Liquidation Value Methodology

All metrics are derived exclusively from SEC EDGAR XBRL filings. No adjusted numbers, no management estimates, no earnings — just the reported balance sheet.

See liquidation value in action: Rankings | Apple Inc. | Microsoft

Core Thesis

MFFAIS shows the liquidation reality of public companies. Every metric answers a simple question: if this company stopped operating today and converted its most liquid assets to cash, how much would be left after paying all obligations?

Total Obligations = Current Liabilities + Long-term Debt + Operating Lease Liability + Finance Lease Liability

Liquidation Metrics

Note on terminology. The American Society of Appraisers (ASA) defines distinct liquidation premises — Forced Liquidation Value (auction sale, days-to-weeks), Orderly Liquidation Value (privately-negotiated sale, weeks-to-months), and others. MFFAIS's Cash / Liquid / Operating Liquidation Value are platform-defined formulas built on the public-filing balance sheet, not the ASA premises — the platform does not assume a specific liquidation horizon, doesn't appraise the underlying assets, and shouldn't be read as an ASA-style appraisal. The platform-defined factors (1.00 / 0.90 / 0.80) are conservative starting points that you can override per-component on the calculator.

Default Factors

These are the platform's conservative starting points. The calculator lets you adjust each factor in either direction — values below 1.0 model haircut scenarios (e.g., 0.60 = 60% recovery on inventory in distress), values above 1.0 model improvement scenarios (e.g., 1.10 = 10% growth in cash, 1.50 = 50% improvement in AR collectibility).

Derived values

Some line items on the calculator are marked derived. This means the value was computed by the platform via simple arithmetic on what the filer reported, rather than being read directly from a single XBRL tag.

One concrete derivation the platform performs today is computing the noncurrent portion of split liabilities (long-term debt, operating lease liabilities, finance lease liabilities) when the filer reported the total and the current portion but did not report the noncurrent portion as a separate tag. In that case, the platform computes:

Noncurrent = Total − Current

The same logic applies inverted when the filer reports total + noncurrent but not current.

This derivation is performed because many filers don't break down every liability category into current and noncurrent components in their XBRL filings, but the math is unambiguous when the total and one side are reported. Without this derivation, the calculator would frequently show empty noncurrent buckets even when the value is calculable.

The platform's principle: every derivation or substitution is marked and disclosed, never silent. Today the platform performs two kinds of disclosure: (1) Synthetic noncurrent values like the one described above, marked with the derived badge on calculator rows; and (2) Substituted-zero entries where the formula treats a missing balance-sheet component as $0 to keep the metric computable, marked with the incomplete badge on metric cards (see Incomplete metrics below). Industry averages, prior-period imputation, and peer-company substitutions are not performed.

Incomplete metrics

Some metric calculations on the platform are marked incomplete. This means at least one of the components the formula expects (cash, accounts receivable, inventory, current liabilities, long-term debt, operating lease liability, finance lease liability) was not reported by the filer for the period being computed.

When a component is missing, the platform treats it as $0 in the formula so the metric still produces an output you can use. The disclosure badge tells you exactly which components were excluded so you can judge whether the result is meaningful for this filer.

Two reasons a component may be marked missing:

1. Not reported. The filer didn't tag this concept in their XBRL filing — the data simply isn't there. Common for ETFs, SPACs, commodity trusts, and other non-operating entities whose balance sheets don't include traditional working-capital items.
2. Annual-only periodicity. The filer reports this concept only in 10-Ks (annual filings), not 10-Qs (quarterly filings). Common for operating lease liabilities at companies like AAPL. The annual data is correct; the quarterly view is missing it because that's how the filer chose to report.

The platform does not silently substitute zero for missing values. The metric is computed with $0 in place of missing components for transparency, and the disclosure badge ensures you know exactly what was excluded.

See also: Derived values — a separate disclosure pattern for synthetic noncurrent values calculated from filer-reported totals minus current portions.

