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3. Useful Lives of Customer Accounts
Respondent uses a two-pronged approach in his argument that
petitioner has not shown the useful lives of the Rose customer
accounts. First, respondent argues that petitioner is limited to
using Rose’s historical data to determine the useful lives of the
acquired accounts. If the Court decides that petitioner is
entitled to use its own historical data, respondent argues that
petitioner has misapplied its data to Rose’s accounts.
It is not surprising that the use of petitioner’s historical
account life data resulted in the parties’ experts reaching
generally similar useful lives for the Rose customer accounts in
similar categories. So, for example, with respect to cash and
margin accounts, respondent’s expert concluded that the useful
lives were 5 and 4.3 years, respectively, whereas petitioner’s
expert concluded that the useful lives for the same categories
were 4 and 6 years, respectively. Likewise, with respect to the
vendor and marketing agreements, the parties’ experts both
concluded that the useful lives were 5 and 3 years, respectively.
The similarities result from the fact that both parties’
experts used petitioner’s account life experience in their
analysis because there was a paucity of information available
from Rose regarding the acquired accounts. The major difference
between the experts’ approaches as to useful life is attributable
to their categorization of the accounts. Although both experts
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