Investment Banking Valuation Methods Explained (Valuing Apple with Claude)

0:00Claude Opus: The thing that jumps out for me is that those valuation methodologies just don't really support the current share price. And effectively, it's inferring either Apple is massively overvalued or that these methodologies, as you hinted, are maybe just not great for Apple.

0:14Debs: Right. I think if we were doing some real work on Apple, we'd at least be building up the revenue on a high level segment by segment basis rather than just slapping a simple four and a half percent growth rate on in 2031 and pulling that down to three and a half.

0:27Claude Opus: There is a skill in building the story, the narrative of how all the different valuation approaches slot together. It can be slightly iterative, can't it? Like you get to the end and you've got this chart where none of the lines overlap. I mean, there's no messaging in that.

0:40Debs: If some investment banker comes in and presents this page, I think you say like, what are you showing me?

0:47Claude Opus: Welcome to all our listeners to this week's episode of What's the Big Deal? And we have some exciting news, don't we, Graham?

0:55Debs: We do, we do. So we at Wall Street Prep are working on some big things. We'll have some news to share in the next couple months or so. Because we're so busy on all that, like Debs and I are going to push the pause button on the podcast for a couple months and come back beginning of Jan. But it's not going to be the last you see of us because we've got a lot of other stuff in the works. So stay tuned for all that.

1:18Claude Opus: Oh, so exciting. Can't wait. Okay, well, let's dive into this week's episode. we do have a really good topic for you this week. Graham, please tell our listeners, what is the big deal this week?

1:30Debs: The big deal this week is the cornerstone of investment banking valuation work. Whether you're sitting in an analyst seat where you're getting ready for your interview prep and you're looking to get investment banking, if you're doing any of that, you've seen the football field page before. So this is the slide that goes into literally every pitch book, whether we're pitching to a financial sponsor to buy a business or we're pitching an investment banking pitch to a public company looking to buy another public company or private company, whatever the case may be, we need to figure out how much a company is worth.

2:02Debs: And I think as you probably know, or as we've talked about, there's not just one methodology. So the football field is the nice summary chart, which shows the overall range of valuation for any particular business. So we're going to break it down today with an example that actually, Debs, we use a lot in the classroom. We're going to talk about Apple.

2:18Claude Opus: Absolutely. But before we dive in, Graham, a question for you, because I remember when I first saw a football field chart, I thought to myself, well, hang on, if we're advising a client on a valuation for a particular transaction, why would they care about different methodologies? Let's say we're looking at M &A deal. The football field includes not just M &A valuations or what we refer to as controlled valuations. It also includes things like standalone valuations. And that's the valuation that you would have for the company if you were just buying a minority state. So why do clients care about having that full picture of all of the different perspectives of valuation for their own transaction?

2:56Debs: I think the reality is with valuation, we know we've talked about the fact that a lot of finance is both art and science, right? The one thing we know for sure is that whatever number we put on the page in terms of a forecast or an assumption, probably isn't going to be exactly the right one. because ultimately what's something worth? It's worth whatever someone's going to pay for it. But we need to try to articulate, all right, if we're, say, buying something, how much do we think we should pay for this? And in order to do that, we need a few different methodologies just because this is kind of an inexact science.

3:31Debs: All right, we've got precedent transactions where we're going to say, where have things sold for before? And we're going to turn that into a multiple that we can apply to one of our own metrics, which is, especially in the context of M &A, is a pretty sensible thing to do. The problem, of course, is in a perfect world, we'd have a perfect set of comparable transactions or comparable companies if we're looking at trading comps and be able to apply those multiples to our business and know that we're getting a perfect comparison. But the world's not perfect. So we don't have companies that look exactly the same way, shape, and form that we do.

4:06Debs: That's the same on the precedent transactions. On trading comps, we're looking at for a group of comparable companies, where are they trading just on the stock market in terms of valuation? Let's apply those multiples to our own. I think on the basis we say, okay, as it relates to comparable transactions, comparable or trading comparables, these are comp sets that have market noise in them. So let's also look at a fundamental analysis. the good old DCF, we talked about that before, where we just discount all of our future expected cash flows back to today's value. There are just very few assumptions that have a big impact on the ultimate valuation.

