Revenue
$1.7Blow FY2017
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PJT, PJT Partners
Capital Markets & Asset Management financial
PJT Partners is a premier, global, advisory-focused investment bank that was built from the ground up to be different.
Our highly experienced, collaborative teams provide independent advice coupled with old-world, high-touch client service.
PJT Park Hill PJT Park Hill, our leading global alternative asset advisory and fundraising business, provides private fund advisory and fundraising services for a diverse range of investment strategies.
The business
What it sells, where the money comes from, the kind of company it is.
Revenue · FY2025
$1.7B
+14.9% YoY · 10% 5-yr CAGR
Vital signs · TTM, with 5-yr average
Revenue $1.8B 5-yr avg $1.3B
Net margin 10.4% 5-yr avg 9.3%
Revenue $418M +28.9% vs yr-ago qtr
Net income $89M yr-ago $74M
Net margin 21.3% yr-ago 22.9%
The business in brief
read the 10-K →What this business is and what moves its needle, from its own SEC filings.
- What moves the needle
- Assets under management and the fee rate on them. What decides it: net flows in or out, the market's move on the assets already there (the firm rises and falls with the indices it invests in), the drift toward cheaper passive products, and the operating leverage on a largely fixed cost base. On its own account, the filing leans hardest on customer concentration, set against the numbers in what the filing emphasizes, below.
- Is it a good business?
- Operating margin has been modest for a fee business (median 16%). It earns this on little capital, so return on equity has run near 72%, the leverage of a model that needs almost no plant to grow. A high return that does not fade can mark a moat, but whether the assets stay (net flows, not last year's market) is what the flow disclosures and the 10-K settle, not the multiple.
Every line is arithmetic on the company's filings, shown in full in the sections below.
The record
Ten years of arithmetic, read across the cycle.
The record, 2016–2025
realized figures from each filing · older years to the left| 2016’16 | 2017’17 | 2018’18 | 2019’19 | 2020’20 | 2021’21 | 2022’22 | 2023’23 | 2024’24 | 2025’25 | TTMTTMMar 2026 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Income statement | |||||||||||
| $499M | $499M | $576M | $717M | $1.0B | $986M | $1.0B | $1.1B | $1.5B | $1.7B | $1.8B | RevenueRevenue |
| 2.9% | 2.0% | 6.4% | 11.3% | 23.0% | 21.7% | 19.7% | 14.9% | 17.2% | 19.2% | 19.5% | Operating marginOp. mgn |
| −0.6% | −6.5% | 4.7% | 4.1% | 11.2% | 10.8% | 8.8% | 7.1% | 9.1% | 10.6% | 10.4% | Net marginNet mgn |
| ($3M) | ($33M) | $27M | $30M | $118M | $106M | $91M | $82M | $134M | $180M | $187M | Net incomeNet inc. |
| — | — | -4% | 38% | 23% | 22% | 29% | 28% | 19% | 16% | 20% | Effective tax rateTax rate |
| Cash flow & returns | |||||||||||
| $104M | $110M | $116M | $202M | $461M | $118M | $239M | $438M | $528M | $513M | $652M | Owner earningsOwner earn. |
| — | — | — | 94% | 76% | 88% | 49% | 33% | 72% | 58% | 68% | Return on equityROE |
| — | — | — | 79% | 73% | 23% | 36% | 23% | 59% | 50% | 59% | Retained to equityRetained/eq |
| Balance sheet | |||||||||||
| $590M | $559M | $672M | $953M | $1.2B | $988M | $1.1B | $1.4B | $1.6B | $1.8B | $1.6B | Total assetsAssets |
| $152M | $146M | $106M | $216M | $300M | $200M | $173M | $356M | $484M | $539M | $309M | Cash & investmentsCash+inv |
| ($9M) | ($157M) | ($26M) | $31M | $154M | $120M | $185M | $245M | $187M | $308M | $273M | Shareholders’ equityEquity |
The record, charted
FY2016–2025Each measure over its full record; the current point and the worst year marked.
Quality & stewardship
Returns, the balance sheet, capital allocation, and pay.
Owner’s Scorecard
FY2025 10-K · source on SEC EDGAR →
Is it a good business?
