Diamond Hill Investment Group, an Ohio boutique that ran a client base near $29.4 billion, stopped being a public company on a spring day in 2026. First Eagle Investment Management completed the merger that day, and every share converted into a cash payment of $175.00. The firm had kept posting high-20s adjusted operating margins through the final quarter before the delisting, so the exit priced a profitable, debt-free asset manager that had quietly re-based itself across two asset classes over the prior fiscal year.
The transaction had been signed on December 10, 2025, and it retired a stock that had compounded for a quarter century. Former holders received a lump sum instead of a stake in a franchise the market had underpriced through 2025, and the cash-out landed above where the stock had traded for most of that stretch. The 18% annualized total return of the prior 25 years made the exit a validation of a long compounding record rather than a rescue of a failing business. In practical terms, the public market never finished pricing what the fixed income franchise had become.
This report treats the deal as the terminal event. It uses the price First Eagle paid to grade what the public market had missed: a profitable, low-debt asset manager whose equity business was quietly shrinking even as its fixed income franchise grew into the second engine of the revenue base.
The central finding is that the buyer paid a multiple of roughly 6.6x on 2025 adjusted operating income. That income had landed near $43.0 million, and the multiple clears the firm's historical trading range. It signals that First Eagle valued the franchise above its recent standalone earnings power, a judgment the closing documents make explicit.