Quantifying Risk When Using the Income Approach

Risk, in a financial sense, is defined as variance about some forecasted value. Any time a business appraiser forecasts future cash flows of any sort, these future value estimates are actually means of all likely cash flows in that particular year. The same holds true with discount rate estimates. Several software products allow an analyst to simulate variable future cash flows and/or discount rates but they all require the forecasting of a mean figure, its standard deviation or variance, the shape of its distribution and the correlation coefficients between all variables involved. Usually, accurately estimating most of these data are impossible in a business valuation context. This article presents a simplified method of developing an actual risk measure (standard deviation) that may be used with discounted cash flow valuation models.