- Operating margin 19.2%Solid fee marginOperating income $326M ÷ revenue $1.7BIndustry peers: median 28%
What this means
The heart of a asset manager: how much of each fee dollar survives the cost of running the business. Fees ride on assets under management, so the swing factors are net flows in or out and the market's move on the assets already there; the cost base is largely fixed, which lifts margins in a bull market and squeezes them in a bear one. A high margin held for years, through a market it does not control, is the operational mark of a real franchise.
- Net margin 10.6%SolidNet income $180M ÷ revenue $1.7B
What this means
What reaches the owner after tax and interest. For a capital-light fee business this should be a wide share of revenue; when it is thin despite a high operating margin, debt taken on for acquisitions is usually the reason, so read it next to the balance sheet.
- Return on equity 58%Very high (≥25%)Net income $180M ÷ equity $308MIndustry peers: median 18%
What this means
Because the business ties up little capital, a healthy fee stream throws off a high return on the equity behind it. Read it with the buyback record: returning capital lifts this ratio honestly, but heavy debt taken to do so can flatter it.
Does AI threaten the moat?
Moderate contestabilityAI is likely to reshape costs and some products here without clearly contesting or sparing the core moat; how the company itself frames it is the tell.
In its own filing Framed as a capability
The filing positions AI as something the company uses, not something it fears.
“Our continued investment in technology infrastructure and integration of Artificial Intelligence ("AI") capabilities into our business, aims to further enhance our advisory capabilities to remain differentiated in a rapidly changing environment.”
The question is whether a moat the record shows as durable outlasts a technology that lowers the cost of part of what the firm sells. The durability is read in the record above, the filing's own framing of AI beside it; the industry label decides nothing on its own.
Read from the filing's own risk factors, paired with the industry's structure under its SIC code; the durability is read above, the price below.
All figures as filed; the source filing is linked above.
Lease obligations
the lease note, SEC EDGAR →Debt by another name. What the business owes on the property, aircraft, stores and equipment it rents rather than owns is a fixed claim due on a schedule; added back to the debt, it is the true leverage. That ladder, operating and finance leases together, and what it adds to the debt on the page above.
Operating leasesFinance leases
Lease payments by year, scaled to the largest; “later” is everything beyond year five, shown apart. These are the contractual cash payments, before the interest the filing imputes back out to the balance-sheet liability.
Due in the next 12 months$36Ma fixed cash payment, owed whether or not the business has a good year
Total lease payments$664Mevery year plus the tail, undiscounted: the full cash the leases will take
On the balance sheet$414Mthe present value of those payments, the recognised lease liability
True leverage: debt plus leases
On-balance-sheet debt$0
Lease obligations (present value)$414M
Total fixed claims on the business$414M
Counting the leases the way Buffett does, the fixed claims on this business come to $414M, of which the leases are 100%, more than the debt itself. The lease wall above and the debt schedule together are the calendar of what must be paid, and when.
Lease ladder read from the ASC 842 tags in the company’s Dec 31, 2025 annual report and reconciled: the yearly buckets sum to the undiscounted total, which less the imputed interest equals the balance-sheet liability; a ladder that doesn’t tie out is withheld.
Management, ownership & pay
read the proxy →From the proxy: how much of the business the people running it own, and how they are paid, beside what the business earned for its owners in the same years.
| Fiscal year | Chief executive | Pay, as filed | “Actually paid” | Owner earnings |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | Mr. Taubman | $1.0M | −$31.6M | $118M |
| 2022 | Mr. Taubman | $40.1M | $54.0M | $239M |
| 2023 | Mr. Taubman | $1.0M | $38.4M | $438M |
| 2024 | Mr. Taubman | $1.0M | $43.0M | $528M |
| 2025 | Mr. Taubman | $1.0M | $8.2M | $513M |
Both pay figures are the company’s own, from the pay-versus-performance table its proxy statement files. “As filed” is the Summary Compensation Table total: salary, bonus, and equity awards at their value on the day of grant. “Actually paid” is the SEC’s prescribed recalculation, which re-marks those equity awards to what they became as they vested; it can swing far above or below the filed figure in either direction, and negative years occur. Owner earnings are the whole business's, from the record above, for the same fiscal years.
- Insider ownership<1%
The stake all directors and executive officers hold together, per the 2026 proxy: skin in the game, the first thing Munger reads.
