RE:RE:RE:How Many Are Assuming There's Going To Be A Takeout?You can't look at financial ratios without looking at the profitability ratios for a positive cash flow generating business. For example, your current ratio is easily fixed as they have stopped M&A activity and have stopped share buybacks.. therefore, they will earn operating cash flow which goes to the current assets on their balance sheet and improves that ratio.
Instead of a D/E where the Equity portion of that relies on the valuation of the Goodwill/Intangibles, you should be looking at Debt-to-EBITDA ratio which is the one that management uses and the banks use for their covenant calculations. Their debt ratio ran a little hot in the last quarter.. but again, all they have to do is stop burning cash with M&A and they can pay it down pretty quickly.
Agreed on the Goodwill and the fact that it can skew the assets. That's why I wouldn't look at valuation metrics like a Price/Book here as your Book value can change very quickly. Keep in mind though that the majority of Intangibles are also purchase related - these are the values of the non-compete agreements, customer lists, etc.. that arise when you do purchase price accounting.
For CTS, the best financial statement to look at is probably the cash flow statement as it takes out all the noise with purchase price accounting. At the end of the day, they have positive EBITDA and postive cash flow so there is an absolute floor to the valuation of the company.