4:44Debs: So because we have these big ranges and kind of big assumptions, it doesn't really make sense just to use one. Kind of want to say, put them all together. And we're looking for, I'm not going to say we're looking for the ideal football field chart, or if things are telling a story that we expect to hear, we're going to see things that broadly broadly line up or have some overlap. And the way this works in the real world in a pitch meeting is you kind of look through this page and say, all right, this range is here, this range is here. All right. It's about, you know, we think it's about, here's where we want to put our bid in for this.

5:13Debs: Like it's very imperfect, but we're trying to take all the data we possibly can and use that to make some kind of informed decision.

5:21Claude Opus: For sure. And I kind of think that in general in life, if you're trying to estimate what something is worth, you know, even if I was, you know, looking to buy a house, for example, having an idea of other perspectives you know maybe there's a developer that's potentially interested in buying the house as well having an understanding of what they would be prepared to pay maybe just makes me more informed about how much i should be paying so just having those different perspectives all brought together really informs your own kind of view and you know your own decision on the deal and interesting that you mentioned earlier about valuation being an art not of science.

5:57Claude Opus: And I've taught football field analysis in the classroom so many times. I'm sure you have too, Graham. And the question that I think analysts often have in their head is, well, surely it's just a case of putting a chart into Excel. Where is the skill there? So, Graham, what do you think the skill is in creating the chart, but also building the narrative around it, which I think is really important with football fields?

6:22Debs: you know there's a there's a two-layer answer to this because actually part of the question at least in the in the good old days and you'll you'll know this from having done these before is well surely this is just a matter of making an excel chart actually these are a pain in the ass to make or they used to be like yeah there's not if you buy by the way it was like three hours building

6:39Graham: it from scratch and then do this exactly exactly especially like football field or even worse you

6:47Debs: have the waterfall the waterfall chart where you have you know some some things are positive some things are negative and you have these like hidden starting ending values it's just like a total pain yeah so if anyone if anyone has used excel before and just looked for the where's the where's the old football field template built into excel like it just doesn't really exist so you kind of have to build your own template and now you have a lot better a lot better tools uh like some of the finance add-ins for excel make this really easy and of course now clog could just do it in like 10 seconds.

7:15Debs: So, you know, that part, that part has gone away, but historically actually making this chart was a pain. It was, it was tedious and time consuming. Um, but the whole, I don't know, I think the whole, the whole point of having, having this in a pitch book is just a guided discussion. Like if you think about the way a lot of these, a lot of these meetings would work, say between an investment banker and MNA advisor and their actual client, you are trying to, You're trying to advise someone on, say, buying a business to incorporate or even more fundamentally, perhaps, on selling their own business.

7:50Debs: So if you come into a meeting with some kind of objective of trying to tell me or the company I'm running how much I'm worth, well, I need to see some backing data for that. If you come in and say, I think you're worth a billion dollars just pulling numbers out of the air. All right, where's the proof? And again, there's not one metric to say this is exactly how much a company is worth. We're not going to rubber stamp that until we actually have a transaction and a buyer willing to pay us that price for it. But we know that the buyers on the other side of the table are going to be running through a very similar analysis.

8:26Debs: And we need to have a way to articulate what kind of sensible range we think we're going to go out with.

8:30Claude Opus: Yeah, for sure. And I think I would also just add to that, that there is a skill in building the story, the narrative of how all the different valuation approaches slot together. And it can be slightly iterative, can't it? Like you get to the end and you've got this chart where none of the lines overlap. I mean, there's no messaging in that. And it really does cause you to think, well, hang on a second, what comps have I used? You know, are those the right comps? Have I derived an appropriate range from those comps? Because it's not just kind of the… the science of, well, the numbers tell me this.

