In some sense, the longer the brand has been around, the less likely they are to pull an exit scam.

It’s the opposite in my experience - older brands have a hard time keeping up with newer trends and are more likely to be bought out by PE to ‘harvest value’, as they’re not as profitable right now.

In order for something to become old, it has to have resisted attempts on its life so far.

That didn’t work out well for Craftsman (or Sears in general), Milwaukee, and a bunch of other brands!

The tool market is an example of that not being the case

Craftsman, Portal Cable, Bosch, Stanley, the list goes on and on, of once independent brands that have been bought out by mass marketers to sell lower quality tools under those names

Another point - there is a difference between being 'old' (a 40 year old veteran solder is 'old', for instance, even if they're still in extremely good physical condition), and being 'old' as in 95 years old and can barely get out of bed.

From a PE/market perspective, the sweet spot seems to be the 95 year old with a good reputation that still carries weight.

I imagine it's because of the good spread between current price and expected returns, as the 'old' brands this is done with aren't usually very profitable, if at all.

Yeah, that's the exec short term gain thing. But it doesn't take too much research to check if that's happened before pulling the trigger, people are pretty vocal when that happens to their favorite brands.