Rookie Investor;337161 wrote:I'm not one to blindly follow a random on a youtube channel, but I have wondered about buying BN for some time now (never owned it) and especially now given the falls, but since it is an incredibly complex firm to understand and value I sought out some help and found the following:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRAPQMq3F8Q
Not sure if there is something to be concerned about but if there is a lot of private assets being bought at expensive valuations, that too with a lot of debt (so debt squared in some cases...) then I find it an incredibly risky bet potentially. Add that to interest rates likely to stay high for longer, I wonder what the
risk-reward for BN, and others like it, really is?
You are right - it does have complexity due to its balance sheet (which the 'asset light' GPs do not have). For this reason, I suspect it will always trade at a discount to its NAV. The FT did a big article on Brookfield this past week, specifically looking at these various overlapping relationships.
However, BN has a lot of exposure to public subsidiaries, which provide a transparent pricing point for a large % of its assets. You can then back out how much the market is discounting the other parts of the business. In this case, the market is effectively discounting the rest of the business by 80%...! This is the math that has attracted Bill Ackman to build a position:

Brookfield are very shrewd operators and management are heavily incentivised via owning a large portion of BN to find ways to release value.