Told my MD how I got the discount rate

My MD was going through my model for a very popular athletic clothing brand. Imma be honest here now, I have no idea what a discount rate is (no biggie, I’ll do my own research). So I went onto the company’s website to look for more info. I made an account and almost instantly, like they knew what I was looking for, they sent me a discount rate! I couldn’t believe my luck, and plugged it into the model. It was 10% and looked reasonable to me.

My MD clearly looked flustered when I told him this right before the client meeting. Is this not how to get the discount rate? Help??

19 Comments
 
[Comment removed by mod team]
 

I use a special dartboard to calculate the discount rate. It’s purely fate. 

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
guyfromct

This has more empirical support: 

lolol

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
Most Helpful

Bit rambly below, but just had my coffee so felt like adding a devil's advocate view.

Ironically I could make an argument that retail good discounts 'should' be capped at the company's discount rate. Like I think there's a weird form of correlative logic here. 

Stay with me... I sell a good for $100, if I had 0 operating costs and 0 taxes then this 'profit' would go straight to the capital holders (for simplicity of this example, assume it's 100% equity funded, I put in $100 initially as equity capital).

Means my $100 is straight to equity with a 100% return. 

If it produces another $100 the following year, then that return is 100/200, making it a 50% return. 

Another year goes by, 100/300, 33%.

Another 100/400, 25%

Another 100/500, 20%

Another 100/600...100/700...100/800...100/900...100/1000

Now each year the return on my capital base is less than 10% after 100/1000.

However I also realise if I can discount my product so that I can sell another one (via price elasticity of demand).  The 'most' I can discount it and still be worth it to my bottom-line is the amount of return. e.g. discount original by 10% on 100, I can sell two for 90, so I get 180. 180/1100 > 100 / 1100. There is then a relationship between the discount rate on the product vs. the return implied on capital. 

Now the world is more complex than this and there is operating costs, tax etc, and I probably messed the math up along the way (hence it's more of a wobbly correlative effect), but I do think that if I had a rational, well-run retailer, they should be able to discount to the max of their cost of capital pre-price elasticity if there is a chance they will get more sales in an efficient manner (i.e. this is a management mechanism where you can push RoE > CoE, in fact this is the basis of a cost-led strategy anyhow and why digital products > physical, because it's not necessarily the 'price' that they win on, it's the 'cost' it takes to run the operation at the end).

Separately, if you whack in a 10% you're going to be pretty much right. If historical cost of equity is 4-6%, and long-term debt rounds out to target inflation of 3%+ (i.e. I believe the 'real' risk free rate should theoretically net out to 0 in the long-run which I guess reflects a philosophical view similar to ZeroHedge, but in reality there is no such thing as a real 'risk free' return in the long-run, because I can break it by simply say human civilisation will collapse some point in the future, and hence the rate at that time will cease to exist, hence there's a risk, even if it's infinitesimally small, thus everything else is just arbitrary approximation for 'optics') then your long-term wacc ends up around there anyhow (also there's a certain mathematical symmetry implied by a 10% discount rate that makes pitches cleaner when you forecast out time periods etc that bankers tend to love). 

 

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