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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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Musings on Markets: Data Update 5 for 2022: The Bottom Line!

CFO News Room

The question of whether a company is making or losing money should be a simple one to answer, especially in an age where accounting statements are governed by a myriad of rules, and a legion of number-crunchers follow these rules to report profits generated by a firm. The numbers yield interesting insights. .

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Data Update 4 for 2024: Danger and Opportunity - Bringing Risk into the Equation!

Musings on Markets

In particular, there are wide variations in how risk is measured, and once measured, across companies and countries, and those variations can lead to differences in expected returns and hurdle rates, central to both corporate finance and investing judgments.

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Data Update 5 for 2022: The Bottom Line!

Musings on Markets

Measuring Profitability The question of whether a company is making or losing money should be a simple one to answer, especially in an age where accounting statements are governed by a myriad of rules, and a legion of number-crunchers follow these rules to report profits generated by a firm. The numbers yield interesting insights.

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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.

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Data Update 5 for 2023: The Earnings Test

Musings on Markets

Starting with gross margins, and computing the number for all non-financial service firms, we report the distribution of gross margins across publicly traded companies at the start of 2023, again based upon gross income and sales in the most recent twelve months: While the median gross margin across all publicly traded global firms is about 30%.,

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Data Update 1 for 2021: A (Data) Look Back at a Most Forgettable Year (2020)!

Musings on Markets

In closing, I also want to dispense with the notion that data is objective and that numbers-focused people have no bias. Finally, it is worth noting that, notwithstanding the travails of last year, the number of firms in the data universe increased from 44,394 firms at the start of 2020 to 46,579 firms, a 4.9%