In the data update posts this year, I have wended my way from the macro (equities collectives, the bond market and other asset classes) to the micro, starting with hurdle rates and returns in posts five and six and the debt/equity choice in my seventh post. In this post, I will look at the...
In my fifth data update, I examined hurdle rates in 2025, and in my sixth data update, I looked at the profitability and return metrics for firms. Both hurdle rates and profitability metricsmcan be affected by how much debt companies choose to have in their financing structure, and it enters...
Crass and mercantile though this may sound, the end game for a business is to make money, and a business that fails this simple test cannot survive for long, no matter how noble its social mission, how great its products and how much it is loved by its customers and employees. In this post, I...
In my first four posts, I looked at markets - equity, debt and collectibles - in the aggregate performed in 2025. In this post, I turn my attention to divergences in risk across companies, looking at alternative measures of risk, some based on prices and others at earnings, and how these...
If you have read my first three data updates in 2026, I won’t blame you if you skip this one, because you found them long and boring. I won't take issue with you either if you viewed them as too US-focused, because I did spend my second data update, looking at US equities, and my third, examining...
In my last post, I talked about the disconnect between the bad news stories that we were reading and the solid performance of US equities during 2025. In this one, I want to focus specifically on four news stories from last year - the US announcement of punitive tariffs on the rest of the world,...
In my musings on valuation, I have long described myself as more of a number cruncher than a storyteller, but it is because I love numbers for their own sake, rather than a fondness for abstract mathematics. It is that love for numbers that has led me at the beginning of each year since the 1990s...