.60% Indonesia 9.13% Japan 5.75% Korea 6.28% Macao 6.05% Mongolia 11.00% Pakistan 14.00% Papua New Guinea 11.00% Philippines 9.88% Singapore 5.00% Sri Lanka 11.00% Taiwan 6.05% Thailand 7.25% Turkey 9.13% Albania 11.00% Armenia 9.13% Azerbaijan 8.60% Belarus 11.00% Bosnia and Herzegovina 12.50% Bulgaria 8.00% Croatia 8.00% Czech Republic 6.28% Estonia 6.28% Hungary 8.00% Kazakhstan 7.63% Latvia 8.00% Lithuania 7.25% Moldova 14.00% Montenegro 9.88% Poland 6.50% Romania 8.00% Russia 7.25% Slovakia 6.28% Slovenia [1] 5.75% Ukraine 12.50%
- 43. Estimating Lambdas: Earnings Approach
- 44. Estimating Lambdas: Stock Returns versus C-Bond Returns Return Embraer = 0.0195 + 0.2681 Return C Bond Return Embratel = -0.0308 + 2.0030 Return C Bond
- 50. A year that made a difference.. The implied premium in January 2009 Year Market value of index Dividends Buybacks Cash to equity Dividend yield Buyback yield Total yield 2001 1148.09 15.74 14.34 30.08 1.37% 1.25% 2.62% 2002 879.82 15.96 13.87 29.83 1.81% 1.58% 3.39% 2003 1111.91 17.88 13.70 31.58 1.61% 1.23% 2.84% 2004 1211.92 19.01 21.59 40.60 1.57% 1.78% 3.35% 2005 1248.29 22.34 38.82 61.17 1.79% 3.11% 4.90% 2006 1418.30 25.04 48.12 73.16 1.77% 3.39% 5.16% 2007 1468.36 28.14 67.22 95.36 1.92% 4.58% 6.49% 2008 903.25 28.47 40.25 68.72 3.15% 4.61% 7.77% Normalized 903.25 28.47 24.11 52.584 3.15% 2.67% 5.82%
- 51. The Anatomy of a Crisis: Implied ERP from September 12, 2008 to January 1, 2009
- 53. Implied Premiums in the US: 1960-2010
- 54. Implied Premium versus Risk Free Rate
- 55. Equity Risk Premiums and Bond Default Spreads
- 56. Equity Risk Premiums and Cap Rates (Real Estate)
- 60. Implied Equity Risk Premium comparison: January 2008 versus January 2009 Country ERP (1/1/08) ERP (1/1/09) United States 4.37% 6.43% UK 4.20% 6.51% Germany 4.22% 6.49% Japan 3.91% 6.25% India 4.88% 9.21% China 3.98% 7.86% Brazil 5.45% 9.06%
- 62. Beta Estimation: The Noise Problem
- 63. Beta Estimation: The Index Effect
- 65. The Index Game…
- 67. In a perfect world… we would estimate the beta of a firm by doing the following
- 70. Bottom-up Betas
- 76. The Cost of Equity: A Recap
- 82. Default Spreads: The effect of the crisis of 2008.. And the aftermath Default spread over treasury Rating 1-Jan-08 12-Sep-08 12-Nov-08 1-Jan-09 1-Jan-10 1-Jan-11 Aaa/AAA 0.99% 1.40% 2.15% 2.00% 0.50% 0.55% Aa1/AA+ 1.15% 1.45% 2.30% 2.25% 0.55% 0.60% Aa2/AA 1.25% 1.50% 2.55% 2.50% 0.65% 0.65% Aa3/AA- 1.30% 1.65% 2.80% 2.75% 0.70% 0.75% A1/A+ 1.35% 1.85% 3.25% 3.25% 0.85% 0.85% A2/A 1.42% 1.95% 3.50% 3.50% 0.90% 0.90% A3/A- 1.48% 2.15% 3.75% 3.75% 1.05% 1.00% Baa1/BBB+ 1.73% 2.65% 4.50% 5.25% 1.65% 1.40% Baa2/BBB 2.02% 2.90% 5.00% 5.75% 1.80% 1.60% Baa3/BBB- 2.60% 3.20% 5.75% 7.25% 2.25% 2.05% Ba1/BB+ 3.20% 4.45% 7.00% 9.50% 3.50% 2.90% Ba2/BB 3.65% 5.15% 8.00% 10.50% 3.85% 3.25% Ba3/BB- 4.00% 5.30% 9.00% 11.00% 4.00% 3.50% B1/B+ 4.55% 5.85% 9.50% 11.50% 4.25% 3.75% B2/B 5.65% 6.10% 10.50% 12.50% 5.25% 5.00% B3/B- 6.45% 9.40% 13.50% 15.50% 5.50% 6.00% Caa/CCC+ 7.15% 9.80% 14.00% 16.50% 7.75% 7.75% ERP 4.37% 4.52% 6.30% 6.43% 4.36% 5.20%
- 89. Recapping the Cost of Capital
- 90. II. Estimating Cash Flows DCF Valuation
- 94. From Reported to Actual Earnings
- 97. The Magnitude of Operating Leases
- 100. The Collateral Effects of Treating Operating Leases as Debt
- 101. The Magnitude of R&D Expenses
- 104. The Effect of Capitalizing R&D at SAP
- 107. V. Dealing with Negative or Abnormally Low Earnings
- 123. FCFE and Leverage: Is this a free lunch?
- 124. FCFE and Leverage: The Other Shoe Drops
- 126. III. Estimating Growth DCF Valuation
- 129. Motorola: Arithmetic versus Geometric Growth Rates
- 139. III. Fundamental Growth Rates
- 152. The Value of Growth Expected growth = Growth from new investments + Efficiency growth = Reinv Rate * ROC + (ROC t -ROC t-1 )/ROC t-1 Assume that your cost of capital is 10%. As an investor, rank these firms in the order of most value growth to least value growth.
- 155. Sirius: Reinvestment Needs Industry average Sales/Cap Ratio Capital invested in year t+!= Capital invested in year t + Reinvestment in year t+1
- 157. IV. Closure in Valuation Discounted Cashflow Valuation
- 159. Ways of Estimating Terminal Value
- 167. V. Beyond Inputs: Choosing and Using the Right Model Discounted Cashflow Valuation
- 173. The Building Blocks of Valuation
- 174. 6. Tying up Loose Ends
- 175. But what comes next?
- 179. Cash: Discount or Premium?
- 180. The Case of Closed End Funds: Price and NAV
- 182. A Premium for Marketable Securities: Berkshire Hathaway
Notes de l'éditeur
- Cash is king. A firm with negative cash flows today can be a very valuable firm but only if there is reason to believe that cash flows in the future will be large enough to compensate for the negative cash flows today. The riskier a firm and the longer you have to wait for the cash flows, the greater the cashflows eventually have to be….
- A business and the equity in the business can be very different numbers… A firm like GE in 2005 had a value of $ 500 billion for its business but its equity is worth only $ 300 billion - the difference is due to the substantial debt that GE has used to fund its expansion. You can have valuable businesses, where the equity is worth nothing because the firm has borrowed too much….
- The value of equity is the present value of cash flows to the equity investors discounted back at the rate of return that those equity investors need to make to break even (the cost of equity). In the strictest sense of the word, the only cash flow stockholders in a publicly traded firm get from their investment is dividends, and the dividend discount model is the simplest and most direct version of an equity valuation model.
- A firm includes not just the equity, but all claim holders. The cash flow to the firm is the collective cash flow that all claim holders make from the firm, and it is discounted at the weighted average of their different costs.
- In general, you should maintain consistency in your definition of debt. If you choose to call something debt in your cost of capital calculation - operating leases, for instance - you should subtract the item out to get to the value of equity. If you do it right (and it is tough to do- see fcfffcfe.xls spreadsheet on my web site), you should get the same value for equity using both approaches. (The requirement is that the debt ratio assumptions should be the same in both approaches)
- Treat these cashflows as given. In the pages to come, we will talk about estimating these cashflows in detail. Note that we are assuming a perpetual bond with fixed interest payments in each period. The costs of equity and debt are also given.
- The reason the two values converge is because the market values of equity and debt for this firm happen to be equal to the estimated values of equity and debt. If this does not hold, the weights you use for your cost of capital calculation - which are based upon current market value - will not be consistent with the debt ratio you are assuming for estimating for your FCFE calculations and the two values will diverge.
- It is a principle that is often violated because we often talk about discount rates and cashflows loosely and costs of capital and equity interchangeably. We need to be more precise about words like free cash flow (to whom? The firm? Equity?) and discount rates to avoid these problems.
- The results of mismatching… not inconsequential… A few years I checked through acquisition valuations done at major investment banks checking for fundamental mismatches and was amazed at how many I found. Every possible combination of cashflows and discount rates had been explored with disastrous consequences for stockholders in the firms involved in the deals… (Check out the Kennecott case study in the Harvard Business School finance case book (Butter, Fruhans et al.) for a great example…)
- The process is not always sequential. It may seem irrational to pick the DCF model after you have estimated the inputs, but you have to get a sense of the cash flows and growth potential before you pick a model.
