A monthly, deep dive, and rigorous piece identifying:
Extraordinary Value Spreads, Mispriced Quality, and Behavioral Errors

FOMO includes both the perception of missing out, which triggers anxiety, and compulsive behaviors … it is closely related to the fear of social exclusion or ostracism, which existed long before social media. -Natalie Christine Dattilo, Ph.D, Harvard Medical School, 2023 Recall that the second line of defense of the efficient markets theory is that the irrational investors,

In our piece, Economic Cycles and Mean Reversion, we demonstrated that corporate profit margins had risen to levels above the prior century's peak in 1929. We have updated the chart used in that piece. These margins have been and continue to be the fundamental bulwark on which any bull case for US equities rests.

In our August piece, The Solvency Debate Continues, KCR updated our 2021 missive Junk Stocks Funded by Junk Bonds. We observed that 2023 had seen speculators return with a ferocious appetite for low-quality stocks. Our focus in that piece, and again today, will be on a group of companies that failed the Federal Reserve’s test for financial fragility as defined by interest coverage ratios (“ICRs”).

KCR has written a blizzard of material on the increasingly dire investment implications of market capitalization weighted index funds due to the outsized performance of large stocks that now sit at brutally high multiples. This is hardly a new topic for us. In 2014, as “smart beta” strategies became wildly popular, we penned Indexing Dilemmas, which laid out the following facts:

Hello everyone. This is Matt from KCR. Today we will do what is effectively a tardy half-year update. The speed and tone will be quick and sharp as the year has been challenging for evidence-based investors like us. The summary is that the sharp speculative rally we have seen YTD

Our recent pieces, How to Value Tech Companies and External Obsolescence: Tech Investors’ Newest Nightmare?, discussed how AI algorithms, big data, and machine learning could be undermining the moats of tech stocks that now sport multiples last seen during the dot.com mania. We noted that our empirically

“Didn’t we just learn that pouring trillions of dollars into technologies with uncertain profit profiles we didn’t fully understand was a bad idea? Tech investors seem to be most aggressive when they have the least visibility on the IP and valuation provides them with no margin of safety.” -Zac M., KCR Subscriber...

This paper will demonstrate the following: 1. 60/40 Asset Allocation models have come under crushing stress over the last several months 2. Combined, popular alternatives like private equity, private credit & venture capital strategies are often merely leveraged, high-cost variants of “60/40” with lagged reporting, in our view

In April last year, KCR penned What is Accounting Quality and Why it Matters. The work discussed the abysmal state of financial reporting and used our earnings quality score to demonstrate that high-quality firms trounced low-quality firms’ performance.

“We’ve had 40+ years where all the money went into broadband, or internet, or Netflix or the cloud and no money went into basic productive capacity…” -Robert Friedland, CEO, Ivanhoe group of companies “During the latter stage of the bull market in 1929, the public acquired a completely different attitude towards

How the Crypto-FTX-Fraud Could be Masking Epic Capital MisallocationAccounting Tools states that cash flow to stockholders is the amount of money a firm pays its equity owners. They explain that “Investors routinely compare the cash flow to stockholders to the total amount of cash flow generated by a business…”

Have Policy-Makers Given Investors a Secular Growth Story for Cyclical Stocks? Our research is empirically based and tends towards places that are uncomfortable and out-of-favor. In 2020, as investors gorged on crypto, loss-making tech and growth stocks of dubious merit..