Archive

A popular investing metric is broken... Investors commonly use the price-to-earnings (P/E) ratio to quickly understand a company's valuation. The same can be done for the benchmark S&P 500 or any other index to understand how cheap or expensive the entire stock market is.  In the March 23 Altimetry Daily Authority, we talked about economist […]

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It's the one ingredient needed for a long-term recession...  Back in September, before anyone had heard of social distancing and when the news cycle was dominated by the trade war, we discussed the conditions for a recession. While the world has changed over the past 10 months, our position has not. Major recessions are always […]

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Here's what the alphabet has to do with economic recovery... Earlier this month, financial-services company Northern Trust put together a piece about the shape of the recovery after the coronavirus pandemic. Over the past few months, experts have debated how a recovery will play out in the U.S. Some believe that due to government relief […]

It's your final opportunity to explore the 'Challenger Deep' with us... In 1960, a deep-diving submarine made the first manned journey to explore the depths of the Challenger Deep – the deepest section of the world's oceans, at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Explorers had been plotting the sea floor for the past century […]

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Even one of the most well respected firms on Wall Street can't dodge the 'At-Home Revolution'... As we discussed last month, the commercial real estate ("CRE") market is one of the prime targets for disruption by the massive societal shift we're seeing in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. Many people are realizing that working […]

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One of my mentors just published a new book focused on the corporate lifecycle... My team and I call him the godfather of adjusted accounting analytics, and it's not said tongue-in-cheek. Bart Madden developed the CFROI framework. It's one of the first methods to focus on something equivalent to what my team and I have […]

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During an economic crisis, there's a sneaky way your portfolio could be crippled... In late June, UC Berkeley hosted its annual "Fraud Fest" – completely online for the first time. This year, the 200 panelists had a lot to talk about... As one said, "the pandemic is the perfect storm for fraud." Due to the […]

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The 'at-home economy' claimed another victim this month, as workers adopt their 'Zoom shirts'...  The retailer that claimed to "dress the president" since Abraham Lincoln was yet another company to fall to the "At-Home Revolution."  Earlier this month, Brooks Brothers filed for bankruptcy. It couldn't survive the lockdowns that closed its stores, nor the lack […]

This past weekend, we taught a course on corporate strategy... And once again, as usual, we learned something new. The class, which we call "Return Driven Strategy" ("RDS"), is focused on understanding the key tenets of a successful long-term value-creating corporate strategy. Uniform Accounting is essential to identifying "RDS companies," as we call them. These […]

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In late 2010, one of our largest clients called us in a panic... One of its biggest holdings, coffee maker Green Mountain Coffee, had just received a data request from the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission ("SEC") stating it was launching a formal investigation into the company's accounting.  Our client needed to know what to […]

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