- The four pillars of value: Cashflows Potential for high growth Length of the high growth period (before the firm starts growing at the same rate as the economy) Discount rate Note the variations and the need for consistency: With equity -> Cashflows to equity - > Growth rate in net income -> Discount at the cost of equity With firm -> Cashflows to firm - > Growth rate in operating income -> Discount at the cost of capital
- The oldest discounted cash flow model - the dividend discount model - is an equity valuation model. Implicitly, we are assuming that firms will return the cash that they can afford to in the form of dividends. In a slightly modified form, you could add stock buybacks to dividends in constructing the model. While the dividend discount model is often stated in per share terms, you can use aggregate dividends and value aggregate equity in the firm as well.
- The only difference from the dividend discount model is the use of free cash flows to equity - a measure of cash left over after reinvestment needs have been met and debt payments made. You can consider this a potential dividend model rather than an actual dividend model. This model will give you a more realistic estimate of equity value than the dividend discount model for firms that consistently hold back cash that they could pay out in dividends. One more difference… Free cashflows to equity can be negative for high growth firms with substantial reinvestment needs… Dividends can never be negative.
- When you discount cash flows to the firm, you start with operating income. Consequently, you value only the operating assets of the firm. To this you have to add the value of non-operating assets - cash and marketable securities and holdings in other firms. Subtracting out debt should yield the value of equity for a firm.
- While discount rates are a critical ingredient in discounted cashflow valuation, I think we spend far too much time on discount rates and far too little on cashflows. The most significant errors in valuation are often the result of failures to estimate cash flows correctly…. As companies increasingly become global, and multiple listings abound (Royal Dutch has six equity listings in different markets). the consistentcy principle becomes very important. The currency used in estimating cash flows should also be the currency in which you estimate discount rates - Euro discount rates for Euro cashflows and peso discount rates for peso cash flows. Recently, I came across a valuation of a Mexican company, where the cashflows were in nominal pesos but the discount rate used was the dollar cost of capital of a U.S. acquirer…. As a result, the value was inflated by more than 300%….
- Re-emphasizes a key assumption that we make in risk and return models in finance. It is not risk that matters, but non-diversifiable risk and the cost of equity will increase as the non-diversifiable risk in an investment increases. This view of the world may pose a problem for us when valuing private companies or closely held, small publicly traded firms, where the marginal investor (owner, venture capitalist….) may not be diversified.
- Lays out the four basic models and how non-diversifiable risk is measured in each model: The capital asset pricing model makes the most restrictive assumptions (no transactions costs, no private information) and arrives at the simplest model to estimate and use. The arbitrage pricing model and multi-factor model make less restrictive assumptions but yield more complicated models (with more inputs to estimate) The proxy model is dependent upon history and the view that firms that have earned higher returns over long periods must be riskier than firms that have lower returns. The characteristics of the firms that earn high returns - small market cap and low price to book value, for example in the Fama-French study - stand in as measures for risk.
- While this equation is set up in terms of the capital asset pricing model, the issues raised with the CAPM apply to the more complex models as well -the APM and the multi-factor model
- Treasury bills may be default free but there is reinvestment risk when they are used as riskless rates for longer-term cashflows. A 6-month T.Bill is not riskless when looking at a 5-year cashflow. Would a 5-year treasury be riskfree? Not really. The coupons would still expose you to reinvestment risk. Only a 5-year zero-coupon treasury would be riskfree for a 5-year cash flow. If you were a purist, you would need different riskfree rates for different cashflows. A pragmatic solution would be to estimate the duration of the cashflows in a valuation and use a treasury of similar duration. (Since the duration is the weighted average of when the cashflows come in, this should be fairly long, especially when you count in the fact that the terminal value is the present value of cashflows forever).
- Since we are valuing cashflows for the long term, we want a long-term riskfree rate (so, rule out the 6-month T.Bill rate). Since the valuation is in US dollars (a nominal rate), we can also rule out the TIPS rate. In theory, the 30-year rate should be the best choice. In practice, I would go with the 20-year bond for the following reasons: It is the most liquid of the treasuries and there is always a fresh auction rate from the previous Monday, Getting other inputs such as equity risk premiums and default spreads is easier with a 10-year rate than a 30-year rate The term structure flattens out by the time you get to the 10-year rate…..
- The only reason for differences in rates across these securities is default risk. Consequently, it makes sense to use the lowest of the rates (Germany) as the rsikfree rete, if you are valuing a company in Euros.
- The government bond rate is not riskfree. To get to a riskfree rate, you would subtract out the default spread of 2.55% from the bond rate to get to a riskfree rate of 8%.
- If there were no barriers to the flow of capital, the real riskfree rate should be the same around the world ). To the extent that there are barriers to capital flowing across markets, it is possible that the real riskfree rate in countries like India and China may be higher than than this value. One possible solutions: Use the long term real growth rate of the economy as your riskfree rate.
- Approach 1: The Mexican peso bond rate is 7.5% and that the rating assigned to the Mexican government is Baa1. If the default spread for Baa1 rated bonds is 1%, the riskless peso bond rate would be 6.5%. Riskless Peso rate = Mexican Government Bond rate – Default Spread = 7.5% - 1% = 6.5% Approach 2: If the current spot rate is 38.10 Thai Baht per US dollar, the ten-year forward rate is 61.36 Baht per dollar and the current ten-year US treasury bond rate is 5%, the ten-year Thai risk free rate (in nominal Baht) can be estimated as follows In general, while many practitioners use the last approach (working with a different, more stable currency) to avoid having to deal with inflation in the local currency, they shift the problem of making these estimates to the cashflows from the discount rates.
- The correct riskfree rate is the treasury bond rate. All of the other bonds either are non-currency matched or have default risk.
- Riskfree rates should vary primarily because of differences in expected inflation. Whatever you gain by using a low riskfree rate currency in your discount rate, you will lose in your expected growth rate.
- While it is tempting to second guess yourself and replace the current riskfree rate with a more reasonable number, it is exceedingly dangerous for the following reasons: “ Normalized” is in the eyes of the beholder. If you change just the riskfree rate and leave your other numbers unchanged, you can end up with internally inconsistent valuations. If your riskfree rate is too low (high), there is a countervailing variable in the valuation that will offset its impact. In particular, if interest rates are low, you should use a low expected inflation rate and low real growth in your valuation (at least in your stable growth phase).
- While everyone uses historical risk premiums, the actual premium in use can vary depending upon How far back you go in time Whether you T.Bills or T.Bonds Whether you use arithmetic or geometric averages This table was developed using data that is publicly accessible on the S&P 500, treasury bills and 10-year treasury bonds on the Federal Reserve of St. Louis web site. Dataset: histretSP.xls An interesting issue that has been raised by some researchers is that there may be a selection bias here. The U.S. stock market was undoubtedly the most successful equity market of the 20th century. Not surprisingly, you find that it earned a healthy premium over riskless rates. A more realistic estimate of the premium would require looking at the ten largest equity markets in the early part of the century and estimating the average premium you would have earned over all ten markets. A study at the London Business School that did this found an average equity risk premium of only 4% across these markets.
- The noise in stock prices is such that you need 100-150 years of data to arrive at reasonably small standard errors. It is pointless estimating risk premiums with 10-20 years of data. The survivorship bias will push historical risk premiums up, if you use the US as the base market.
- The problem with using the risk premium in the United States is that there is a survivor bias - the U.S, was the most successful equity market of the 20th century… In “The Triumph of the Optimists”, Dimson and his co-authors examined risk premiums in the largest equity markets of the 20th century and concluded that the average equity risk premium across these markets is about 4%.
- Many analysts use the default spread on the country bond as a measure of the extra risk premium to charge for that market. In fact, many leave this default spread in the riskless rate, thus adding it as a constant to every company in that market. Some double count it, by including it both in the riskless rate and by using a larger risk premium. The equity standard deviation approach is promising but less liquid (and very risky markets) often have low standard deviations. Using this approach, you can end up with a lower standard deviation for these markets than you would for the US. (The standard deviations were estimated using 2 years of weekly prices.)
- In this approach, we consider the country bond and the equity market in an emerging market to be competitors for investor funds. We argue that the equity market has to deliver a larger premium than the bond market to attract money since it is riskier. The standard deviations in equity and the C-Bond are based upon two years of weekly returns. (One is in real and the other is in dollars. If this is a potential problem, you could convert one or another into another currency using exchange rates). I am scaling up the country default spread by the relative volatility of equity. I would add this country risk premium (7.89%) to the risk premium I have for a mature equity market (4.82% for instance). There is a chance that I am double counting some risk since you could argue that the 4.82% risk premium in U.S. already reflects some of the standard deviation in the treasury bond. This may be possibility and the country risk premium may look high, but I would change this risk premium over the forecast period - reducing it as I move towards the terminal year.
- Emerging market risk is volatile and can shift dramatically from period to period. Consequently, you have to keep updating these numbers as you do equity valuation over time. Holding all else constant, the drop in country risk premiums should lift stock prices for Brazilian companies across the board. The Bovespa doubled in value between August 2004 and January 2007. 2008 though caused risk premiums to move in the opposite direction, even though Brazil’s rating improved.
