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 ...

The Ten Biggest Family Businesses in the U.S. Business Insurance lists them: Wal-Mart Wal-Mart is the world's largest retailer and most successful family business of all time. In 1962, founder Sam Walton took his knowledge of discount retailing and opened the first Wal-Mart store in Rogers, Ark. It wasn't long before Sam expanded his business and opened up hundreds, then thousands of stores worldwide. After ...

Kravis: No Better Time than Now to Be Making Investments"    Private Equity International's James Taylor reports that at an invitation-only event in Monaco, the KKR co-founder said that low interest rates and a lack of capital offer 'enormous' opportunities for private equity: Kolhberg Kravis Roberts co-founder Henry Kravis struck a bullish tone in a speech in Monaco this week, dismissing talk of a "hard la ...

Book Review:  Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business Family Business Review recently ran an interesting book review, by Jane Hilburt-Davis, of M.T. Green's book Inside the Multi-Generational Family Business: 9 Symptoms of Generational Stack-Up and How to Cure Them.  Writes Hilburt-Davis: Green introduces a new conceptual framework, the syndrome of “generational stack-up,” defining it as “the converge ...

Normalization of Income: Where Business Valuation Meets Forensic Accounting At the Legal Intelligencer blog, Terry Silver explains that since buyers and sellers often have differing ideas of a business' true fair market value, normalization is usually a required part of any M&A deal: The valuation of virtually every closely held business requires normalization adjustments. Although these adjustments may ...

Firehoses, Drinking Fountains, and Intrinsic Value CFA Magazine'sChristopher Wright recently spoke with four analysts about the challenges of identifying key share price drivers among the torrent of minutiae. The analysts cover a number of topics, and come from a variety of firms and industries.  Here’s J.B. Groh, CFA, senior research analyst at D.A. Davidson in Lake Oswego, Oregon: [It is largely] about th ...

Which States are Poised for Job Growth?  As the U.S. jobs market digs its way out of the recession, gains aren’t expected to be evenly distributed. But some of the hardest-hit regions may also see some of the best growth, according to a new analysis, writes Phil Izzo at the Wall Street Journal Real Time Economics blog. Forecasting firm IHS Global Insight looked at which states will have the strongest rates ...

FASB Proposes Changes in Investment Accounting Michael Cohen reports at Accounting Today: The Financial Accounting Standards Board has released two proposed accounting standards updates to clarify the criteria for investment company accounting and develop guidance for investment property accounting. The proposed update for investment company accounting stems from the efforts of FASB and the International Ac ...