But time, experience and events convince me that I was right then and you are right now. As you’ve noted the market does not price risk well. In large part this is due to a fundamental misunderstanding of value. The professional appraisal community has a far better handle on this, exemplified by drawing the formal distinction between “fair market value as a going concern”, “investment value”, “fair market value in a orderly liquidation”, “fair market value in a forced liquidation” and so on. One corollary to the foregoing is one of those lessons that stick from sit-down education, that “Book Value” is not a standard of value but rather a mathematical identity.

Without going into a long involved academic tome, the cost of capital (and from which results the mathematical determination of value per the income approach) has a shape more approaching that of a an asymmetric parabola (if one graphs return on the y axis and equity debt weight on the x.).

If I was coming up with a new theorem, risk would be an independent variable. So for example:

WAAC = wgt avg cost of equity + wgt avg cost of debt + risk premium

You’ll note the difference that in standard WAAC formulation risk is a component of the both the equity and debt variable – and practically impossible to consistently and logically quantify. Yes, one can look to Ibbottson for historical risk premia, or leave one to the individual decision making of lenders, butt it complicates and obscures the analysis.

In the formulation above, cost of equity and cost of debt are very straightforward and can be drawn from readily available market metrics. But what does risk look like? Again if you plot risk as a % cost of capital on the y axis and on the x axis the increasing debt weight, on a absolute basis risk is lowest @ 100% equity. From there is upwards slopes. However, risk however is not linear, but rather follows a power law.

The reason risk follows a power law is that while equity is prepared to lose 100%, debt is not. Also, debt weight increases IRR to equity (in the real world) contrary to MM. Again, debt is never priced well, because issuers don’t understand orderly and forced liquidation, whereby in “orderly”, e.g. say Chapter 11,recoveries may be 80 cents on the dollar, and forced, e.g., Chapter 7, 10 cents on the dollar. One really doesn’t begin to understand the foregoing until you’ve been through it more than a few times.

So in the real world, as debt increases, equity is far more easily “playing with house money.” A recent poster child for this phenomena is the Simmons Mattress story. In the most recent go round equity was pulling cash out (playing with house money) and the bankers were either (depending on one’s POV) incredibly stupid for letting equity do so, or incredibly smart, because they got their fees and left someone else holding the bag. I’m seen some commentators say that ‘Oh it was OK because rates were so low, the debt service (the I component only) was manageable.’ Poppycock; sometime it’s the dollar value and sometimes it’s the percentage weight and sometimes it is both.

But you’ve already said that: “company specific risk is significant and varies a great deal.” I would also add that – or amplify – that in any appraisal assignment the first thing that must be set is the appraisal date. Everything drives off that and what is ‘known or knowable’ at the time.

From my understanding the logic is:

1) Companies can capitalize in different ways.
2) Investors may find the capital structure suboptimal, so
3) Investors can leverage or deleverage at the security level, so
4) There is no benefit to companies cost of financing based on structure

Of course in the real world not all investors can access financing; small investors may be able to buy stocks but lack the scale to buy bonds, and so on.

If you don’t believe efficient markets to begin with, then there is no reason to believe MM.

This doesn’t make sense – it’s just another way of saying the market is efficient, and if that is the case, then why not just use CAPM?