Caveats that Careful Valuators and Consultants to Keep in Mind When Using the Market Approach to Valuation Authoritative sources such as the IRS, SEC, FASB, and professional appraisal associations consistently advocate market prices to be the best indications of value. But is that always true? Gregory R. Marsh argues that in some financial markets—at various times—there’s plenty of evidence that both buyers ...

Be Careful When Using EBITDA for the Terminal Valuation Calculation If you’re going to construct consistent valuations, use earnings instead of cash flows in your calculations. Why is it important to be consistent? Because you have to calculate a discount rate based on one or the other. Richard Claywell explains. ...

Capitalized Earnings: When are the Earnings Stabilized? When you're doing a business valuation, should you use a Capitalization of Earnings/Cash Flows? Or should you use a Discounted Earnings/Cash Flow method? Here's a rule of thumb: If the benefit stream will be constant over time, choose the Capitalized Earnings/Cash Flows. Richard Claywell explains. ...

All kinds of news, findings, and rulings come out that might affect the work of financial consultants and appraisers every day. When can you know when a precedent is important or something you can ignore? Or, put another way: what information is most important to pay attention to? Rand Curtiss explains. ...

The Richest and Most Comprehensive Comparables: IBA Data, 24/7. Log On Today. Business valuation has often been called an art, not a science. Revenue multiples are one key method; another is the use of comparables. Many valuators use both. KeyValueData offers NACVA members access to the IBA comparables, which are the richest and most comprehensive set of comparable available in the valuation world. Here’s a ...

Emily Chasan is on the spot with the latest news:   U.S. and international accounting rule makers finally may be ready next month to resolve a debate over corporate lease accounting, that would bring $2 trillion worth of lease obligations onto corporate balance sheets. Members of the U.S. Financial Accounting Standards Board and the International Accounting Standards Board said Thursday they were ready to v ...

The Public Company Accounting Oversight Board found 123 audit deficiencies related to fair-value estimates and asset impairments in 2010, making asset valuation the most common audit problem. Market volatility always makes it tough to value assets fairly based on market prices.  But that doesn't mean management forecasts—and the assumptions and methodologies of financial modeling used in corporate pricing—c ...

Investopedia weighs in on the pros and cons of varying approaches: Business valuation is never straightforward - for any company. For startups with little or no revenue or profits and less-than-certain futures, the job of assigning a valuation is particularly tricky. For mature, publicly listed businesses with steady revenues and earnings, normally it's a matter of valuing them as a multiple of their earnin ...

Nerd's Eye View, which provides commentary on financial planning news and developments,  points out that a growing body of research shows our brains are not quite the logical, rational decision-making machines we think they are – or at least, wish they could be.   Instead, our brains take shortcuts; we substitute easier questions for difficult ones, often without realizing it, and respond accordingly with o ...

Business valuation (BV) reports frequently include information presented in the form of financial statements. The reporting requirements for such financial statements have drawn increased attention as a result of the issuance of Statement on Standards for Accounting and Review Services No. 19 (SSARS 19), Compilation and Review Engagements.   The Journal of Accountancy reports: "When conforming the existing ...

Private Equity Manager reports that with regulators looking over their shoulders, some GPs are playing it safe by hiring third-party valuation advisors to check their numbers. However not all third-party opinions are equal, warns Cindy Ma, managing director at advisory-focused investment bank Houlihan Lokey.  PE Manager's Nicholas Donato talked with her recently.  Here are excerpts:  There was a feeling of ...

If you're been hoping to find a comprehensive source for private equity transactions and fund information, you may see a version of it as early as this fall.   Fund managers have joined limited partners and other industry players in supporting a global private equity database being developed by Harvard Business School professor Josh Lerner.  Graham Winfrey at Private Equity Manager reports: A group of priva ...

The most highly anticipated IPO in history didn't put on much of a show. Facebook closed today within decimal points of its opening price of $38. Even so, the company's market cap is higher than McDonald's or Pepsico. Espen Robak is the president of Pluris Valuation Advisors, where he studies and values private companies trading on the secondary market. Derek Thompson at The Atlantic talked to him this morn ...

One of the problems with how financial institutions assess risk is that they rely on imprecise models.  Financial News'  Shanny Basar reports that in fact, just a few days before JP Morgan announced its multi-billion dollar trading loss, James Montier,a member of the asset allocation team at fund manager GMO, gave a speech on The Flaws of Finance. In the speech, delivered on May 6 at the 65th Annual CFA Ins ...

Five Things to Watch For In Year-End Portfolio Company Fair Value Measurements Private equity fund managers—and their limited partners—cannot take fair value measurement for granted. In 2011, a number of new procedures and policies spawned by SFAS 157 (not Topic 820) have hardened into established routines. This checklist helps fund managers and consultants measure the fair value of portfolio company invest ...

Add Value to Appraisals. Ask First: “Who’s the Most Important Reader?” Rand M. Curtiss explains how appraisals have the most value when consultants have customized and focused them for their most important intended audience. In some cases, that may be a prospective buyer. In other cases, it might be a client auditor—or even the IRS. That can make quite a bit of difference. Here’s why. ...

Owner Personality Strongly Affects Business Value. Learn How. As consultants work with business owners to plan successful exit options, it’s helpful to spend some time thinking about how the business was built. Paul Brown here describes how different owner personality types—described here as “Mountain Lions,” “Wolf Packs,” “Beavers,” or “Ants”—tend to build quite different sorts of businesses. Different app ...

What Data Valuators Need from Physician Practices—and Why! Physician practices are increasingly undergoing consolidation. Often that means being acquired by a hospital, and a prerequisite of being acquired is having a valuation performed by an independent, third-party valuator. Here’s information on the sort of data that valuators need (and that physician practices should be collecting today), an explanatio ...

Blame Disaster on Bad Inputs. Black-Scholes Works. The last few years have given us plenty of reasons to hate financial models. Models that promised to increase efficiency and manage risk became substitutes for common sense and justifications for greed. The real estate bubble was of course justified by them. Yet people at hedge funds and trading firms, using models to mint money, remain passionate believers ...

Increased Scrutiny for Private Equity Valuations The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has started an informal inquiry of private equity firms, asking for a broad range of documents on how the funds value assets and who invests in them, reports Bloomberg's BusinessWeek.   The agency’s Los Angeles office last year sent letters to several firms asking for details on fund investments and the valuation of ...