- Stock-based compensation$234M
The slice of the business handed to employees in shares this year, 14% of revenue, equal to 72% of operating profit. Buffett's oldest accounting fight: this is compensation, compensation is an expense, real whether or not the headline earnings admit it. One trap: the cash-flow statement adds SBC back, so the operating cash, and the owner earnings drawn from it, are flattered by exactly this amount; counted as the cost it is, what an owner keeps is lower.
Peers, Capital Markets & Asset Management
The same industry, side by side on fee margins. Each figure is a through-cycle median, so a peak or trough year can’t distort it; the group median at the foot is the line to read each against.
| Company | Revenue | Op. margin | Net margin | ROE |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| HLIHoulihan Lokey | $2.6B | 20.5% | 16.1% | 18% |
| MORNMorningstar Inc. | $2.4B | 17.4% | 15.2% | 17% |
| AMGAffiliated Managers Group Inc. | $2.1B | 42.8% | 24.3% | 17% |
| STEPStepStone Group | $2.0B | 25.0% | 4.0% | 18% |
| FHIFederated Hermes | $1.8B | 28.4% | 20.0% | 26% |
| PJTPJT Partners | $1.7B | 16.0% | 8.0% | 72% |
| VCTRVictory Capital Holdings | $1.3B | 38.3% | 25.6% | 19% |
| APAMArtisan Partners | $1.2B | 35.1% | 21.8% | 74% |
| Group median | — | 26.7% | 18.0% | 18% |
The price
What a price has to assume.
What the price implies
reverse-DCFType today's close and see the owner-earnings growth you'd have to believe to justify it, beside what PJT Partners has delivered.
PJT Partners’s latest year runs above its own through-cycle margin — the reported figure may flatter a peak. So the tool opens on the through-cycle base, Graham’s averaging cutting both ways; clear the toggle below to read the latest year exactly as reported.
$
Through the cycle, PJT Partners earns about $437M on its 25.8% median owner-earnings margin. This year’s 30.2% margin runs above that; the reported figure may flatter a peak you'd be paying on. Normalize, below, values the price on that through-cycle figure rather than the latest year. It comes pre-checked here for that reason, the same rule that already normalizes a trough; clear it to price the year as filed.
Base
—
The assumptions
9.0% = the 4.55% 10-year Treasury (Jul 15, 2026) + 4.45 points of equity premium. The rate you require is yours to set.
Enter a price above to run it.
A dated snapshot of the price you typed, the assumptions you set, and what the page showed for them. A snapshot is never edited after it is saved. Your notebook is yours alone — the commitment states what is stored and what we will never do.
Implied by the price—
Owner-earnings growth · ’21→’25+31%/yr
Owner-earnings growth · ’16→’25+19%/yr
Owner-earnings growth · ’16→’25+19%/yr
Owner-earnings yield—
What a growth belief costs, in multiples
The growth each return requires, at your price
P/E (3-yr earnings ’23–’25)—
P/B—
Graham’s price gate—
Graham capped the multiple at 15×; Buffett and Munger let that rule go: a wonderful business can deserve 50× if the thesis holds. The gate marks the bargain-hunter's floor.
Against a high-grade bond: Graham’s yardstick bond yield%
Prefilled with the 10-year Treasury (4.55%, as of Jul 15, 2026). Edit it for today’s exact figure, or a AAA corporate yield.
Graham measured a stock against the bond you could own instead, the heart of his margin of safety. Enter a price above to weigh the owner-earnings yield against this bond.
Owner-earnings yield—
High-grade bond yield—
Margin over the bond—
Free cash flow $614M on 26M shares outstanding (a weighted cover-text, the only count this filer tags); net cash $309M. The base opens on the through-cycle figure (the latest year sits above the record’s own median, and Graham’s averaging cuts both ways); clear Normalize to use the year as filed. Net of stock comp treats option pay as the expense it is. Capex ($52M) runs well above depreciation ($14M), so this is a build-out; Steady-state swaps total capex for maintenance (≈ depreciation), lifting the base to about $653M, the cash it would throw off if it stopped expanding. The dials set the multiple a growth belief justifies; the price, and every dollar on this page, is yours.
Cite: Owner Scorecard, "PJT Partners (PJT), the owner's record," https://ownerscorecard.com/c/PJT, data as of 2026-07-09.
Manual order: ← PIPR its page in the Manual PK →
Industry order: ← PIPR the Capital Markets & Asset Management chapter PLUT →