- Updated after the crisis. The premiums are much higher than they were in January 2008…
- While many analysts use the first approach, it strikes us as unreasonable to tar all companies - large and small, domestic and export oriented - with the same brush. The second approach tends to work well for all but the most extreme examples - firms that derive the bulk of their revenues outside an emerging market. For companies that derive most of their revenues from markets other than their domestic market, the third approach offers the most promise, though we are left with the question of how to estimate lambda. Lambda will look a lot like beta, averaging one across all stocks. A stock with a lambda greater than one is more exposed to country risk than the average stock.
- This is not meant to be an all inclusive list. While there are undoubtedly other factors to consider, you also have to be able to obtain this information not only on your firm but on other firms in the market. In fact, of the three items listed above, revenue sources may be the only publicly available information on companies.
- This is a simplistic approach, but it is the easiest one to use. You can usually get the percent of revenues that your firm gets in the country from its annual report. Notice that Embraer has a lambda close to zero since it gets so little of its revenues in Brazil. Since its factories and work force are still in Brazil, this estimate seems to be too low.
- More ammunition for the argument that Embraer is less exposed to country risk than Embratel. Note that Embratel’s earnings swing as the country bond default spread for Brazil widens (indicating investor unease with the country) whereas Embraer’s earnings are relatively unscathed.
- Extends the regression approach used to estimate betas to estimating lambdas. All of the caveats of regression estimates apply - the estimate has a large standard error and reflects your company as it used to be. But it is perhaps our best shot at coming up with a comprehensive estimate of lambda for Embraer.
- Applies all three approaches to estimating the dollar cost of equity for Embraer. Note how much lower the cost of equity is with the lambda approach. Clearly, it will have a big impact on what value you arrive at for Embraer.
- Analysts will routinely undervalue these companies because they will be using too high a discount rate. A good strategy to follow would be to buy these companies, preferably after a crisis in the emerging market in question. Investors tend not to be discriminating during crises and mark down all stocks in an emerging market and correct themselves later.
- The simplest analogy is to a bond. If you know the price of a bond, you can compute the yield to maturity as the discount rate that makes the present value of the expected cashflows on the bond equal to the price of the bond. Similarly, if you know the current market value of equities in the aggregate (or of an equity index), you can compute the discount rate that makes the present value of the expected cashflows on the index equal to the price of the index today. There are two practical problems: Unlike a bond, the cashflows on stocks are not promised but expected - you need an expected growth rate. Unlike a bond, stocks have infinite lives. You have to consider cashflows forever.
- The best analogy is to pricing a bond. If you know the price of a standard coupon bond, you can estimate the yield to maturity as the discount rate that equates the present value of the cashflows to the price of the bond today. We are doing the same with stocks collectively, and estimating the discount rate that will make the present value of the cashflows on stocks (dividends and stock buybacks) equal to the index level today.
- The implied equity risk premium will decrease As the index level increases As earnings decrease As the riskfree rate goes up All three tend to move at the same time though in different directions. For instance, as the economy strengthens, earnings and earnings growth will increase (which should push up premiums) and interest rates will increase(which will push down premiums). The net effect will show up in the index.
- In this approach, we are computing the equivalent of a yield to maturity for stocks. In effect, we are replacing the bond price with the level of the index, the coupons with expected dividends and stock buybacks and the finite life with an infinite life. We then solve for the discount rate that will make the present value of the cashflows equal to the level of the index today. This approach does require a number of assumptions: (1) We can estimate the expected cash flows for the future (2) We can assume a perpetual growth rate = risk free rate.
- Equity risk premiums changed more in three months than they had in the previous 20 years put together. A wake-up call for those who stick with fixed premiums? That depends on whether we assume that this is an aberration or a break with the past.
- The key lesson I would take away is that equity risk premiums are unstable and that globalization has made them more unstable. The other is that there seems to be mean reversion in the process – implied premiums, when abnormally high or low, move back towards a longer term average.
- As the index changes (and it is the input most likely to change by large amounts in short periods), the implied premium will change. Note that as premiums rise, stock prices drop. Notice two historical phenomena: (1) Equity risk premiums spiked in the 1970s as inflation increased in the US (2) Equity risk premiums bottomed out at 2% at the end of 1999 at the peak of the dot-com boom. Would you settle for a 2% premium? If your answer is no, you believe that stocks are overvalued.
- There is mild evidence that the ERP is higher when interest rates are high and lower when they are low, but it is not overwhelming. (Hence, it should be okay to use an ERP from the past and not tie it to interest rates currently, unless those interest rates are abnormally low or high. If they are, it might be worth taking a closer look at the relationship. Historically, the equity risk premium has been about 66% of the riskfree rate. At the end of 2008, the equity risk premium was almost three times the riskfree rate (the highest its been since 1960 was 1.24 in 1960)
- Between 1960 and 2008, equity risk premiums were roughly twice the Ba1 default spread – with noticeable breaks in 1999, 2005-2007 and 2009… The first instance was the dot com boom, when stocks were overvalued (at least relative to bonds), the second was the bond market boom that started in 2003 and extended almost in 2008, where default spreads kept falling while the ERP did not change. 1999 was followed by a stock market craxh, 2005-2008 by a bond market crash initially… What will 2009 bring?
- The cap rate is a widely used measure in real estate valuation. Simply put, the expected income from property is divided by the cap rate to arrive at the value of the property. Thus, it takes on the role of an expected return on real estate. Cap Rate premium = Cap[ rate – Treasury bond rate Baa spread = Baa rate – Treasury bond rate As an asset class, real estate was delinked from financial assets until the early 1980s. In the last two decades, though, real estate increasingly has moved with other asset classes. This may be because more people invest in real estate as investments (rather than as dwellings) and the increasing securitization of real estate.
- Everything will look cheap… Using any premium higher than the implied premium today will bias values downwards (and most stocks will look overvalued). This is why risk premiums used in equity research departments tend to be different than those used in corporate finance. So, how do analysts compensate for this bias? They make unrealistic estimates of growth and reinvestment to arrive at what they feel are reasonable values. They then put pressure on management to deliver these unrealistic numbers. Managers bend the accounting rules to pull this off… and we have the makings of accounting scandals.
- Whenever the historical premium is higher than the current implied equity risk premium, you will be using a much higher discount rate than the market and consequently ending up with a much lower present value for stocks. If you are required to be market neutral (as is the case with equity research analysts, equity mutual fund managers, acquisitions), where you are asked to value an individual stock and not pass judgment on the market, the best number to use is the current implied equity risk premium.
- Unlike historical risk premiums, which can be computed for developed markets with a long history, implied premiums can be computed for any market where you can observe the current level of the index, estimate dividends last year and an expected growth rate for the future. The last input is the only tricky input.
- Across the board, equity risk premiums have gone up, but they have gone up more with emerging markets than developed markets.
- The standard approach for estimating betas- regressions - leads to flawed and backward looking estimates of risk.
- Note the standard error problem. Amazon has a beta estimate of 2.23, but the standard error of 0.50 results in a considerable range around this estimate.
- This beta looks much better (in terms of standard error) but it is misleading. Nokia dominates the Helisinki index (it was 70% of the index at the time of this regression). The reason it is misleading is because Nokia’s largest single investor was Barclays, which manages one of the worlds’ largest global index funds. Barclays would not view the beta of this regression as a good measure of risk. (They would probably prefer a beta estimate against a global equity index like the Morgan Stanley Capital Index).
- Changing the regression parameters, which is what we do in the first approach, will yield such a large range of betas (with large standard errors) that it will leave you more confused about the true beta of a firm rather than less confused. While you can use standard deviations to compute a relative standard deviation, you are assuming that market risk and total risk are perfectly correlated. With accounting earnings, the biggest limitation is that you will have relatively few observations in your regression. We prefer bottom-up betas….
- Don’t play it… You can get almost any beta for any company if you play the game long enough. And don’t fall into the trap of picking an index to suit a particular investor. Just because you are analyzing Aracruz for a US investor does not change the marginal investor and cannot be used as a justification for staying with the S&P.
- These are the three fundamentals that drive betas. Firms that produce luxury goods (such as Gucci and Tiffanys) should have higher betas than firms that cater to more basic needs (Walmart). These firms tend to have revenues that are much more sensitive to changes in economic conditions. Firms in businesses with high fixed cost structures (like airlines) should have higher betas than firms with more flexible cost structures. Firms that borrow more money will have higher equity betas than otherwise similar firms that do not borrow money.
- To do this, we have to be able to measure the fixed costs and variable costs of each of the firms that operates in the business. This is difficult to do, though we may be able to estimate fixed and variable costs by looking at operating expenses over time.
- The standard practice of using the same unlevered beta for all firms will overstate betas for firms that have low fixed costs because of strategic decisions that they have made over time (such as Southwest in the Airline business) and understate betas for smaller firms in large infrastructure businesses where fixed costs tend to be much higher early in a firm’s life cycle.
- In some books, the unlevered beta is referred to as the asset beta. To derive this equation, set up a balance sheet with the tax benefit from debt shown as an additional asset: Assets Value Liabilities Value Operating Assets A ( = u) Debt D ( =0) Tax Asset tD ( =0) Equity E ( = lev) You can set the weighted averages of the two sides equal: u (A/(A+tD) = lev (E/(D+E)) Substituting in A = D+E -tD, you get the first equation. If you set the beta of debt be d instead of zero, you will get the second equation. The first equation assumes that debt carries no market risk and works reasonably well for investment grade firms. For firms with junk bonds (which tend to behave like equity and carry market risk), the second approach works better. You will need to estimate a beta for debt - I use betas that are a function of the rating of the firm, with debt betas increasing as the rating falls.
