I will make an exception for the chapter “Latin America and populism” as this is the especially relevant topic for Ukraine. “… with too few exceptions, Latin America had not been able to wean itself from the economic populism that had figuratively disarmed the entire continent in its competition with the rest of the world”. […]

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Have finished Greenspan’s massive Age of Turbulence. The author’s extensive experience and advanced age warranted the inclusion of about 8 autobiographical chapters, where Greenspan talks about his experiences in the context of the economic history of his day. The final chapters of the book describe some of his views and are of particular interest. As […]

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I seem to remember that this book had a bomb effect in 2001, however I only got to it now. What strikes about it is that while titled “Globalization and its Discontents” it is focused almost exclusively on the poor handling by international public institutions of crises and transitions of developing countries, especially on the […]

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Appropriate and approximate discount rates in buyouts: near liquidity – 30%; strong cash flow history – 25%; growth platform – 20% In the buyout modeling changing management assumptions is common. Among the most routine changes are: adjustment of the growth in sales, gross margins; detailed examination of the SG&A; adjustment of capex to at least […]

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We had a “real” fund-raising pitch of the P/E fund manager to us, the potential limited partners. Frankly, the questions both actually asked and those that should have been asked were very much common sense. Fund size, average deal size, where will they invest, how are they different from other people in this crowded marketplace […]

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This time we had a guest speaker on top of the excellent course, a lady who worked for William Blair (mid-sized investment bank here in Chicago). The theme of the class was the ways to exit a buyout deal. The focus was to contrast selling the company vs. doing an IPO. Unfortunately, the clear and […]

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After having successfully missed my 5th class due to the interviews in Barcelona, we turned in our class #6 to leveraged buyouts. Because my experience in this area is almost non-existent, the quality of key class takeawas is going down definitely. As we start from the fundamentals, Scott (Scott Meadow, our humble teacher) mentioned very […]

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The first case discussed this week was Angstrom Medica, about the company that discovered the ways to build much better medical implants. The details of the product are quite difficult to understand for the non-medical person, while the details of the industry are also difficult for non-Americans. One of the points made by the professor […]

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“Valuation is the exact science that always gives a specific and only answer about the value of the company”. The second thing we are most concerned about is exit. The first one is obviously management. By the way, when talking about management the following were mentioned as the traits of the successful management teams: centrality. […]

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Again, stemming from the private equity class readings here are some of the notes regarding valuation (by Steven Kaplan, a famous GSB finance professor). Only the things that startled me. First of all both the APV and WACC valuation methods lead to the value of the firm with debt, i.e. enterprise value. So if after […]

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