No. of Recommendations: 13
I have no forensic accounting skills. I just read a lot.
The thing is, for a good company, that should be enough.
You don't have to be a scientist to follow a Scientific American article pretty well.
Financial reports should be much the same way: a reasonably well-read and bright person should be able to make sense of it.
For complicated businesses, sure, some accounting understanding really helps a lot.
For example, securitization and loss estimates (insurance etc) and non-recourse debt certainly take a while to get used to. I still can't quite figure out the intricacies of the "equity method".
If you're going to converse in financial numbers, you have to pick up some of the language.
But still: it's *supposed* to be understandable within the limitations of the complexity of the business.
For most firms, it really shouldn't be that hard.
And the Brookfield empire is not, at heart, all that complicated a business.
They own some stuff that creates cash flows. They have some debt against those things, sometimes specific to an asset ans sometimes at the top level.
Some things are only partly owned by them, so they get only fractional benefit.
All these assets are hard to value until they are sold, so there are different methods to estimate it--the best usually being IFRS, which is mainly a multiple of cash flow. Multiples suited to the class of asset.
They are also asset managers who earn fees on long-lived portfolios that can be a little difficult to value till the fat lady sings at the end.
That's really about it, right? Doesn't sound so very complicated when you sum it up.
Since they own some assets, simple things like "how many dollars worth of working assets does a share of BN own?" shouldn't be hard to find, and should be almost impossible to get wrong.
I'm not talking about the accuracy of the valuations, merely finding the number that gets the pro-rata economic ownership fractions all correct.
And heaven help you if you try to figure out the sum of all the compensation of management, or even who they are. (the list of partners in "Partners Limited" that controls the top level is not disclosed)
Or even clear definitions of some of the key things that Brookfield uses to measure the progress of their business and its value.
Sometimes a business-specific metric really does make things clearer--no argument there. But it has to be REALLY well explained.
For example, my understanding of "unrealized carry" is very much like unrealized capital gains on stocks: "profits that would exist today if that asset were liquidated today at the prices we have estimated for it".
So they are NOT simply earnings already earned but not yet received...that view would presuppose that prices can't fall, and that price estimates are really solid.
Is my understanding correct? I'm not sure.
Anyway, I digress into a list of annoyances!
I do not actually think they are crooks.
But either they are very very poor communicators, or they are trying to hide things.
Jim