9:02Claude Opus: It's what do you infer from your analysis? And so being able to draw all those different data points together on a chart that does have a story that you can then convey to your clients, because you are providing advisory services and saying, we are experts in valuation. Creating a chart that has just lots of noise in it is not helpful. You're not providing good advice there. So I think it is quite an iterative process, isn't it? And I'm sure, Graeme, you have loads more experience than I do in building these charts for real deals. There is a process of kind of you build the chart, you go back, you rethink what you've done, some of your assumptions, and then you kind of update your chart for that.

9:42Claude Opus: Is that the approach that you used to use?

9:45Debs: Yeah. You know, it's funny, though. I mean, you say I've got loads more experience. I mean, ultimately, I only really did this when I was in M &A, right? And I was only in M &A as an analyst. So, you know, certainly had the benefit of I think one of the nice things maybe about being an analyst in a satellite office like I was in Los Angeles is you're pretty involved in the sense you go to a bunch of pitch meetings and you kind of see how everything comes together. But I never had the direct M &A experience as like an MD. So just, you know, kind of sanity warning on that one. But certainly a little bit.

10:18Debs: And one thing that I do remember from that work is, you know, say you're pulling together a set of trading comps And it either there is an element sometimes that doesn't tell the story that not necessarily you want it to tell, but that you expect it to tell. So there is some investigative work that goes into figuring out like, oh, is that particular comp too high or too low because of the impact of some one off thing? Right. One off, you know, one off, you know, bounce in revenue or a big restructuring charge. if I extract that out does it tell the story that I expected to tell that kind of fits in line with the story that not just I'm trying to build but that we all kind of intuitively know to be the case so there's a lot of there's a lot of work like that going through and adjusting these comps if anyone's ever heard the term scrubbing comps before as an example that's really good that's really this cleansing process and making sure that say the trading comps the transaction comp set that I'm putting forth is based on a, say I'm looking at EV to EBITDA, I want to make sure I'm looking at an EBITDA number that is repeatable, recurring, doesn't include a bunch of, say, one-offs in it that's going to make the multiple look too high or too low.

11:29Debs: So there's a lot of that work that goes into this kind of analysis. So it's funny, you look at this chart and you're like, all right, this is a few bar charts on a page. What am I possibly going to get from this? But actually there's a lot of detailed thought that goes into putting this together to begin with.

11:44Claude Opus: Yeah. And just to pick up on your point about the importance of this in M &A, because my background was in equity research, we didn't really use this kind of analysis. We do, of course, use different valuation approaches. We use a combination of some of the comps, some of the parts, DCF, and we bring them together within our kind of valuation work, but we don't necessarily have this kind of chart that we rely on for kind of building a narrative because we're coming up with a single target price in research. So slight difference in approach there for different parts of the bank. But let's dive into what we've got now, which is a football field chart for Apple.

12:20Claude Opus: And this was all done by Claude, by Opus 5.5. It built some supporting analysis. The different tabs here show the detail behind the different valuation approaches. And then I'm just showing you here the actual chart itself. and so Graham do you want to kind of like highlight some of the key features in this chart and anything that jumps out at you that you think is particularly interesting here

12:45Debs: okay so one I mean the thing that jumps out to begin with is that we are we're all we're all kind of in in the range right what we want to see what we what we expect to see generally is not to have everything completely lined up like if we if we have a page that looks like that it very much reads like someone's just put too much work into tinkering with assumptions to get things looking perfect. Like this is not supposed to be perfect and we're not supposed to see things completely line up. We are supposed to see some overlap and we're seeing some of this. Ironically, there's probably more of the straight up lining up in this chart than I'd see in most traditional, say, investment banking pitch books.

13:27Debs: I guess thematically what you tend to see is, generally speaking you've got your transaction comps which are going to be a slightly more premium valuation to to all your methodologies on the on the expectation you've got a transaction premium built into the into the valuation so transaction comps above trading comps which were which we're seeing here but interestingly the low end of the the low end of the transaction comp bar is just below the trading comps here. DCF can be, this is the one where we really talk about garbage in, garbage out on the basis there are so few assumptions that drive the DCF.

