One measure in itself may be misleading. Coming from a science &...

One measure in itself may be misleading. Coming from a science & tech background it took me a long time to realize that many accounting entities are far more fluid than they are made to appear. I know very little about PNI and expect that one needs to analyse both company figures in great detail and work out what the actual returns on a yearly basis are. With PAC for example, it seems as much an asset trading business as an investment company, given how they keep shuffling the portfolio constantly. You will then have to work out the profitability of each of these two segments and also figure out what activity will occur in each for next year (or 3 or 5 y) if you want to invest for short/medium time. The simple measure I use is uNPAT/FUM which turns out to be 7.7bps for FY18 and 8.3bps in FY18. This is still a lousy indicator because of their various stake in the managers. Their reporting has improved after many years but they still cant bring themselves to give us a simple table of boutiques, their FUMs, percent stake and equity value in each. That would enable us to measure earnings per unit FUM as a comparative. And then good luck finding this measure for PNI. That is why I gave up.