Banks, regulators, and fixed income investors rely on Moody’s and S&P to provide a consistent and standardized metric of credit risk across names and over time. As I explained in The Self-Reinforcing Standards Moat: …ratings underpin the risk weightings that banks attach to assets to determine capital requirements, dictate which securities a money market fund […]
In the decade or so leading up to the mid-2000s, FactSet was in the business of aggregating third-party content from a variety of different vendors – financial information from Thomson Reuters; index data from MSCI, Russell, and S&P; trading data from exchanges – cleaning it up, hosting it on mainframes, and rendering it on workstations […]
Industrial enzyme production beings with several thousand bacteria dunked into ever larger containers of liquid and nutrients. These microorganisms feast on the nutrients and replicate like crazy before being transferred to a fermenter — a giant steel vat that regulates temperature, pressure, oxygen, and Ph levels — where they are suspended within another nutrient-infused medium. […]
A deep local presence can confer competitive advantages in industries with low entry barriers. Rollins typically commands the largest share in its markets, allowing it to service more houses per technician outing than competitors, resulting in greater labor productivity and scale economies on marketing and branch overhead. Fastenal clusters its stores near customers, permitting steady […]
Autodesk, Dassault, and PTC were all founded as CAD companies in the ‘80s but have since become much more than that. PTC first integrated PLM and is now branching off into industrial IoT and augmented reality. Dassault (which also moved into PLM and simulation) and Autodesk are no longer just supplying software tools to solve […]
CarMax sells more cars in a single year than Carvana has sold in its entire existence and yet has half the latter’s enterprise value as the market has come to appreciate that buying cars online is becoming a real thing and Carvana is best positioned to profit from this channel shift. CarMax was version 1.0 […]
Many of the complex objects and structures around you were conceived as virtual objects modeled in computer-aided design (CAD) software. Those CAD objects may have been converted into millions of small polygons (pre-processing), each one bombarded with advanced calculus to help engineers visualize the polygonal mesh’s response to different simulated physical conditions (post-processing) Source: YouTube: Abaqus CAE: […]
Over the last 5 years, Google has increasingly been crowding out organic results with paid ads and preferencing its own properties in search results, frustrating online businesses that feed under its canopy. TripAdvisor and Angie’s List used to brag that most of their traffic came from unpaid organic search while competitors with weaker brands were […]