14:06Debs: It's really just what is my weighted average cost of capital and really what's my long-term growth rate if I'm using a perpetuity growth method to value the terminal valuation. Because I can put a bunch of work, of course, in the first five years of the DCF forecast, but most of my valuation comes from that terminal value that has very few assumptions that go into it. So I can kind of like in some ways I can kind of make the DCF value say like whatever, whatever I want. The interesting thing here is that the, the trading range, the 50, the high, the 52 week trading range, generally, generally you would expect to see at least say the transaction comp value go above that range here.

14:50Debs: But here, the high point of this valuation chart is just Apple's 52-week stock price high. And I guess it's kind of an interesting thing just to think about as we're talking about, say, Apple, is just how relevant are a lot of these valuation methodologies for a company this big? What are the actual comp sets that we're pulling in for our, say, precedent transactions because like my my guess is that we're not going to see an enterprise value even remotely approaching the size of apple on that on that precedent transaction comp set so how relevant is this multiple here um so it's a it's an interesting kind of thought experiment to figure out all right what is the right valuation approach for apple because it does kind of exist in both this sort of like i'm going to say this rarefied universe of you know just really big tech and we've got a few a few comparable companies of course for you know within that comp set but even even within big tech apple looks a lot looks quite a lot different from you know say google or nvidia or uh or meta right so it's hard to find a multiple i think or a comp set that really that really makes sense just for apple how about you deb so what do you think

16:07Claude Opus: yeah i mean for me i guess because of my market hat uh it's the trading range but also the current share price that really jump out at me. So the current share price,$341, right at the top of the 52-week range. It is expensive at the moment. And that current share price, higher than you get from any of the valuation methodologies, bearing in mind that those valuation methodologies are using current data. The thing that jumps out for me is that those approaches, those valuation methodologies just don't really support the current share price. And effectively, it's inferring either Apple is massively overvalued or that these methodologies, as you hinted, are maybe just not great for Apple.

16:50Claude Opus: It is a huge company. It is not going to be an M &A target in the near future. It's just too big for most companies to acquire. So it makes it challenging to value using precedent transactions, as you say, and there's no other transactions of this scale. it makes it very difficult on the trading comp side as you said there's only a handful of companies which even have the same scale and maybe not the same business model so it makes it difficult to value on that basis and then as you say you know even DCF evaluation sits you know it kind of overlaps with a lot of the other methodologies but doesn't give you really a justification for the current share price so I think with my research hat on my next step if I was looking at this would be to work backwards and say well what do you need for the you know what would you how would you know reverse engineer the dcf to justify the current share price and then see kind of what's missing in the forecasts um you know why there is that gap so that's kind of what i'm getting from this chart um is that you know the difference between the current share

17:56Debs: price and the ranges in third in some ways you almost think of the methodologies we've got on this page, even though it's the one that I know I've kind of talked down at a little bit in the sense that I don't think I've ever really used this to make a fundamental decision. But here, is it really the DCF is the one where you can make a credible argument? Well, I don't have a good comp set, either transaction comps or trading comps, like none of it really makes sense. So fundamentally, what is Apple worth? Well, it's worth the sum total of its future cash. And we know Apple is a cash machine. So can you make a credible argument that that's kind of the right approach here?

18:33Debs: I think maybe. And then to your point, it's like, all right, what assumptions do I need to believe to support the current share price? Because just based on what's going on right now, are people just anticipating and pricing in just a ton of growth from the foldable iPhone that's coming out? Are those expectations going to play out according to what investors are actually believing like i i don't know and this is i i don't know enough about what goes on with apple's apple's kind of you know weekly trading to have any kind of view in terms of like how much

19:07Claude Opus: of that growth is priced in okay so graham on that note let's have a look at the dcf because yeah for me dcf is kind of the approach that we follow when you've got a really unique asset and you really want to understand the fundamentals as you say it's going to based on the cash flows And so we need to be able to justify the valuation from those cash flows. And just having a quick look at the forecast we've got here, we've got six years of forecast with, you know, actually what I would say is quite modest growth. You mentioned the new iPhone that's coming out. You know, they're always launching new products.

