It is a common trope in investing circles that the intrinsic value of a business is the cash it will put in your pocket from now to kingdom come (let's ignore the appropriately discounted bit and also grant that this statement includes eventual liquidation value).
Of course, the hard part is in determining what the cash generation of the business in question will actually be. Further complicating the problem is that headline earnings (in the accrual accounting sense) can be very different from the "cash an owner can pocket" in a business. Investors often circumvent the latter problem by focusing on free cash flow (cash produced from operations minus capital expenditures). If cash is corporate happiness, then free cash flow is investor nirvana.
With significant margins and constant streams of fee income, asset managers tend to generate prodigious amounts of (free) cash flow. Benefiting from massive economies of scale, an asset manager with sticky assets needs to re-invest very little of the cash it generates in order to maintain or even grow its cash stream. In effect, for an asset manager, one can often further simplify and use cash from operations as a proxy for free cash flow.
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