The Brookfield website shows the price of 'BN' on 12/9/22 as $35.15 USD and on 12/16/22 as $32.40 USD. It says the market cap of BN as of 12/16/22 was $13.355B, implying 412M shares outstanding (what?).

They're having the same automated data feed problems as everyone else. The share counts are reversed, probably because 'BAM' represented one entity until Dec. 9 and now represents another. The 412m share count sounds about right for the new BAM, as it represents one share for every four old BAM (new BN) shares, and those number 1640m.

That would yield a current BN market cap of $53.1b (1640m*$32.38), a current BAM market cap of $11.2b (412m*$27.10) and a combined current market cap (comparable to the old BAM) of $64.3b. That's a pretty good discount to the BAM market cap a year ago, but then, so was the pre-spin price, just not to quite this extent.

Some analysts think the new BAM, the spinout, is the better buy now because of the selling that often accompanies spinouts and because of the higher multiple its asset-light model should eventually offer.

I have seen less discussion around what appears to be a disproportionate drop in the BN price. If, for simplicity's sake, the old BAM was roughly half asset-heavy owner/operator and half asset-light manager, divesting one-quarter of one-half the business (25% of the manager) should reduce the parent's value by one-eighth, or ~12.5%. But BN is down from the pre-spin BAM price by about one-quarter, or twice that, from the low 40s to the low 30s. If and when Mr. Market recognizes this overreaction, BN's price, which represents 100% of the owner/operator and 75% of the manager, should recover somewhat.

Of course, it's impossible to separate the immediate price effects of the spin from the simultaneous drop in valuations across alternative asset managers generally, so it may be that these prices don't normalize until those do.