19:42Claude Opus: The growth sort of tailors quite quickly down from about 10 % to 4.5 % in six years. And then long-term growth of 3.5%. And this is one of the limitations of a simple DCF is that, you know, you have kind of generally quite short range forecasts. And then this kind of long term growth assumption, which really, by definition, has to be no higher than, you know, economic growth in the economies it operates in. So three and a half percent, three percent is the usual long term growth. But really, is that appropriate for Apple to be growing at that in six years time and forever? So I think that's the big challenge for me.

20:20Claude Opus: What about you, Graham?

20:20Debs: Yeah, very much the same, very much the same thinking here. I think we're already, if we're 2027, we're estimating effectively 10 % growth. I don't know what, I'm actually curious to know the last few years what Apple's kind of top line revenue growth rate was. this is also a really simple forecast right i think if we were doing some real work on apple we'd at least be building up the revenue on a high level segment by segment basis rather than just slapping a simple four and a half percent growth rate on in 2031 and pulling that down to three and a half there's probably there's an argument to do two things it's build this forecast up in more detail and also for for a company like this i'd probably take it out farther than than five years yeah and at least get to a position where okay by the by the time we've finished building our forecasts, this is where we can credibly say, okay, from this point on, we're going to apply this 3.5 % long-term growth rate.

21:14Debs: Because at some point, when you get into forever growth mode, you do have to assume just the straight-up overall economic growth rate. We're not going to assume we can outpace this forever, but we probably can outpace it for more time, quite possibly, than we're showing in this forecast year. So my guess is there's some work we could do that would at least bring the DCF value in line with that 52-week trading range without feeling too uncomfortable about it.

21:43Claude Opus: Let's have a look at the comps valuation. We mentioned the difficulties of finding good comps for Apple because of its scale. Of course, we've got the big techs. We've got Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, and Amazon being included as comps there. So what do you think is causing the difference here in terms of Apple's multiple, which is so high? I mean, their first year forecast multiple of EBITDA is about 30 times. That's roughly double what we see for most of those peers. Yet we always greet them together, the kind of the big tech companies. So what is it that's different about Apple? Why would it trade on such a big premium in terms of its multiple versus peers?

22:27Debs: is my the ones and one of the things i talk about i talk about a lot of times especially when i do say private equity instruction is i really try to get people to think about cash instead of just ebitda and the the notion of cash conversion which in my mind is you know for every dollar of ebitda how much of that converts to actual cold hard cash flow yeah because so much the world relies on some kind of relative multiple to ebitda right enterprise value ebitda debt to ebitda if we're talking leverage, it really can over understate the same, the same multiple as a multiple of actual cashflow, which is ultimately what we're trying to, what we're trying to value at the end of the day.

23:08Debs: Think about the DCF analysis. We're trying to value cashflow, not necessarily EBITDA. We use EBITDA because it's easy to get. Everyone uses it and we're a little bit lazy to be, to be totally honest. But if we turn these into a cashflow multiple, my guess is, my guess is without, without looking at these companies, I think we can probably assume Apple converts a lot more of its EBITDA cash than most of these other guys, right? In particular, because we know on all the comp set companies we're seeing here, all hyperscalers, all spending a lot of capex on data center build out. And then Amazon's also different, right?

23:38Debs: Amazon has AWS, which is a hyperscaler, and it also has the retail business. So, you know, it doesn't, it never surprises me when I see Amazon trade on, on lower multiples than, than, than its peers, just because of that, that mix and what we don't have here i don't think is a an ev to revenue multiple and that for amazon you you actually see at a much at a much lower at a much lower multiple compared to the pure set right because so much of it the revenue number for amazon is really big but the margin on that revenue number is so much lower than than any of these other guys just because a lot of that is the the retail business um so just again i think just kind of simplistically averaging out these multiples and applying it to Apple, kind of like you get the logic, but you can also say, all right, for this company, does it really make sense?