- Three measurement issues come up: How broadly or narrowly do we define comparable firms? We would argue for a broader rather than a narrow definition, because the savings in standard error increase with the number of firms. How do we deal with differences in operating leverage and business mix that may persist across these firms? Assume that there are no differences in operating leverage and business mix or that the differences average out. Adjust for the differences quantitatively. For instance, you could decompose the unlevered beta further into a business beta and the operating leverage effect: Unlevered beta = Business beta (1 + (Fixed Cost/Variable costs)) How do we compute an average - simple or weighted? I prefer simple averages. Otherwise, your betas reflect those of the largest and most stable firms in the business.
- While we still use regression betas to compute bottom-up betas, the law of large numbers works in your favor. The average of a large number of imprecise betas is more precise than any one regression beta. The reason we unlever and relever is because different firms may have different debt ratios. Even if a company is in a single business and has not changed its business over time, the bottom up beta should dominate a regression beta. If a company has changed its business mix, the argument for bottom up betas becomes irrefutable.
- The unlevered beta is the beta for aerospace companies globally. The debt to equity ratio is Embraer’s current market debt to equity ratio and the tax rate used is the marginal tax rate in Brazil.
- I would say yes, as long as there are no significant regulatory differences between aerospace companies in Brazil and aerospace companies in the United States The product is not a discretionary product in one market and a non-discretionary product in another Note, though, that using the same unlevered beta does not translate into using the same cost of equity for U.S. and Brazilian aerospace company because the country risk premium (estimated earlier) would increase the cost of equity for the latter.
- When you use the net debt ratio approach, the cost of capital will attach a much higher weight to the cost of equity. This will partially offset the lower cost of equity you will arrive at using the net debt ratio. The two approaches will diverge because of differences in assumptions about tax rates (the net debt approach reduces the tax advantage of debt by offsetting it against the taxes paid on interest earned on cash) and default risk (the net debt approach assumes that debt is close to riskless).
- Big Picture of Cost of Equity
- The cost of debt is not the rate at which you borrowed money historically. That is why you cannot use the book cost of debt in the cost of capital calculation. While many companies have bonds outstanding, corporate bonds often have special features attached to them and are not liquid, making it difficult to use the yield to maturity as the cost of debt. While ratings are often useful tools for coming up with the cost of debt, there can be problems: A firm can have multiple ratings. You need a rating across all of a firm’s debt, not just its safest… A firm’s bonds can be structured in such a way that they can be safer than the rest of the firm’s debt - they can be more senior or secured than the other debt of the firm.
- This is a simplistic approach but it uses the ratio that explains the largest proportion of the differences between ratings at non-financial service U.S. companies - I tried the 8 ratios that S&P said it depends upon the most to rate companies (which are available on its web site) and correlated them with bond ratings in 1999. You could expand this approach to incorporate other ratios and create a score - similar to the Altman Z score - but you have to decide on whether the trade off is worth it - more complexity for less transparency.
- This table was last updated in 2006 (for interest coverage ratios and ratings). The numbers in the first column are the ones I would use for larger market cap companies (> $ 10 billion), whereas the numbers in the brackets are the ones for smaller or riskier firms. The default spreads get updated more frequently and the most recent ones can be obtained from http://www.bondsonline.com.
- When estimating the cost of debt for an emerging market company, you have to decide whether to add the country default spread to the company default spread when estimating the cost of debt. For smaller, less well known firms, it is safer to assume that firms cannot borrow at a rate lower than the countries in which they are incorporated. For larger firms, you could make the argument that firms can borrow at lower rates. In practical terms, you could ignore the country default spread or add only a fraction of that spread.
- To develop an interest coverage ratio/ratings table, you need lots of rated firms and objective ratings agencies. This is most feasible in the United States. As long as interest rates in another country are similar to those in the United States, the ratings yielded by the table are fairly reasonable. When interest rates are high, interest coverage ratios will come under downward pressure and the table may need to be adjusted to reflect this.
- Default spreads widened dramatically in 2008, just as equity risk premiums shot up…. A question looking forward is whether we should use the most current spreads and ERP or go with normalized values.
- I would use the fair cost of debt in the cost of capital computation and compute the increase in value from the subsidy separately as a cash flow effect. The advantage of doing this is that it allows you to separate the value of the subsidy from the value of the firm and measure the trade off you are making in accepting the subsidy. (There are no free lunches. You get a subsidy for doing something that creates a cost for you elsewhere) It also allows you to keep the subsidy from becoming a perpetuity (which it tends to do once it gets built into the cost of capital)
- The rationale for using market values is simple. You are considering how much someone who would buy the company today should be willing to pay for the company. Since he or she can buy equity and debt at today’s market value, you use those as weights. However, you could very well push the market values towards your estimated values in the process of buying the company. If this is a concern, you can iterate the weights in the cost of capital calculation to make the values used in the weights converge on the values estimated in the analysis.
- Most of Embraer’s debt is not traded. Many analysts assume that book value of debt is equal to market value. You can estimate the market value of debt fairly easily using the interest rate on the debt and the book value of debt.
- The two approaches will give you different answers because they make different assumptions about the equity risk premium. In the first approach, the risk premium remains a constant as you switch from one currency to another. In the second, you scale up the risk premium for higher interest rate currencies. The second approach will give you more consistent valuations as you switch from currency to currency.
- Keep your cost of capital simple. If possible, consolidate all of your capital into either debt or equity. With convertible bonds, this is fairly simple to do. With preferred, you do have a problem since its non-tax deductible status makes it unlike debt and it certainly is not equity. Here, you would make the exception and allow for a third source of capital. (In practice, I would do this only if preferred stock were more than 5% of capital in market value terms. Otherwise, I would ignore it for purposes of analysis). The cost of preferred stock is the preferred dividend yield.
- The alternative approach is to use an option pricing model to value the conversion option and use that value as the value of the equity portion. In practice, here are a few problems that you may run into: The bond may not be traded. The best solution here is to value the conversion option. If this is not feasible, use the face value as market value. The value of the straight bond exceeds the market price. If this happens, treat the entire bond as debt since equity options cannot have a negative value. The firm is not rated and has no straight debt. You have to use a synthetic rating to get a cost of debt.
- Big picture of the cost of capital.
- Sets up the process. Much as we do not trust accounting statements, that is where we go for the information. Accounting earnings are not cash flows. We do not draw a distinction between discretionary and required capital expenditures. Once you introduce growth in earnings, the distinction becomes largely symbolic. Draws a distinction between cashflows to equity and the firm again.
- Lays out the three definitions of cashflows. The strictest measure is the dividend measure. (In fact, there are some who do not count stock buybacks.) The more expansive equity measure is the free cashflow to equity, which you can think off as potential dividends. The free cashflow to the firm is the cash available for all claimholders in the firm - it is before cashflows to any of the claimholders in the firm - debt or equity.
- The tax savings from interest payments do not show up in the cashflows because they have already been counted in the cost of capital (in the use of the after-tax cost of debt). If you add the interest tax benefits to the cashflows, you will double count the benefit.
- Very seldom can you use the reported earnings in the annual report in valuation. This lays out the three adjustments that you usually have to make before you start doing valuation: You might need to update the accounting information for most recent reports that have come from the firm or other sources. If you have a cyclical or commodity firm, you have to adjust the earnings for where in the cycle (of the economy, for a cyclical firm, or for the commodity price, for a commodity firm) you are currently. You have to clean up for obvious shortcomings in accounting rules.
- For larger and more mature firms, you can get away with using the most recent annual report. The younger the firm and the more tumultuous the times (the economy entering a recession, for instance), the more you have to worry about using dated information. Your objective in valuation is simple. You want to use the most recent information you can get for every input, even if it means that your inputs are observed at different points in time - the market values may be from today and the accounting information from the most recent quarterly report.
- Financial expense: Any commitment that is tax deductible that you have to meet no matter what your operating results: Failure to meet it leads to loss of control of the business. Capital expense: Any expense that is expected to generate benefits over multiple periods. These are two fairly standard adjustments you have to make to almost every firm that you encounter though the consequences are going to be larger for some firms than others.
- The firms where operating leases matter the most are retail firms…
- From an intuitive standpoint, there is little difference between a term loan (where you pay off a loan in equal annual installments) and an operating lease. It may be more like unsecured debt than secured debt but it is debt. It is not just debt that is affected when you convert operating leases to debt. The operating income also will change.
- The Gap reports its lease commitments in its financial statements. The present value of operating lease expenses is computed using the pre-tax cost of debt. (An argument can be made that the unsecured cost of debt should be used.)
- Traces the effect of converting operating leases to debt. Both operating income and capital invested increase. The net effect on return on captial will depend upon which increases more.
- Again, the effects of R& D expensing are uneven. They matter more for technology firms and pharmaceutical firms than for the rest of the market. However, you could argue that training expenses are the equivalent of R&D for a financial services or consulting firm.
