Comps

So today my junior mentor took me out to lunch at a really nice restaurant. It was extremely good - I couldn't believe food could taste like that. For the two of us it cost about $150, all paid by the firm. Nice little present to the summer intern.

Today I spread comps for the deal that I'm working on. It actually took a long time because these companies get really complicated with the way they handle certain kinds of debt. Also, they are MLPs which means that they have a strange corporate structure that has to be handled differently than normal companies. I had to spread about 20 companies, so it took me a really long time.

When I would start on a new company, I would basically pull the 10-K and most recent 10-Q. Then I go through the financials, filling in all the information. The reason you need the K and the Q is because there's an LTM (latest twelve months) section. You basically take the 10-K number, add the 1Q 10-Q number, then subtract the previous year 1Q 10-Q number. This leaves with you with the previous 12 months' number.

I also had to calculate EBITDA and about 10 other metrics like leverage ratios and solvency ratios. For each company I had to also pull research reports to find analyst estimates for 2009-2011. A lot of what you do as an intern is finding numbers and plugging them into Excel. After pulling all the data I aggregated the comparable metrics into one place and put it into presentation format. It felt good to finish up a project in one day. Right as I was finishing, I got more work to do. I decided to take a break to write in this since it's been a few days.

It's really strange that I only have two weeks left. I decided that I was not going to waste a second of the next two weeks. I'm going to rebuild a merger model and an LBO model just so I'll be familiar with it. I don't usually have spare time, but I figure that if I stay an hour or two more every day I can get it done.

It's crunch time.