Quote from Ghost of Cutten:
But where's your discount then? 20 bill for the market fall, and 50 bill for legal costs/damages and lower future earnings, brand damage etc. You have exactly the same value as you did before the spill.
Why pay the same valuation for a company in the current mess as for one without any mess, as BP was 2 months ago? With all this risk and uncertainty you should demand a huge discount to fair value, not be paying exactly the same valuation.
IMO fair value for BP after this disaster is probably in the high 20s to low 30s, using conservative assumptions. With aggressive assumptions it could be in the 40s up to 50, but who uses aggressive assumptions in investing? Even if its worth in the 40s, that's a 20-30% return, hardly outsized given the risk involved. So I wouldn't be interested until at least the low 20s and ideally the teens. It might not get there, but markets often overreact and I doubt we have seen the worst of the news out from BP yet. Imagine if a hurricane comes along and sprays all that oil inland across the Gulf, or if it's still leaking by August, or it comes out that BP were criminally negligent. They could lose their entire US assets in the courts.