- The argument used by accountants - that R&D yields uncertain benefits - is specious. You could make the same argument about other investments - investing in a factory in an emerging market, deciding to build a concept car - and you are forced to treat these as capital expenditures. To capitalize R&D, you need to specify On average, how long it takes between the time you do research and a commercial product emerges from the research. (This is the amortizable life) R&D expenses from the past (for a period equivalent to the amortizable life). If your firm has not been in existence for that long, you would go back for as many years as you can. Depreciation schedules - stick with the simplest which is straight line depreciation.
- The amortizable life is an assumption based upon SAP’s business. It would be shorter in other businesses (such as computer chips) and longer in businesses that need regulatory approval (such as pharmaceuticals). Note that the amortization is 1/5 of the R&D expense each year. We are also assuming that R&D expenses are spent at the end of each year - not realistic, but simplifies analysis - that is why there is no amortization of the current year’s expense. The effect of capitalizing R&D will be greatest at firms where R&D is growing over time and be non-existent at firms with flat R&D.
- Traces out the effects of capitalizing R&D. The key aspect is that operating income will be increased by exactly the same amount that net capital expenditures will be increased, with the increase being: Change in operating income and net cap ex = Current year’s R&D expense - R&D amortization In other words, the free cashflow to the firm will not change as a result of this capitalization. So why do it? It allows us to Get a better sense of the profitability of the firm (operating income and return on capital. Better estimate how much the firm is reinvesting for future growth.
- If it is truly a one-time change, you should use a profit of $ 500 million. If the firm is playing games (consolidating expenses and reporting them as one-time charges every five years), you should take the average annual expense of $ 200 million (1/5 of $ 1 billion) and estimate a profit of $ 300 million. Don’t take company characterizations of non-recurring charges at face value. Look at the firm’s history.
- This is a challenge. There are clues, though none of them are fool proof and it makes sense to be skeptical about accounting numbers post-Enron. Check the footnotes. Bear in mind that this what forensic accounting tries to do and there are relatively few good forensic accountants around.
- To decide what to do when your firm is losing money, you first have to diagnose the problem. If the problem is transitory (a recession, a loss caused by a strike), you can normalize earnings instantaneously and use the normalized earnings in valuation. If it is long term, you have to first figure out what the long term problem is. If it is financial - the firm has too much debt - you have to consider whether the firm can pay down its debt and survive. If you believe it can, lower the debt ratio each year and compute a cost of capital. If it is operating or strategic - you have to work out what it will cost the firm to fix these problems- and build the expected improvement in margins over time. If it is life cycle related - the firm is in early stage of its life cycle and it is normal to lose money at that stage - you have to build in the expectations of the improvements that will occur as the firm moves up the life cycle (with a healthy dose of skepticism about whether the firm will make it).
- The effective tax rate is defined as taxes paid/ taxable income, as defined in the reporting books. The marginal tax rate is the tax rate on the last dollar of income. The effective tax rate is lower than the marginal tax rate for most firms. Why? Bracket creep: Can be a reason for small private businesses but not for large publicly traded firms where most of the income is at the highest marginal tax rate anyway. Cosmetic factors: Two sets of books with different accounting standards for tax and reporting books. Real factors: Capacity to defer taxes to the future.
- If you have a choice, you would prefer to do valuation with the tax books in front of you, but since you do not have that choice as an outsider you have to choose between the effective tax rate and the marginal tax rate. If you use the effective tax rate all the way through, you are assuming that taxes can be deferred forever. This is unrealistic - tax deferrals catch up with you as your growth flags - and will result in an overvaluation of your firm. If you use a marginal tax rate, you are assuming that you cannot defer taxes from this point on. This is far too conservative and will yield too low a value for your firm. Suggestion: Start with the effective tax rate in the early years and move towards the marginal tax rate in the terminal year.
- Emphasizes the importance of NOLs. The tax rate will be zero in the first two years and will be 40% in the third year. (Suggestion: Change the first year to a loss of $ 500 million, the third year to a profit of $ 1 billion and work out the solution. The NOL will increase to $1.5 billion after year 1 and cover income in years 2 and 3.)
- It is dangerous to have three separate (and unconnected) line items for capital expenditures, depreciation and growth in a valuation. Analysts very quickly discover the secret of value creation (at least on paper) - decrease cap ex, increase depreciation and increase growth.
- The accounting definition of cap ex is too narrow. It excludes external cap ex (which is what acquisitions are) and intangible cap ex (which is what R&D is). We would include all acquisitions, including stock swaps acquisitions. To those who would argue that there is no cashflow associated with stock swaps, we would suggest that all that has occurred is that the firm has just skipped a step - the firm could have issued the stock to the market and used the cash on the acquisitions. It is true that incorporating acquisitions into valuation can be messy for firms that do relatively few and very diverse acquisitions over time. You have the option of ignoring these acquisitions when you do valuation but make sure that the expected growth rate in earnings does not then include the expected growth from acquisitions. You are implicitly assuming that acquisitions in the future will be done at fair value and hence have no value impact.
- You have to dig to find this. Cisco’s 10K yielded this. To estimate the price paid for the pooling acquisitions - which were funded with stock - we multiplied the shares offered in the acquisition by the share price at the time of the acquisition.
- The true net cap ex of $ 3.7 billion is well in excess of the net cap ex from the accounting statement ($98 million).
- We remove cash from current assets because cash is not a wasting asset for most firms with substantial cash balances. Cash today tends to be invested in treasuries or commercial paper which yields a fair return for the risk taken (which is little or none). There are some analysts who still use operating cash (which they estimate as a percent of revenues) as part of working capital, but we believe that this is no longer appropriate for firms in markets with well developed banking systems and investment alternatives. The debt in current liabilities is included in the debt used for cost of capital.
- Firms like Walmart have been able to generate cashflows by keeping non-cash working capital low or negative - in a sense, supplier credit is being used a source of capital. The possible downside is that you can increase credit risk if it gets out of control. That is why you should not assume negative non-cash working capital in perpetuity.
- In each case, we have used both the company’s history and the industry averages as the basis for our forecasts for the future. The advantage of linking working capital to revenues is that eliminates the need to estimate working capital as a separate line item. There are some analysts who prefer to estimate each item in working capital separately - inventory, accounts receivable and accounts payable. We would do this only If we had a strong basis for separating the items and a way of forecasting each individually. For the short term. As you push out into future years, you are better off estimating aggregate rather than individual numbers.
- In the strict view of the world, even stock buybacks are not cashflows to equity investors because they go to someone else - a person cannot sell their stock back to the company and hold it for dividends at the same time. In 2000, US companies paid out about 60% of what was available to be paid out (after reinvestment and debt payments) in dividends. Historically, the unwillingness of managers to cut dividends has also made them more reluctant to increase dividends as earnings increase.
- Models that discount earnings and assume a growth rate in earnings at the same time will systematically overvalue companies because they assume that firms can grow earnings without any reinvestment. (Glassman and Hassett made this mistake in their book Dow 36000 , where the discounted earnings at close to the riskfree rate and assumed real growth in perpetuity.)
- Note the differences between this and Free cashflow to firm: Start with net income (equity earnings) rather than operating earnings. Interest expenses are subtracted out from earnings and the tax benefits are reflected. Net out net debt payments. If a firm raises more new debt than it pays off, this can be a positive number which, if large enough can make the free cashflow to equity higher than the free cashflow to the firm.
- This is a steady state equation and works if the firm is at a debt ratio that it feels that it can maintain for the foreseeable future. When this equation is used to estimate free cashflows to equity in the past, the average book debt to capital ratio has to be used. The free cashflows to equity each year will be different from the actual numbers, but the averages will converge.
- Estimates Disney’s free cashflow to equity, using a book debt to capital ratio, for 1996. Disney actually paid out $345 million.
- As the debt ratio increases, equity investors are putting in less of the required reinvestment each year, which will push up the free cashflow to equity. This is based upon changing the debt ratio only on new investment. If you change the total debt ratio for the firm on existing assets, there will be higher interest expense and lower net income (but also fewer shares outstanding).
- But the higher leverage increases the beta for the firm as well. The levered beta equation developed earlier is used. The unlevered beta is 1.09 and the tax rate is 36%: Levered Beta = 1.09 ( 1 + (1-.36) (Debt/Equity))
- Any of the above, if you believe that value can be affected by leverage and that there is an optimal debt ratio. The third choice if you are a true believer in Miller-Modigliani.
- Three basic approaches for estimating growth. We tend to use all three but the degree to which we weight each in will depend upon the company that we are looking at.
- Estimating historical growth rates may seem to be trivial, but there are a number of estimation issues that can lead different analysts to estimate different historical growth rates for the same firm.
- Arithmetic and geometric growth rates can be very different as illustrated above. However, the differences are widest when there is significant volatility in the year-to-year numbers - compare net income to EBIT to revenues. When will the two converge? Where there is no standard deviation in percent changes.
- It cannot be estimated. You can modify the equation to yield a number - see next page - but it would be meaningless for making forecasts.
- There are mechanical fixes that might need to be employed to come up with a number, but you should not read too much into that number.
- Becomes tougher and tougher to maintain high growth rates as firm becomes bigger - note the drop off in growth rates as net profit increases.
