Based on my meager observations, I’m fairly confident that the valuation of oddly-shaped investments amounts to be whatever fiction the principals can agree upon. After all, how do you value something that can’t be compared effectively to anything else?

That said, however, business journalists seem to speak of corporate acquisitions in terms of multipliers of free cash flow, which at a glance suggests how many years it would take to earn the purchase back in dividends at the current rate.

It’s also worth noting that valuing an investment based on its past performance is a bet that it will continue to perform as well or better than it has, and can probably be considered a variant of the gambler’s fallacy, or perhaps the problem belonging to Nassim Taleb’s Thanksgiving turkey (no fragment anchor unfortunately; instead page search for “Bogus Math”).