20 articles in this subtopic.
A durable moat shows up as ROIC exceeding WACC for a decade or more, traceable to five structural sources that each leave distinct financial fingerprints.
Working definitions for the core vocabulary of fundamental analysis, from margins and ROIC to accruals, DCF terms, and SEC filings.
Receivables outgrowing revenue, shrinking deferred revenue, and accrual ratios above 0.10 are quantifiable red flags that surface before restatements.
Working capital management separates companies that fund growth from operations from those that borrow to survive.
A five-ratio screen of leverage, interest coverage, net debt, and asset quality separates sustainable capital structures from fragile financing.
The practical point: Management teams with 5%+ insider ownership outperform those with minimal stakes by 2-3% annually over multi-year periods.
A priority-ordered 60-minute workflow reads notes first, then MD&A, risks, and controls, pulling most of a 10-K's signal with quantified red-flag tests.
A five-metric scorecard of M&A outcomes, organic growth share, buyback timing, dividend policy, and incremental ROIC separates compounders from destroyers.
Tracking hedging words and confidence scores across consecutive MD&A filings can reveal management concern one to two quarters before analyst revisions.
The cash flow statement tells you what actually happened to the money—not what accounting rules say happened.
Comparable company analysis prices a target off 5-7 true peers: filter by size and model, apply median multiples, adjust for growth, question outliers.
The practical point: A company can report 18% revenue growth while its core business shrinks.
Rebuilding adjusted earnings with your own add-back standards, the Sloan accrual ratio, and cash conversion exposes how much reported profit is presentation.
ROE flatters leveraged balance sheets; ROIC and economic profit test whether returns truly exceed the cost of capital, the real measure of value creation.
A 90-minute earnings model decomposes revenue into volume and price, forecasts margins from base rates, and turns conviction into a testable EPS spread.
Sum-of-the-parts valuation prices each segment on pure-play multiples, deducts overhead, and tests whether a 10-15% conglomerate discount hides opportunity.
Alternative data gives a 2-6 week edge on quarterly results, but 30-50% of signals are noise; triangulate with fundamentals and respect mosaic limits.
Profit margins tell you how efficiently a business converts revenue into profit at each stage of its operations.
A written three-case thesis with probability weights and fundamental kill criteria forces disciplined exits that memory and rationalization never will.
LTV to CAC, contribution margin, and KPIs like net revenue retention show whether growth is self-funding long before margins collapse in earnings.
