Everything an investor needs to know.

The essential building blocks every investor needs to understand before anything else.

How markets function, how prices move, and how returns are generated over time.

The broader forces that shape markets, economies, and investment outcomes.

4 min read

Every listed company publishes three core financial statements. Together they tell the full story of a company's financial health, if you know how to read them.

5 min read

The same income statement looks completely different depending on the size of the company. Margins strip away size and let you compare any two companies, or a company against its own past, on equal footing.

7 min read

Margins tell you how profitable a company is. Ratios go one step further and tell you whether the stock price reflects that profitability fairly, generously, or not at all.

5 min read

Ratios fall into four categories, each answering a different question about a company. Knowing which category a ratio belongs to tells you what it is measuring, and what it cannot tell you.

4 min read

Beyond the four foundational ratio categories, there are three more that experienced investors use to assess how efficiently a company deploys its capital, uses its assets, and rewards its shareholders.

8 min read

A P/E ratio means nothing until you know who it's being compared to. Here's how to build a peer group that holds up, and what to do when a company doesn't have a clean one.

13 min read

A company's own trading history is a peer group of one. Learn how to read the way revenue, margins, profits, and the balance sheet have changed over time, build a historical valuation range, and judge when a return to the average is a fair expectation and when the business has simply moved on.

13 min read

A DCF does not predict the future, it makes your assumptions about a company's future cash flows explicit enough to question. Here is how the standard method, terminal value and all, fits together.

4 min read

Every number we use comes from somewhere. Here's exactly where to find it yourself, for free, without a Bloomberg terminal or a paid research subscription.