Pershing Square Valuation

Can someone explain how Pershing Square can be valued at $10bn with $14bn of AUM? I understand that there is hype around Ackman so naturally there may be a slight premium as the IPO essentially monetizes his brand / person, but how is this even close to justifiable? 

According to Bloomberg, this makes Pershing Square more highly-valued than RenTech's Medallion Fund, Millennium, and Elliot Management. Their article compares the valuation of Pershing to Schroders, which manages $1 trillion. I understand this comparison is apples-to-oranges (like comparing Blackstone to BlackRock), but how exactly does this work?

How exactly does his business model / fee collecting business get valued? Should we think of it like a Berkshire Hathaway? In any case, still don't really understand it and would appreciate some color.

11 Comments
 

Definitely different from Berkshire (which is just a conglomerate built around an insanely good insurance operation and in no way a hedge fund/mutual fund/ any fund).

As to the valuation: they are IPOing the management company that just collects fees. So someone just guessed that the present value of all the fees + their chunk of the AUM is >10bn or is just speculating on people hyping it up because it’s Ackman. Either way, it’s very similar to how a bunch of PE firms are public today.

 

A lot of public managers went public in 2006, Ackman here has done a phenomenal raise; high valuation for an asset management company (collecting fees on the 14-15bn) with markets at fairly high valuation vs short rates is a great deal.

If the prospective funds of 25bn goes ahead, total AUM touches ~40bn. Of that, 2% is ~800m. PSH since inception has comfortably edged DD, so let's say 10%, giving you 4bn, and a 2-20 will give you 1bn. So approx 1.5-1.8bn yearly income, slap some selling premium and 10.5bn seems reasonable.

 

Yeah but won’t they only collect 2-20 on the 10bn of LP capital at PSH? The remainder of the AUM
(~30bn) from IPO proceeds won’t be paying fees since it’s just SE, right? It’s permanent capital and big chunk of cash for bill to play with, but doesn’t contribute to fees paid to PSCM. Please let me know if I have this wrong … curious to see what his plan is here. Seems like this will allow him to take bigger, longer term bets. Could be the beginning of a new investment company / conglomerate

 

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