To: pvz who wrote (13742 ) 5/10/2002 1:08:04 AM From: kodiak_bull Read Replies (1) | Respond to of 23153 PVZ: Here is your question from this morning: <<I have an accounting type question on something completely unrelated. I bought TYC on its run up last week and sold just before it reached its 9 ema where it turned back, as expected. It did a decent Fib retracement and is now looking pretty favourable for a new rise, to the top of its gap around $25.stockcharts.com [e,a]dacly... Unfortunately, I can't get around the fundamentals and this morning I finally figured out what was bothering me. I understand TYC wasn't able to get the price they were hoping for in the past couple of weeks for the divisions they wanted to spin off. In other words, the sum of the parts might not be greater than the whole after all. Does that not mean the company is running a real risk of needing to write down some of that massive goodwill they have parked in the balance sheet?>> My friend Derrick wrote to me after a long day at the office and late meetings (quel good guy): "SFAS142 eliminates goodwill amortization beginning this year but introduces an annual impairment test. All prior acquisitions have to be valued and compared to book. If book is higher than current valuation, writeoffs are required. That's the simple answer. The more complicated answer is that FASB was deliberately vague in how the impairment test was to constructed. I've seen some take the net present value of expected cash flows and use that as a valuation. Some look at similar sales of business in the marketplace and use that as a metric to comparison. Because this standard applies to so many industries and circumstances, it's probably impossible to have just one standard of valuation, but leaving it this open leaves plenty of interpretation for management and for its auditors to wrestle with. Will Tyco have to write things down? Probably in telecom because everything is decimated there. Other sectors like alarm systems maybe not but I've never looked at them specifically. Tyco is a rollup in the process of decompression and I don't like to touch stocks like that until they get into the $1-3 range. Whether Tyco would ever get there or not, I don't know, but there's a lot of potential downside IMHO."