SAIC does not do "DD". As far as I know DD is an American term used to mostly describe reading every little tidbit of information on some stock until you convince yourself to buy and hold forever. SAIC does engineering.

Last night I was looking at my portfolio and noticed an overweight position in a casino stock. I followed a few links to find a report that compared 7 or 8 casino stocks. PEs, growth forecasts, history, key metrics, the works. This stock of mine is a 3-bagger, as are most of them in the list. I convinced myself that they are all crap compared to what I have except for one that operates in Macau. And they trade on the Pink Sheets no less. That is research, not DD.

If you want to know what kind of assumptions are necessary in estimating, look at the AACE document I linked to in my last post. The less refined the estimate is, the more assumptions have to be made. But there always will be assumptions. Commodity (plastic feedstock) prices are critical. SAIC clearly had to make assumptions, and if we are to believe the Summary, they are contained in a White Paper, which no one has access to. Based on that... voila... EBITDA of $28 Million.