$4.465 billion. That's how much Jeffrey Gundlach's six-year-old mutual fund startup, DoubleLine Capital [profile], appears to be worth, judging by new analyst estimates of the value of Oaktree Capital's stake in DoubleLine.

Jeffrey Gundlach DoubleLine Capital Chief Executive Officer

Devin Banerjee, John Gittelsohn, and Charles Stein of Bloomberg report that Oaktree's 20-percent stake in DoubleLine could be worth $893 million. That's based on the estimation of Wells Fargo analysts Chris Harris and Robert Ryan, who last week pegged the DoubleLine stake as accounting for about 13 percent ($5.80) of Oaktree's own value of $44.60 per share.

Morningstar analyst Stephen Ellis offers a slightly lower estimate, $600 million to $700 million, of the value of Oaktree's DoubleLine stake. Yet even the lower bound of that estimation would value all of DoubleLine at about $3 billion.

Putting that in perspective, Oaktree paid about $20 million for that 20-percent stake just over six years ago, in December 2009. Using Ellis' valuation, that means the stake has increased thirtyfold. And DoubleLine has even paid Oaktree $158 million in dividends over the last six years, too.

Put another way, given that DoubleLine now has $85 billion in AUM, those price tag estimations value DoubleLine at between 3.53 percent and 5.25 percent of AUM. That's on the higher end of asset manager valuations.

Gundlach founded DoubleLine in December 2009 after a bad breakup with TCW, and Oaktree co-founder Howard Marks (another TCW alumnus) decided to invest in Gundlach's startup. The Bloomberg piece offers a look back at that history, too. 

Edited by: Neil Anderson, Managing Editor


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