24:30Claude Opus: Yeah, for sure. And it's interesting, you know, as you're saying that so many of these peer companies have huge exposure to AI, huge, you know, capex spend investment in AI. Apple really doesn't. And as you say, it's generating so much cash and, you know, is one of the biggest payers of share buybacks or biggest distributors to returns to shareholders out of all the companies globally. And so, you know, it is fundamentally doing very different things with its cash flows. So, and the amount of cash that generates for its investors. So, yeah, I think we can see that quite starkly here, can't we, in the trading comps data?

25:10Debs: 100%.

25:11Claude Opus: Let's have a look at precedent transactions. Now, I think this is really tricky. These are the suggested precedent transactions from Claude. We've got four, which are kind of across a variety of tech deals. We've got Activision Blizzard, VMware, Twitter and Electronic Arts. So a mix of private deals and public deals in this, public and private acquirers in this comp set. Three of them happened in 2022, only one of them in 2025. five what do you think about these comps graham like i i get i get why these are on the list

25:49Debs: they're in the general tech space but also i i'd argue pretty highly irrelevant right i mean we don't even everything they're they're big deals but they're also we don't have a single one over a hundred billion what's apple's market cap today like how many how many trillion yeah right it's just it's a it's a different it's a different world and then we have some where it's like a quasi-private equity buyer, like EA, I mean, Elon Musk's investment in Twitter, it's just not, like, I think if you are, if someone, you know, say you're presenting to, oh, God, I don't even know his name now. It's like Tim Cook's gone now.

26:23Debs: It's right. It's on to the next guy at Apple. If some investment banker comes in and presents this page, I think you say, like, what are you showing me? Like, why would I place any stock in the valuation that these multiples imply?

26:38Claude Opus: Yeah, I think it's interesting because I think there was one other comp that it offered up as a possibility. And it was XAI, which I think wasn't really a third party transaction. so it was removed from concert so yeah I mean that would have been a very large deal but still not very comparable so I think this is the challenge isn't it with precedent transactions is you know if you're you know even though M &A activity in the tech space has been very active over the last decade finding similar precedent transactions for a company of Apple's scale and you know even for what Apple does which is a whole variety of different things I think is really challenging, isn't it?

27:24Debs: Yeah, yeah, 100%, 100%. If you were trying to value a tech business in the$50 to$100 billion range and you looked a little bit more like one of the companies on this page, and you say, okay, I've got a bit more confidence in the valuation that this methodology is forecasting. But here, it's kind of tricky to make that argument, I think.

27:46Claude Opus: For sure. Right, next valuation methodology. methodology and we'll just touch very lightly on this one dcf including synergies do you want to talk to us a little bit about this not you don't necessarily need to dive into the numbers but just a little bit about this methodology and why it's relevant yeah i mean here all we're saying is if

28:04Debs: we are you can really make this argument if you're if you're i guess selling selling company or buying one but particularly if you are valuing something to be to be purchased right in a in a you know in a private transaction or in a p2p where you think there's some kind of either cost synergies or revenue synergies involved. All we're saying here is we're basically taking the Apple standalone DCF and then we are including the impact of some kind of synergy expectation. I think it's hard to argue a... I can't think of an acquirer that would acquire Apple and extract a huge amount of synergies out of Apple.

28:43Debs: Could you see it work the other way around where Apple acquires something and they just don't need a lot of that company's cost base? You say, okay, we're going to remove that or reduce it by quite a lot. If you're acquiring Apple, do you have one of your business lines that looks like it? And could you remove some costs? Yeah, maybe. But again, for a company that is this large, it's a very academic analysis, but not one that I think translates too much into real world valuation.

29:11Claude Opus: Sure. And the theory behind it is just simply that you're treating these synergies as like cash inflow and saying, hang on here's a lump of value from these synergies let's add it on to the standalone DCF and well hey this is how much you might be prepared to pay in an M &A scenario for this company but as you said exactly have someone coming on and buying Apple's quite low the last methodology is LBO this is your home turf now Graham so tell us a little bit about this I mean I know we've kind of already mentioned Apple not likely to be an LBO candidate but just highlights of why this is relevant for of a football field analysis and what it's trying to show.