- Shows the absurdities created by maintaining historical growth rates at small firms that have grown at high rates to become medium sized firms. It is a good test to convert percent growth rates to dollar values…
- Analysts spend a disproportionate amount of time forecasting next quarter’s earnings per share - disproportionate because next quarter’s earnings per share has a relatively small impact on the value of a firm. Analyst forecasts are easy to get. Thus, they are used in a large number of valuations to arrive at expected growth in earnings.
- While analyst estimates tend to be more precise than historical growth based estimates, the improvement in accuracy seems small relative to the resources expended on analysts…. Analysts also tend to move in herds… an upgrade by one often leads to upgrades by others…
- All-America analysts (the pinnacle of sell-side equity research) seem to be picked more for their public relations skills ( how often they can get their names into the news) than for their stock selection or forecasting skills. The marginal improvement in forecasting after they become All-America analysts can be attributed to the fact that they are more likely to get their phone calls answered after they get selected… The recommendations made by analysts have an impact but the impact tends to be more short-term than long-term for buy recommendations. There is a much longer-term impact from sell recommendations - the pity is that there are not too many of those…
- A jaundiced view of sell-side equity research… Reflects my personal biases…
- Use analyst forecasts with caution. They know less than you think they do, and much of what they know has little impact on long-term value. Interesting issue: How will the SEC’s Fair Disclosure rule (FD) that restricts companies from selectively revealing information to analysts have on analysts?
- Simple set-up to illustrate that earnings growth comes from how much you reinvest and how well you reinvest…
- Sets up the relationship between growth in earnings and the two determinants of this growth - reinvestment rate and return on equity. Opens the door to the second source of earnings growth - improvement in returns on assets in place.
- In an equity analysis, the return on investment becomes return on equity and the reinvestment rate is measured as the percent of net income that gets reinvested back into the firm (which is the retention ratio). Proposition 1 should have the caveat that this applies because the return on equity on existing assets cannot keep going up each year in the long term….
- Implicitly, we are assuming that the current return on equity applies not only to existing investments but to marginal investments as well… In this case, the expected growth in earnings per share will be 7.97%.
- New return on equity = .1756/ (1+.30) = .1351 Assuming the retention ratio remains unchanged, the new growth rate = 6.13%
- Companies can end up with high returns on equity either because they take great projects (high ROC) or use a lot of leverage…. Everything has to be done in book value terms, because both ROE and ROC are based on on book value… This is because market value includes expected future growth potential and cannot be used as the denominator in computing the return on equity or capital… it is not fair to ask companies to earn returns on projects they have not taken yet.
- This is an example from 1997 and illustrates how leverage can be used to increase the return on equity. Without leverage, this firm would have had a return on equity of 19.91%… the additional 11.01% comes from the fact that Brahma can borrow money at 5.61% and invest at 19.91%. The downside is that if the return on capital drops (bad year, economy doing poorly etc.), leverage can hurt you.
- Leverage is a double-edged sword. Titan Watches pays more on its debt than it earns on its projects, resulting in the return on equity being lower than the return on capital.
- While earnings per share cannot grow faster than the return on equity, net income can, if the firm goes out and raises additional equity to expand. In such a scenario, the equity reinvestment rate can be higher than 100%. If you are forecasting net income, you should probably use this approach, rather than the more conventional growth equation.
- When looking at free cash flows to the firm and operating income, you need to define reinvestment rates and returns consistently. The reinvestment rate is stated as a percent of after-tax operating income (rather than net income) and the return is the return on capital(rather than return on equity).
- Growth is earned. Cisco had a high growth because it reinvested a lot and reinvested well. Motorola had a low growth rate because it reinvested less and earned a much lower return on capital.
- As with ROE, when the return on capital changes, there is a second term in the equation that adds to growth - if the ROC increases - and takes away from growth - if the ROC decreases.
- I am assuming that the new projects start making 17.22% immediately, but that the change on existing assets occurs much more slowly over the next 5 years. I am also assuming that the change is spread linearly over the next 5 years.
- Not all growth is created equal. Firms that grow by reinvesting at high rates or through improved efficiency will deliver more value than firms that grow with poor return investments.
- When a firm has negative operating income and low revenues, the sequence changes. Instead of assuming a reinvestment rate and return on capital first, and obtaining growth from these inputs, you should consider estimating revenue growth first and then asking what you would need to reinvest to generate this revenue growth. In conjunction, you will need to assume that your margins will improve over time towards stable (and positive) levels.
- The growth rate in year 1 was set lower to reflect the fact that the economy had slowed down at the time of this forecast. As Commerce One gets larger, revenue growth rates become smaller. The initial year’s estimates were based upon looking at the recent past. We estimated the expected revenues in 10 years first (by making assumptions about market share and total market size) and then adjusted the growth rate in the intermediate years to get to these revenues. (Making year-to-year estimates becomes just about impossible with firms like these…)
- To estimate the reinvestment needs, we used the sales to capital ratio… this is the dollars of revenues that I expect each dollar of capital to generate. This number was obtained by looking at Commerce One’s limited history and calculating the change in revenues as a percent of change in capital each year The industry averages I am also assuming that reinvestment and growth are contemporaneous - investments in capital and the increase in revenues occur in the same year. If I assumed that there was a lag between investment and growth, I could lag the investment behind revenue growth.
- Big Picture of Expected Growth.
- To put closure on valuation, we assume that we stop forecasting cashflows at some point in time and estimate a terminal value.
- Firms have infinite lives. Since we cannot estimate cash flows forever, we assume a constant growth rate forever as a way of closing off the valuation. A very commonly used variant is to use a multiple of the terminal year’s earnings. This brings an element of relative valuation into the analysis. In a pure DCF model, the terminal value has to be estimated with a stable growth rate. The real choice is between stable growth models and liquidation value. One values the firm as a going concern and the other is based upon shutting the firm down and getting what you can for its assets.
- (If the overall economy is composed of high growth and mature companies, and is growing at 5%, the mature companies must be growing at a rate less than 5%). The stable growth rate can be a negative number. This is an intermediate solution between the infinite growth model and liquidation value. Using a negative stable growth rate will make your firm disappear gradually over time.
- It is not uncommon to see analysts use growth periods of longer than 10 years for small, promising companies and 10 years even for larger, growth companies (Coke, Microsoft, Walmart..)
- Firms that grow for longer than 5 years are more the exception rather than the rule. We may be routinely over valuing growth companies as a consequence.
- This is the key balancing assumption that keeps terminal values from becoming unbounded. If you can change the growth rate without changing the reinvestment assumptions, you can make any firm worth any amount of money.
- Firms that have earned excess returns in the past seem to have more success in holding on to excess returns. In other words, an assessment of strategic advantages and barriers to entry may be more relevant to good valuation than the focus on earnings growth.
- The only growth rate that is consistent with this assumption is zero. Even if you set the growth rate = inflation rate, replacing existing assets will cost you more than the depreciation on those assets. Hence you will need to follow the equation on the last page to get to a reinvestment rate.
- If you reduce the growth rate but leave the other characteristics of the firm unchanged, you will create internal inconsistencies in your valuation. This can happen if you forecast out the cash flow in your terminal year is the cash flow in the year prior augmented by the stable growth rate. (You are then locking in the reinvestment rate assumptions in the last year of high growth in perpetuity
- You can estimates cashflows, growth rates and discount rates for equity valuation or firm valuation, but you ultimately have to make a choice about how you will approach valuation.
- When leverage is stable, you can use the short cut for estimating free cashflows to equity. When leverage is changing, estimating cashflows to equity becomes problematic because you have to estimate how much cash will be raised from new debt issues and how much old debt will be paid off each year. While you have to adjust the cost of capital in the firm valuation approach for changing leverage, this is much simpler to do than estimating cashflows. As a rule, firm valuation is a more flexible approach than equity valuation.
- Restrict the use of the dividend discount model to those firms where you cannot estimate free cashflows to equity easily - because you cannot identify the net capital expenditures and working capital investments of the firm. In all other cases where you have decided to do equity valuation, you will be on safer ground using the free cashflows to equity model. In theory, you can make the two models converge by adding the cash accumulated by not paying out dividends to the terminal value in the dividend discount model. In practice, it is difficult to do.
- Consistency is key.
- The biggest limitation of the two-stage model is the abrupt change in fundamentals (growth, risk and returns) that occurs as the firm goes from high growth to stable growth. The present value effect is small, though, when you are going from a 10% growth rate to a 5% growth rate and you can use a 2-stage model. If the growth rate is much higher, you should allow for a transition phase to allow time for the inputs to adjust over time.
- DCF valuation models are like Lego blocks. Combining a cash flow, a discount rate and a growth pattern yields a valuation model.
- In many cases, the biggest errors in valuation occur after you think you are done, where you are tempted and even encouraged to start adding or detracting arbitrary amounts from your carefully estimated value for thinks that sound good or ominous - control, synergy and illiquidity are common examples. We need to fight this tendency since it undercuts the integrity of the process…. Liquidity, control and synergy might have value but we should try to assess the value rather than assume it is always 20% or some other arbitrary proportion of estimated value.