What's NOT in Total Obligations

The four-line obligation total (Current Liabilities + Long-term Debt + Operating Lease + Finance Lease) is intentionally a balance-sheet view. Several real-world claims that sometimes affect liquidation outcomes are not included:

• Pension underfunding. Defined-benefit plan underfunding (Projected Benefit Obligation minus plan assets) appears on the balance sheet only at the net amount, and large industrials (e.g. GM, Ford, GE) routinely carry tens of billions in PBO that aren't fully reflected in Total Obligations.
• Off-balance-sheet (OBS) commitments. Purchase commitments, take-or-pay contracts, supply guarantees, and other contractual obligations disclosed in 10-K notes but not booked as liabilities.
• Contingent liabilities. Litigation accruals, environmental remediation reserves, indemnification obligations — the booked accrual reflects management's probability-weighted estimate, not the maximum exposure.
• Tax-related liabilities not separately tagged. Deferred tax liabilities and uncertain tax positions appear on the balance sheet but are not part of the four-line obligation total.

For industrials and other PBO-heavy filers, treat Total Obligations as the floor of liquidation claims, not the ceiling. The 10-K notes are the definitive source.

Long-term Debt — tag families

Filers report long-term debt under more than one XBRL concept. The platform pulls from two families per period, in priority order:

1. Family A — "LongTermDebt" pair. The standard pattern. The platform reads LongTermDebtNoncurrent directly when reported, or derives it as LongTermDebt − LongTermDebtCurrent (or LongTermDebt − DebtCurrent for filers like BA that use the broader current tag) when only the parent + current portion are reported. This yields the noncurrent figure that goes into Total Obligations.
2. Family B — "LongTermDebtAndCapitalLeaseObligations" fallback. Some filers (TGT, retail-anchored balance sheets) report their long-term debt under LongTermDebtAndCapitalLeaseObligations rather than the Family A pair. When Family A yields nothing for the period, the platform falls back to this tag — for ranking comparability, the value is treated as a long-term debt total.

The calculator's All Tags drawer shows both families when present so you can see exactly which tags fed the displayed value. Family selection is per-period, not per-company — a single filer may use Family A in one fiscal year and Family B in another.

Why "Total = Current + Noncurrent" isn't computed

The platform performs the Noncurrent = Total − Current derivation (see Derived values above) but deliberately does not compute the reverse Total = Current + Noncurrent:

• The current portion of long-term debt and lease liabilities is already included in LiabilitiesCurrent per US-GAAP. Adding the platform-computed Total back into Total Obligations would double-count the current portion.
• The platform's Total Obligations therefore uses noncurrent only for long-term debt and lease liabilities — matching how LiabilitiesCurrent is constructed.

This is why a filer that reports only the split components (OperatingLeaseLiabilityCurrent + OperatingLeaseLiabilityNoncurrent with no parent OperatingLeaseLiability tag) shows the noncurrent figure on the Overview — not the sum. The current portion is already counted via Current Liabilities.

Data sources

• Balance-sheet metrics — SEC EDGAR XBRL. Every CLV / LLV / OLV value, every Key Components row, every calculator tag is sourced from a SEC EDGAR XBRL filing. The platform stores the originating (accession_number, tag, period_end) for every fact so the Calculator's All Tags drawer can surface the raw filer-reported value alongside the platform-derived one.
• Stock prices — Polygon.io. Daily previous-day close, fetched via Polygon.io's aggregates endpoint at 21:00 UTC after US market close. Per-share metrics on company pages and the Calculator divide platform metrics by Polygon's most recent close.
• Industry classification — SEC SIC code. The platform uses each filer's self-reported Standard Industrial Classification code from their EDGAR registration and maps it to a clean industry name via an internal table (see generator/sic_mapping.py in the codebase). SIC is older and coarser than GICS or NAICS but is the only industry signal SEC requires of every filer.

Coverage

The platform tracks a curated universe of US-listed public companies. The tracked universe is broader than the published universe — a tracked company without fact_values rows (e.g. recent SPAC, newly public, ETF, or commodity trust whose XBRL doesn't tag the balance-sheet concepts the platform formulas need) renders a "tracked but no data is published yet" 404 rather than a mostly-N/A page.

Coverage is deliberately balance-sheet-driven: the platform only publishes a company when it has at least one fact_values row for the latest filing. Counts are visible on the all-companies index.