Mike Choe, CEO of Charlesbank Capital Partners, explains how EBITDA multiples have decoupled from free cash flow yield in private equity.
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Choe: Management stability shows little correlation with private equity investment success
“Another one would be that we used to think that management stability would be very correlated with investment success, and we looked at changes in C-suite management, and there was really not a ton of correlation there, so I'd say that's been an insight that h…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Choe: Charlesbank found lower entry multiples correlate with weaker private equity returns
“And in our case, and we really had the data just to look at the hundred or so transactions in our history as a private equity firm, there was really no correlation. If there was one, it was a very weak negative correlation. So lower multiple investments tended…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Choe: 2021 leverage excesses will cause restructurings over coming years
“We think a lot of the leverage excesses of 21 are likely to result in first liability management exercises, LMEs, that will then involve some amount of restructuring over the next few years or so.”
Insight
Choe: Standard 5-Year LBO Models Promote Anchoring and Familiarity Biases
“We're using a highly flawed tool that actually promotes all kinds of predictable human biases. There's anchoring bias, there's familiarity bias, to make a decision that is inherently very difficult to make. Because what we're really doing is we are underwriter…”
Disclosure
Charlesbank Models Investments Using 10,000-Simulation 2-Year Monte Carlo Analysis
“We have, as a result, shifted all of our modeling to a homegrown proprietary tool that we call our two-year fan of outcomes. It's basically a fairly simplified Monte Carlo analysis. It runs 10,000 simulations of the two year forward future of any given investm…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Choe: Two-Year Pre-Tax Earnings Growth Strongly Predicts PE Investment Success
“When we ran our regression analysis, our ability to grow the pre-tax earnings of a company within the first two years of our ownership was highly correlated and very predictive of ultimate investment success, no matter how long the hold period was.”