- The cleanest way to value cash is to keep it separate and value it separately from operating assets. In firm valuation, we tend to do this because we use operating income to estimate cash flows. In equity valuation, we tend to incorporate cash into the income and the value because we start with net income…
- Neutral in company A… Value destroying in company B…. Value adding in company C…. What investors perceive or expect you to do with the cash will affect how they value it….
- In companies with poor investments, you may discount cash for these sub-standard returns….
- The evidence backs this up.. Cash is discounted in companies that have a history of making poor investment choices and may have a premium attached to it because of capital constraints in other sectors.
- Closed end funds are mutual funds, with a fixed number of shares. Unlike regular mutual funds, where the shares have to trade at net asset value (which is the value of the securities in the fund), closed end funds shares can and often do trade at prices which are different from the net asset value. While a few closed end funds trade at premiums over net asset value, most of them trade at discounts. (For those who wonder why you cannot do arbitrage, liquidating these funds is not easy to do.) The average closed end fund has always traded at a discount on net asset value (of between 10 and 20%) in the United States.
- Estimated discount with no growth in fund = .005/.115 = .0435 or 4.35% If you assume a growth rate of 3% in the fund in perpetuity, .005(1.03)/(.115-.03) = 6.06% To see the intuition, consider investing $ 100 in this fund and earning 0.5% less than you should be making in perpetuity.
- The ultimate closed end fund. Berkshire Hathaway has substantial operating businesses (such as GEICO) but it operates as Warren Buffett’s investment vehicle. To the extent that people view Mr. Buffett as having the magic touch, they are willing to pay significant premiums over the market value of the holdings.
- How you deal with cross holdings depends upon which scenario you face.
- Value of equity = 1000 - 200 = 800 With holdings in company B Value of equity in company A = 800 + .10 (500) = 850 Danger: The market might be misvaluing company B. With consolidated holdings Value of equity in company A = 800 + .10(500) - 40 = 810 The problem with using minority interest is that it reflects the book value of the 40% of company C that does not belong to you, when everything else is your estimate of market value.
- Start with the estimate of value from part a of the last page but add in 10% of your estimate of value and subtract out your estimate of the market value of the minority interest in company C. (1000 - 200) + .10 (250) - .40 (250) = 725
- The problems in doing this are often practical: Firms may provide only consolidated financial statements Firms may have dozens of cross holdings Not enough information may be available to value the subsidiary companies If that occurs, you have to make an approximation of the value of the cross holdings….
- This may be the most practical solution when a firm has dozens of minority holdings in other companies and not much information is given about these holdings.
- If assets are truly unutilized and have value, you should add them on to the DCF value. Examples would be vacant land, valuable artwork etc… Be careful not to double count. For instance, you cannot value a retail company and then add on the value of the real estate owned by the company to the DCF value. As for overfunded pension plans, it is safer to reflect the overfunding in the cashflows than it is to add on the entire overfunding on to value today.
- You would expect the complicated company to trade at a discount because what you don’t know (or what managers have not told you) is more likely to contain bad news than good news….
- Simplistic, but effective… Data does not equate to information.
- A veritable shit-list (pardon my language…) for valuation… All the things that bother me when I value companies and how much they bother me.
- Markets seem to penalize complex or complicated companies after scandals (where they are reminded of what can go wrong) but they seem to forget in the good times…
- Two different definitions of debt.. A narrow one for the cost of capital computation but a much broader one for the debt you subtract from firm value to get to equity value.
- If you are valuing a firm as a going concern, you are implicitly assuming that the firm will make its interest payments over time. It therefore makes sense to subtract out the market value of debt (which is the present value of the promised payments).. This will yield an estimated value for the equity of $ 500 million. If you liquidate, you will have to pay the face value of the debt, yielding a liquidation value for the equity of $ 200 million. You will continue to run the firm as a going concern and not liquidate, if you were the equity investor in the firm. If you were the lender, you may prefer liquidation.
- Last chance to bring in whatever holds down your equity value… Lawsuits and other potential liabilities…. Unfunded pension plans… While you don’t want to count these as debt when computing cost of capital, they do drag equity value down.
- Firms issue options to employees (as part of compensation) and to investors when they issue warrants or convertibles. These options create equity claims on the firm and can affect equity value per share.
- It is not the dilution per se that causes the loss of value but the dilution at below market prices. When shares are issued at below market prices, the remaining equity investors in the firm will lose some value. The arguments that options do not affect value per share are absurd: Options are not cash expenses (If we use this rationale, companies can use stock or options to pay for everything and claim revenues as earnings) We do not know whether the options will be exercised and become shares. (That is true but we also do not know whether there will be revenues or earnings next year, whether the managers will commit felonies and whether the universe will still be standing. That does not stop us from forecasting out expected revenues and earnings next year) Options cannot be really valued. The option pricing models are only model. (True, but I would wager that option pricing models do a better job valuing options than accountants do in estimating earnings for the most recent financial year) If options are treated as expenses, firms will have to stop issuing them. (Good… Boards will finally recognize how much they are giving away…and for some firms, it will still make sense to issue options)
- A conventional valuation…
- The right answer is c. Answer a ignores the time premium on options and answer b ignores the exercise proceeds from the options. How does backdating affect the value of equity? With backdating, the company creates the illusion that it is granting options that are at the money but are already deep in-the-money at the time of the issuance. For instance, assume that in this example, the stock price is $ 10 on December 31 but hit a low of $ 8 on October 1… The options will be issued on December 31 but backdated to make it appear that they were granted on October 1 at the then prevailing stock price of $ 8…. These options are obviously worth more than at-the-money options and create a much bigger drain on equity value.
- Simplest approach to use but also the least accurate. Changing the number of shares outstanding is unlikely to yield a good approximation.
- When analysts use diluted earnings per share in computing PE ratios and claim that they have controlled for options, they are implicitly subscribing to this approach (and all its limitations)
- Considers the options at exercise value in the valuation. Ignores the time premium on the options.
- With out-of-the money options, adding the exercise proceeds will make the equity value per share increase as you increase the number of options outstanding…
- This approach is the most accurate way of dealing with existing options. It considers the value of options outstanding, even if they are out of the money.
- There is one more issue to consider. The option pricing models all require the current stock price as an input. In a valuation, however, you can arrive at a value per share that is very different from the stock price. To be internally consistent, should you use the estimated value per share in valuing the options? It may be more consistent, but it is not realistic insofar as the options can be exercised today at the prevailing market price. Unless there are significant restrictions on the options being exercised in the near future, it is therefore often better to use the market price.
- This is an at-the-money option but this is before you consider dilution. In other words, if the CEO announced today that she planned to exercise her options, the stock price will probably fall.
- Note that the options have zero exercise value but are still worth a lot. In fact, you can think of the option value as a probability adjusted value of the options being exercised in the future.
- The equity options represent a transfer of wealth from the stockholders to the CEO.
- There can be a time delay between when options are issued and when the tax effects show up.
- Firms continue to use options as part of compensation packages. Hence, we have to build into the cashflow forecasts our estimates of the costs associated with expected future option issues.
- The companies that issue options the most are young, risky companies…
- A range of companies - small and large, domestic and foreign, mature and growth companies will be valued in this section. We will use different models for each and provide a justification for why….
- When the objective is to decide whether to invest in a stock or not, you cannot make this judgment without passing judgment on the market. If you want to be market neutral (assume that the market is, on average, right, you should use the current implied equity risk premium. If you assume that the market is correct on average over long time periods but not necessarily at this point in time, you would use the average implied equity risk premium over time (about 4%) If you are a strong believer in mean reversion, you would go with the historical risk premium
- When using a stable growth model to value a company, you have to check to make sure that it has the characteristics of a stable growth company. In particular, with a dividend discount model: Stable period payout ratio = Stable growth rate/ ROE (Should reflect the low stable growth rate) Cost of equity should reflect a beta close to 1 (0.8 – 1.2)
- There is some growth rate at which you can justify the current market price. The growth rate is called an implied growth rate. We can solve for the implied growth rate. Assuming that the market and you are in agreement on the other inputs, the question about whether you should invest in Con Ed boils down to a question of whether their earnings can grow faster than this rate in the long term. You can also compute the fundamental growth rate to see how close you get to your break even.
- Total return over the next year = 42.30 (.077) = $3.26 Dividends expected next year = $2.37 Expected price appreciation = $0.89 Value per share a year from today = 42.30+0.89 = $43.19 Total return if you buy the stock at $40.76 today = (43.19 – 40.76 + 2.37)/ 40.76 = 11.78%
- A cop out… No doubt… You could try to estimate the free cashflow to equity for a bank but you will find yourself quickly stymied by how little information is revealed by firms. There is also the added rationale that equity retained in a bank increases equity capital which is required for the bank to expand (because of regulatory constraints on capital). Key inputs: I am assuming that the ROE and retention ratio will stay unchanged for first 5 years. In year 6, the growth decreases and the payout ratio increases. You cannot take dividends in year 5 and grow them one year at 5% because of the change in the dividend payout ratio. Note that the new cost of equity is used to estimate the terminal value, but the terminal value is discounted back at the current cost of equity.
- A good measure of how the world can shift under you. Four weeks after this valuation, Lehman collapsed and the rest as they say is history. Here are some questions: With the benefit of hindsight, which inputs for the company were over optimistic? (Base year earnings and expected ROE..) What macro inputs should be changed, in hindsight again? (I think the ERP of 4.5% turned out to be too low..)
