Investor Essentials Daily

The rise of e-commerce has doomed many great brands of the past 100 years. Sears and Kmart, Barney’s New York, Payless Shoes, Circuit City, Radio Shack, and Borders are just a few of the biggest names that have gone under...

Those of you who have read our Market Phase Cycle™ report know that a core focus of our macro work is on understanding credit cycles. Over the last 150 years...

Last Tuesday, we wrote a Valens Research Institutional Daily on Ford, where we highlighted how rare it is for a company to trade at a material discount to their asset base, when it’s cleaned up to remove the accounting noise under...

When most people think of our most influential presidents, three that immediately come to mind are Washington, Lincoln, and FDR. These three men played massive roles in framing the America...

Many airline analysts talk about Southwest (LUV) as a mythical operating company. A company that can buck the economic trends that historically brought down other airlines regularly for the past 50+ years...

Once upon a time, advertising, consulting, and investment banking all had clearly defined roles in servicing a corporation...

In April 2012, Adobe took a step into the unknown. Many investors lambasted them for their strategy shift, saying they were insane. Adobe was abandoning their cash cow software business, where...

If you’ve ever been in a hospital, whether your memory of the visit was good or bad, you probably remember your nurses. Nurses are the front line of healthcare, managing patient care, acting as the face and...

Behavioral economics regularly highlights that humans are anything but the homo economicus that your introduction to economics professor so desperately wanted you to believe in. Humans often are...

If you’ve watched The Men Who Built America or studied the history of Dr. Nikola Tesla, you may know the famous story of Tesla and Thomas Edison’s falling out. Tesla was working for Edison at would eventually become General Electric, and had many innovative ideas. When Tesla proposed...

Most people would dream to create a single billion dollar business...

There are many factors that researchers point to as having helped fuel Germany’s impressive growth over the past twenty years...

Hello from New York City. I’ll be presenting at the CFA Institute Equity Research & Valuation Conference today. My presentation is titled “NOT EVEN Apples to Oranges”, and I’ll be talking about how problematic GAAP and non-GAAP metrics are for investors...

In the 1950s, Las Vegas’ position as the preeminent destination for gambling in the Americas wasn’t yet secure. The mob and others had heavily invested in Vegas and business was booming, but there was a rival constantly threatening Vegas. Most people now...

One of the first questions that an investor generally asks when they’re talking to an asset allocator is “what is your portfolio churn.” Investors worry that if a manager is constantly buying and selling stocks, transaction fees will...

September 2008 was a truly terrifying month for anyone in finance. Fannie and Freddie went into conservatorship on the 7th. Bank of America bought Merrill Lynch on the 14th, to prevent it going under when...

There are so many choices for makeup when a woman walks into a CVS or a Wallgreens. There’s Bobbi Brown, Clinique, Estee Lauder, MAC, Glamglow, Becca, just to name a few. There are options for...

A scary report emerged from Washington DC in 2018. It shed light on a concern that many in the national security apparatus have been aware of for decades. The Russian state is...

The local news business has been steadily under pressure for the past 5+ years, and really for some time before that. Data from MoffettNathanson shows that pay TV subscribers are shrinking. Viewership for local broadcasts in particular are...

It’s not surprising that Vincent Vega didn’t go to Burger King to find out what the Whopper was called in Pulp Fiction. McDonald’s has long been the most ubiquitous of all the fast food chains, in the US and globally. This is why Vincent...