Earlier this year, I started my series on discounted cash flow valuations (DCF) with a post that listed ten common myths in DCF and promised to do a post on each one over the course of the year. This is the first of that series and I will use it to challenge the widely held misconception that all you need to arrive at a DCF value is a D(iscount rate) and expected C(ash)F(lows). In this post, I will take a tour of what I would term twisted DCFs, where you have the appearance of a discounted cash flow valuation, without any of the consistency or philosophy.
The Consistency Tests for DCF
In my initial post on discounted cash flow valuation, I set up the single equation that underlies all of discounted cash flow valuation:
For this equation to deliver a reasonable estimate of value, it is imperative that it meets three consistency tests:
1. Unit consistency: A DCF first principle is that your cash flows have to defined in the same terms and unit as your discount rate. Specifically, this shows up in four tests:
- Equity versus Business (Firm): If the cash flows are after debt payments (and thus cash flows to equity), the discount rate used has to reflect the return required by those equity investors (the cost of equity), given the perceived risk in their equity investments. If the cash flows are prior to debt payments (cash flows to the business or firm), the discount rate used has to be a weighted average of what your equity investors want and what your lenders (debt holders) demand or a cost of funding the entire business (cost of capital).
- Pre-tax versus Post-tax: If your cash flows are pre-tax (post-tax), your discount rate has to be pre-tax (post-tax). It is worth noting that when valuing companies, we look at cash flows after corporate taxes and prior to personal taxes and discount rates are defined consistently. This gets tricky when valuing pass-through entities, which pay no taxes but are often required to pass through their income to investors who then get taxed at individual tax rates, and I looked at this question in my post on pass-through entities.
- Nominal versus Real: If your cash flows are computed without incorporating inflation expectations, they are real cash flows and have to be discounted at a real discount rate. If your cash flows incorporate an expected inflation rate, your discount rate has to incorporate the same expected inflation rate.
- Currency: If your cash flows are in a specific currency, your discount rate has to be in the same currency. Since currency is primarily a conduit for expected inflation, choosing a high inflation currency (say the Brazilian Reai) will give you a higher discount rate and higher expected growth and should leave value unchanged.
2. Input consistency: The value of a company is a function of three key components, its expected cash flows, the expected growth in these cash flows and the uncertainty you feel about whether these cash flows will be delivered. A discounted cash flow valuation requires assumptions about all three variables but for it to be defensible, the assumptions that you make about these variables have to be consistent with each other. The best way to illustrate this point is what I call thevaluation triangle:
I am not suggesting that these relationships always have to hold, but when you do get an exception (high growth with low risk and low reinvestment), you are looking at an unusual company that requires justification and even in that company, there has to be consistency at some point in time.
3. Narrative consistency: In posts last year, I argued that a good valuation connected narrative to numbers. A good DCF valuation has to follow the same principles and the numbers have to be consistent with the story that you are telling about a company’s future and the story that you are telling has to be plausible, given the macroeconomic environment you are predicting, the market or markets that the company operates in and the competition it faces.
The DCF Hall of Shame
Many of the DCFs that I see passed around in acquisition valuations, appraisal and accounting don’t pass these consistency tests. In fact, at the risk of being labeled a DCF snob, I have taken to classifying these defective DCFs into seven groups:
continue reading: http://aswathdamodaran.blogspot.ca/2015/02/dcf-myth-1-if-you-have-ddiscount-rate.html