- The present value of the terminal price is computed as follows: 476.86/ (1.104) 5 (1.1022) (1.1004)(1.0986)(1.0968)(1.095) You have to live through the first 10 years to be able to claim the terminal value.
- Decomposes a discounted cash flow value into its component parts. You can change the cost of equity you use for each part to preserve consistency. For instance, you could use the stable period cost of equity to estimate the value of assets in place and stable growth.
- The higher the percentage of the value that comes from high growth, the more sensitive the value will be to changes in perceptions and expectations about the future. To compute the value of each component, note: That we used the stable period cost of equity to value assets in place and stable growth The value of growth is whatever is left over.
- A conservative valuation, because it looks at dividends as the only cash flow from owning equity. No stock buybacks are even considered.
- With stock buybacks, index looks under valued. The buybacks were normalized but still were almost twice as high as dividends.
- Note the large negative free cashflows to equity during the first few years. In these years, Tsingtao will have to raise fresh equity to cover its cash requirements. If it cannot, it will have to scale back its investment plans and reinvest less. The stable growth rate seems high but the valuation is in Chinese Yuan, with higher expected inflation. The discount rate is also high to reflect the high inflation.
- With growth companies, this is what you would expect. After all, if you buy stock in a growth firm, you don’t make money while you hold the stock but when you sell it (the terminal price). The intuitive explanation is that this company will be issuing new shares to fund its growth over the next 10 years (that is what negative FCFE imply). You are in effect reducing the value of equity today to reflect expected future dilution in shares. That is why you should not make any additional adjustments to the value of equity to reflect the future share issues – that would be double counting.
- With commodity companies, you ride the price of the commodity. As commodity prices rise, current earnings will rise, but what goes up will come down. The key is normalizing the commodity price, easier said than done, but necessary. Here are some strategies: Look at the average price over a long period (10 years or more) Estimate what a fair price would be, given demand and supply, for the commodity.
- There is circular reasoning involved because the market values of equity and debt are both inputs (in computing the cost of capital) and outputs. If you want to get around this problem, you would need to re-estimate the cost of capital using your estimated values, which would change your estimated values, which would change your cost of capital…. Fortunately, there will be convergence at some point in this process.
- This is the status quo valuation. The value killer is the return on capital – the firm is earning about 7.7% less than its cost of capital during high growth and reinvesting large amounts…. Growth is destroying value….
- Increasing the growth rate will reduce the terminal value. To see why, note that the reinvestment rate will have to rise: New reinvestment rate = g/ ROC= 7%/9.20% = 67.09% Terminal value = 5790 (1.07) (1-.6709)/(.1478-.07) = Rs 26,206 million Why? Because the return on capital is lower than the cost of capital. If the return on capital had been equal to the cost of capital, the terminal value would not change as the growth rate changed. In such a case, you can estimate the terminal value, ignoring growth: Terminal value when ROC = Cost of capital = EBIT (1-t)/ Cost of capital If the return on capital is greater than the cost of capital, increasing growth will increase terminal value.
- The only change here is that the new investments taken generate returns that are higher than the existing assets (though still lower than the cost of capital). Existing assets are assumed to remain at existing profitability.
- In this valuation, you get an additional boost because existing assets become more efficiently run, creating additional growth during the high growth period. This pushes up the value per share. Obviously, this is more difficult to do than making sure that your new investments generate higher returns.
- You already have considered corporate governance problems by allowing these firms to continue growing, while investing at returns well below their costs of capital. In a system where stockholders had more power, these firms would stop investing and liquidate at least a portion of their assets in place.
- There are different valuation issues at each stage of the life cycle and the inputs that matter the most will shift as companies go from idea businesses to mature businesses.
- Raises the key issues that we face when valuing young companies. Acting like these issues do not exist, which is which is what many analysts seem to do, will not make them go away. As an example, many VC firms use what is called the VC approach, where they estimate revenues or earnings in 2 or 3 years and apply a multiple to this number, based on what publicly traded companies trade at today. They then discount this number back at a very high target rate (50-70%) to reflect their uncertainty….
- Consider a young, start-up firm in a new business or industry…The financial statements provide scanty information because the firm’s operations are small, there is no historical data because the firm has not been around for very long and there are either no comparable firms or they all look like the firm being valued.
- To estimate a bottom-up beta for Amazon in January 2000, we used the average beta of internet retailers for the first five years as the bottom-up beta but assume that the beta will move towards the average beta for specialty retailers over time. The high operating leverage that is typical of an internet retailer (high infrastructure and technology costs) provides an intuitive explanation for why they should have higher betas than their brick-and-mortar counterparts. When a firm has operating losses, the interest coverage ratio is negative. Using the interest coverage ratio table on the next page would yield a D rating for the firm. In January 2000, this seemed a little harsh. For better or worse, bondholders and lenders to the firm seemed to be lending based upon expected operating income in the future rather than past operating income. The interest coverage ratio was therefore defined as follows: Interest coverage ratio = Average EBIT next 5 years/ Current interest expense The interest coverage ratio yielded a synthetic rating of BBB and a default spread of 1.50% in January 2000. 3. The pre-tax cost of debt is equal to the after-tax cost for the next 2 years because the firm is expected to keep losing money. In year 3, Amazon is expected to make an operating profit, but it wil have net operating losses that shelter the income leading to no taxes. In year 4, Amazon is able to partially cover the operating income with carried-forward net operating losses… Starting in year 6, we lower the cost of debt since the firm is expected to become a profitable firm with substantial increases in operating income in the subsequent years. Year 1 2 3 4 5 EBIT -$373 -$94 $407 $1,038 $1,628 Taxes $0 $0 $0 $167 $570 EBIT(1-t) -$373 -$94 $407 $871 $1,058 Tax rate 0% 0% 0% 16.13% 35% NOL $500 $873 $967 $560 $0 The value per share in January 2000 is $ 34. This valuation was done with all of the inputs at the high end of my expectations and can be considered optimistic. Notwithstanding this, the stock is still overvalued. In fact, the optimism shows when you see that the free cashflows to the firm are negative for the first 6 years… I am assuming that Amazon will have no trouble raising the capital to fund these cashflows…
- Is $ 84 feasible? The answer is yes - a combination of compounded 10-year revenue growth of 60% and margins of 8%, revenue growth of 55% and margins of 10%, revenue growth of 50% and margins of 14% all yield values greater than $ 84…. The problem is that to generate higher revenue growth, Amazon will have to settle for lower margins… Is $84 likely? The answer is no…
- This is a valuation in January 2001, one year after the first valuation. The difference wrought by the intervening year is remarkable. The economy slowed, e-commerce lost its sheen and Amazon reported disappointingly large operating losses in the period. The big changes in this valuation can be seen in The base year numbers - the revenues increase by about 130% but operating losses more than doubled. More conservative revenue estimates for the future - a lower compounded revenue growth rate and lower revenues 10 years out A slightly lower margin based upon a subset of specialty retailers that look more like Amazon A surge in the beta, because of an increase in financial leverage - Amazon increased its debt and its market value of equity dropped by about 80%. The value of the operating assets drops by about 40%, there is a drop in the value of the options to $748 million and the value per share decreases to $18.74…. This assumes that Amazon does not re-price its options… What would happen if it did?
- A valuation in September 2003 yielded an estimate of value per share of $36 but the stock had shot up to $ 58… Time to sell and start the cycle all over again… The more things change, the more they stay the same…
- The key in this valuation is that we converted R&D into a capital expense, which led us to Modify the operating income and net cap ex numbers, albeit not the FCFF. Change the return on capital, reinvestment rate and resulting growth rate
- Makes the effect explicit. Using the unadjusted numbers here would have yielded a much lower value per share…
- Uncertainty is a given. Getting more data or building bigger models is not going to make it go away. We have to deal with uncertainty and do it in a sensible way.
- More information can sometimes add to uncertainty, especially if it is tangential or transitory.
- Bigger models lead to more inputs. Unless you have the informational advantage of estimating these inputs well, your end value may actually become more uncertain.
- Probabilistic approaches are under used by analysts. With tools like Crystal Ball and better data, we should be able to do this much more easily now.
- Going back to the Amgen valuation, we replaced some of the base case inputs with distributions…. Crystal Ball was the vehicle we used (we also built in a correlation between ROC and length of the growth period…)
- We have an expected value for Amgen, which is very close to our DCF value. However, we also have a distribution that we can use to make probabilistic statements – for instance, the probability that the stock is under valued is about 85%.
- Declining firms can have negative reinvestment rates (as they sell or divest assets) and negative growth. If they get rid of assets that are the cause for low ROC, they can still end up as reasonably healthy (smaller) firms in stable growth.
- DCF valuation tends to view distress rather cavalierly. We either assume that a firm will last forever, or that if even if runs into trouble, it will be able to sell its assets (both in-place and growth) for fair market value. In addition, we assume that our expected cashflows incorporate the possibility that a firm may not survive… In general, DCF valuation will give us an over-optimistic estimate of value for firms in significant financial trouble. You can estimate the probability of default from a bond by using the price of the bond and solving for the probability of bankruptcy. You can use the distress.xls to make this estimate.