29:48Debs: I think you can make a credible argument that this LBO valuation analysis is a bit relevant when you are, say, pitching to a company that you're pitching them, say, a sale process. And one of the prospective buyers in the buyer universe is private equity. How do you think about valuation in terms of private equity? Well, at a basic level, what all this analysis is really doing is saying, okay, if I'm a private equity firm, I've got some kind of hurdle rate. So let me solve for, in essence, what's my ability to pay for Apple based on some high-level private equity style deal assumptions. So we've got inputs on this page for what's our leverage multiple cost of debt.

30:33Debs: So we say, okay, what can we, based on this financing structure, what can we afford to pay for Apple that will deliver us on a base case our hurdle money multiple or IRR target? It's kind of a simplistic analysis just to back into what's my entry valuation on some typical kind of private equity style assumptions that give me my base case return. So I think it's hard to make an argument that there's any private equity buyer that could even come close to paying, not paying for Apple, but buying Apple in any kind of private equity style transaction. So this is one I would leave out of the page if I were ever going to talk to Apple about any kind of valuation.

31:23For sure.

31:24Claude Opus: And actually, just on that point, coming back to the football field analysis, just because we have all of these different valuation methodologies at our disposal, to what extent would you tailor the methodologies for a particular slide deck that you're presenting to a client?

31:42Debs: well certainly based on let's say let's say we're pitching let's say we're pitching a a sell side process to a particular to a particular client right i think the thing you got to do more than anything else is think about all right what is the buyer universe for this asset look like and then i'm going to choose my my precedent transactions and my valuation methodologies based on where I actually expect this to trade. Because like, let's say, let's say I'm really very much expecting this to go to private equity. I'll probably put more weight on the prior private equity, say precedent transactions than I will on the overall universe, right?

32:22Debs: I'm really like, again, for anyone, for anyone who's currently sitting in the M &A seat doing this on a day-to-day basis, like curious to hear what you think, but like, that's how I would think about it, right? Who am I pitching as the ultimate buyer? and when I'm going to pitch this process, I want to have a good idea of what I think that buyer is going to pay so I can be honest with my client about it. So I'm kind of thinking about who I'd sell to in order to define what kind of assumptions go into this comp page.

32:52Claude Opus: Yeah, for sure. That's a really good point, actually. The nature of who you're advising and the transaction you're advising on, it doesn't just influence the methodologies in terms of what's in the chart, but also what then feeds into those methodologies, as you say, the types of precedent transactions that you would be looking at. And then, of course, we're not just going to be doing this for kind of sell-side M &A. It could be buy-side M &A. It could even be a strategic review for a client, which maybe would have some analyst target price range as well in there. So it really does, you know, it's important to know why you're putting this football field together, isn't it, to inform what methodologies we're using.

33:31Debs: 100 % I think you know hopefully one thing that people have taken away from just this quick chat about valuation is even though this is that fundamental page and I think the thing that people think about more than anything else is how do I put it together how do I how do I get that football field page for whatever company I'm looking at there's way more there's way more thought that goes into the actual methodologies themselves and figuring out what is the story I'm telling then the mechanics of putting the page together like really easy to get Claude to pull this page together this is one where i give i give claude like a like c plus i don't know it's pretty this is pretty it's pretty basic right but also it's all this one this one this one's hard right because like how do you how you pull together precedent transactions for apple like that's that's a that's a tricky one way easier to do that if you're pitching a buy side candidate for apple saying all right we think you should buy this company now we have a list of real precedent transactions for companies like that have sold.

34:28Debs: Flipping it around is kind of a hard exercise to go through.

34:33Claude Opus: For sure. Well, I think that takes us to the end of this week's episode. What's the big deal? I hope you've enjoyed our deep dive into football field analysis. I hope we've all learned a little something. I certainly have. It was great to hear all your views, Graham. So thanks so much for listening. And take care from me.

34:51Debs: All right, take care, everyone. We will see you on the next one. Take care.