We Are Winning

Why be a good company? What benefits does being sustainable, diverse, and inclusive bring? There are several key advantages. But the one that most people think of first is sometimes the least important. Being a good company isn’t always enough to drive revenues higher, but it can increase a firm’s stock market value and make […]

“The key to investing is not assessing how much an industry is going to affect society, or how much it will grow, but rather determining the competitive advantage of any given company and, above all, the durability of that advantage. The products or services that have wide, sustainable moats around them are the ones that […]

Last month, I described how computer-aided text-based analysis can help uncover fraud and deception in company communications. But what other insights can we glean from this research into scandal companies? We used Deception And Truth Analysis (D.A.T.A.) to examine 10 of the largest corporate scandals in recent history and found that the average lead time […]

This International Women’s Day we all need and deserve some upbeat, inspiring, and enriching stories. After all, a lot has happened since 8 March 2020. My 2021 research paper “Hear Me Roar,” released today, contains 58 investing success stories from smart women around the world. Women don’t tend to brag about making money, but they […]

Gender lens investing (GLI) is a thematic environmental, social, and governance (ESG) strategy that is inspired by women in leadership (WIL) and related gender equality criteria. The primary publicly traded GLI equity funds available to individual investors include 12 global and 16 regional funds that together closed out 2020 with US$2.67 billion in assets under […]

Every mismatch between GAAP metrics and business reality is a potential alpha opportunity. You can find significant alpha in the mechanics that drive GAAP accounting. Investors can buy companies with temporarily ugly numbers and short stocks with superficially good reports. Entrepreneurs can better market their equity to potential investors and beat the competition in the […]

Too Smart for Our Own Good: Ingenious Investment Strategies, Illusions of Safety, and Market Crashes. 2018. Bruce I. Jacobs. McGraw Hill Education. Too Smart for Our Own Good is a cri de coeur about investment products that lull investors with the appearance of low risk and the promise of high returns, while actually introducing systemic […]

Economic theory holds that absent monopoly powers and barriers to entry, every firm’s competitive advantage in an industry will diminish and its profits fall to zero over time. While this is just economic theory, it raises some interesting questions: Does a firm’s competitive advantage tend to endure longer in some sectors than others? And if […]

Aswath Damodaran determined early on not to treat the COVID-19 crisis like previous market shocks. As the pandemic unfolded, he could see how it was developing and realized it was having the same three-stage effect on investors as previous financial upheavals. “First you lose perspective. Why? Because in the middle of chaos, things are melting […]

How are women growing in importance in the investment ecosystem? How are firms approaching the sustainability journey? What is the Nordic perspective on the environmental, social, and governance (ESG) space? For insight on these questions, Aline Reichenberg Gustafsson, CFA, and Barbara Stewart, CFA, shared their perspectives in a wide-ranging conversation. Reichenberg Gustafsson is the editor […]