Published in full, versioned, and dated. If we change how we value something, the version number changes and the previous version stays available.
Value the business, not the narrative. Every valuation rests on cash a shareholder can eventually claim. Where a company's story and its arithmetic disagree, we publish the arithmetic and let the story argue for itself in the bull case.
Nothing unsigned counts in the base case. Contracted revenue counts. Pipeline, guidance, letters of intent and management ambition do not. They belong in the upside scenario, priced explicitly, so a reader can see how much of a valuation depends on things that have not happened yet.
The capital stack comes before the shareholder. Debt, preferred, accreting project equity and dilution all rank ahead of the common. Any multiple applied to revenue or assets that ignores those claims is measuring the wrong thing.
The model is published, not summarised. Every report carries its working model with the assumptions exposed as controls. A fair value you cannot interrogate is an assertion, not an analysis.
There is no single valuation model that works everywhere, and pretending otherwise is how research goes wrong. We select the framework from the economics of the business, state which one we used in the header of every report, and version it here.
| Business type | Framework | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Contracted asset-backed infrastructureData centres, energy, real assets on long leases | Stabilised NOI, capitalised and de-levered | The asset and the claims ranking ahead of the common are what matter — not the income statement during a build-out. |
| Established cash-generative operators | Unlevered discounted cash flow | Where cash conversion is knowable, model it directly. Multiples hide leverage and reinvestment needs. |
| Cyclicals | Mid-cycle earnings power | Spot earnings at a peak or a trough mislead in both directions. We normalise, and say what we normalised to. |
| Balance-sheet businessesBanks, insurers, lenders | Residual income on book value | Earnings mean little without the equity that produced them and the cost of carrying it. |
| Pre-revenue and optionality | Probability-weighted scenarios | A single point estimate here is false precision. We price the outcomes and show the weights. |
| Anything we cannot underwrite | Not rated | Published as such, with the reason. We do not quietly drop coverage we found difficult. |
Where a company does not disclose an input we need, we derive it from what is disclosed and print the derivation on the page. A derived figure is never presented as a reported one.
The most sensitive input in any model is usually the one the company does not disclose. Every report names its own weakest assumption and makes it adjustable, so a reader can test how much the conclusion depends on it.
Probability weights are explicit judgment calls, labelled as such. They are not derived from any model and should not be read as precise.
Company filings first, then the earnings release and call transcript, then market data. Every figure is traceable to a primary source and the retrieval date is printed on the report.
Every rating is revisited each quarter on results, and immediately on a material contract, a financing event, or a share price move of more than 25%.
Each report states the methodology version it was built under. When the method changes, the version number changes and the previous version stays published.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Undervalued | Modelled fair value is more than 20% above the current price under base-case assumptions. |
| Fairly valued | Modelled fair value is within ±20% of the current price. |
| Overvalued | Modelled fair value is more than 20% below the current price under base-case assumptions. |
| Not rated | We have looked and concluded we cannot underwrite it responsibly. We publish these too. |
We deliberately avoid buy, sell and hold. Those words describe an action a specific person should take, and we do not know anything about any specific person.