We hosted our marquee client event this past week, with 25 buysiders pitching stocks on a 100+ degree day in a suburb outside of New York City. What did we learn? On big picture issues: Firstly, we learned that it is contrarian to be bullish. We surveyed the room on whether the attendees thought the
Here are the three most-clicked charts from our June research. Interested in discussing these insights or hearing our latest views as we enter the back half of 2025? Let us know – we’d love to connect. 1. 40% Of The Market Cap Has Greater Than 60% Gross Margins Among the top 3000 US equities, 25.9%
In our year-ahead outlook, we predicted that tariffs and other policies were not in the price. When the early April tariffs were initially implemented, we lowered our earnings estimates, taking the view that a year of growth was removed, and at that time, we pushed our estimates out a year, turning our initial 2026 earnings
Background: We highlight and update four of the most crucial areas of our research for growth investors. This includes our work on quality, beta, and forecasted growth, how even when you are successful it can be challenging, the current major growth themes and how to think about risk management of them, and some extreme valuations
Background: We highlight and update four of the most crucial areas of our research for growth investors. This includes our work on quality, beta, and forecasted growth, how even when you are successful it can be challenging, the current major growth themes and how to think about risk management of them, and some extreme valuations
In last week’s Level Set, we discussed ways for investors to get defensive (see here). We received pushback from some of our clients who asked why we thought it made sense to offer defensive ideas given recent strong price momentum and relatively stable economic data. Earlier this past week, we held a cross-asset idea dinner
Six Ways to Play Defense While our recent interactions with institutional investors signal that many think the S&P500 will continue to grind higher, we are also consistently asked which ”defensive” stocks look attractive. It seems clear that the “old school,” traditional defensive playbook of Pharmaceuticals, Consumer Staples, and Telecoms is a “broken play.” Hence, we
Using NLP on 2,488 earnings calls since March 2025, our research finds that 37% of companies mentioned both tariffs and pricing—most notably in Materials and Consumer sectors. Lower-quality and value stocks were more likely to raise the issue. Commentary about uncertainty or cost absorption correlated with weaker stock performance, while direct price pass-through and a
Background: We looked at the earnings call transcripts of 2,488 companies for all mentions of both tariff and pricing-related words since March of 2025 using Natural Language Processing (NLP). 918 of the companies (37%) had at least one mention of both tariffs and pricing, with 4,819 total mentions at these companies. Stocks we tag as
Sometimes when you study the stock market, you come away with some high conviction ideas. Your research and your pattern recognition give you confidence to make recommendations and deploy capital. Other times, you go home at night and think you would be better off just doing the exact opposite of what you think. If you
