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Fair Value Method

Lesson
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What do you do when you purchase a small slice of a company?

If you've purchased less than 20% of a company, you can stick the purchase on your books using the fair value method.

It's actually quite simple. You use marked to market systems to put the purchase on your balance sheet at fair value.

As a result, your net income will rise and fall due to unrealized gains and losses from changes to the share price as well any dividend distributed.

Calculating is simple: Just take the original price, add the gain (or subtract the loss) in stock price, and you're done!

Question
Sierra inc., the mysterious chair vendor, has 990 shares outstanding. Your firm has purchased 99 of those shares for $553,000.00. The company reported a net income of $68,000.00 and issued $27,200.00 in dividends to its shareholders. You see that the current price of your shares is $718,900.00.

Under the fair value method, what should you list as the company's carrying value?
Answer
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👉 Answer:

  • The carrying value is $718,900.00

👨‍🎓 Here's how we arrived at the answer:

  • This is a two-step process:
    1. Calculate the unrealized gain (the increase/decrease in price for your shares): $553,000.00 - $718,900.00 = $165,900.00
    2. Add the original investment and the unrealized gain: $553,000.00 + $165,900.00 = $718,900.00
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