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Data Update 1 for 2025: The Draw (and Danger) of Data

Musings on Markets

Not surprisingly, the company listings are across the world, and I look at the breakdown of companies, by number and market cap, by geography: As you can see, the market cap of US companies at the start of 2025 accounted for roughly 49% of the market cap of global stocks, up from 44% at the start of 2024 and 42% at the start of 2023.

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Data Update 7 for 2025: The End Game in Business!

Musings on Markets

In this post, I will focus on how companies around the world, and in different sectors, performed on their end game of delivering profits, by first focusing on profitability differences across businesses, then converting profitability into returns, and comparing these returns to the hurdle rates that I talked about in my last data update post.

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World’s Best Supply Chain Finance Providers 2025

Global Finance

MUFG says that clients who implement a dynamic discounting offering enjoy a typical average annualized yield of between 10% and 12% APR, significantly outperforming most internal investment hurdle rates or returns on short-term cash. The platform also provides multichannel access, including Swift and host-to-host.

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Data Update 8 for 2025: Debt, Taxes and Default - An Unholy Trifecta!

Musings on Markets

There are many who trust accountants to do this for them, using whatever is listed as debt on the balance sheet as debt, but that can be a mistake, since accounting has been guilty of mis-categorizing and missing key parts of debt. Data Update 4 for 2025: Interest Rates, Inflation and Central Banks!

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Data Update 9 for 2025: Dividends and Buybacks - Inertia and Me-tooism!

Musings on Markets

Breaking down global companies by region gives us a measure of variation on cash return across the world, both in magnitude and in the type of cash return: It should come as no surprise that the United States accounted for a large segment (more than $1.5 Data Update 4 for 2025: Interest Rates, Inflation and Central Banks!

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Data Update 4 for 2021: The Hurdle Rate Question!

Musings on Markets

What is a hurdle rate for a business? In this post, I will start by looking at the role that hurdle rates play in running a business, with the consequences of setting them too high or too low, and then look at the fundamentals that should cause hurdle rates to vary across companies. What is a hurdle rate?

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Data Update 5 for 2024: Profitability - The End Game for Business?

Musings on Markets

In my last three posts, I looked at the macro (equity risk premiums, default spreads, risk free rates) and micro (company risk measures) that feed into the expected returns we demand on investments, and argued that these expected returns become hurdle rates for businesses, in the form of costs of equity and capital.