At the trough of the oil crisis in 2015, Equinor’s management was scrambling to prepare the company for an unknown future. Management believed that while the oil and gas industry would eventually recover, the industry would never be the same. The team decided to use…
Read MoreFor decades, the fashion industry has tried to explain the elusive magic of the Prada brand. “Some designers are seekers of trends, but Prada actually is the trend, season after season,” the New York Times Magazine wrote. And this summer, when Jeff Goldblum appeared on…
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As we outline in our white paper, the semiconductor is the General Purpose Technology of our time. A GPT is a core breakthrough technology that performs a general function, and many applications are built on top of it, forming the basis of economic development for…
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For several years I have argued, based on comprehensive statistical evidence, that corporate financial reports―quarterly and annual statements―have lost most of their relevance and usefulness to investors. Corporate earnings, in particular, are no longer a reliable measure of enterprise value change, nor are they indicators…
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We calculate statistics for all developed and emerging equity markets around the world. For our mid/large cap indexes, we take the top 85% of all stocks in a given region or country and convert all prices into US Dollars. These Knowledge Leaders Selection Universe (KLSU)…
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Some Knowledge Leader companies are born in a moment of disruptive innovation. From the start, they exist under pressure to change their industry or die. Such is the case with Swatch Group, a company scraped together from the remaining ashes of a dying Swiss watch…
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This week, in Bubble-Like Stock Valuations Miss $3.4 Trillion in Hidden Assets, Bloomberg detailed how traditional accounting can make a company’s fundamentals “look a lot worse than they are.” In the article, New York University’s Professor Baruch Lev weighs in. “You get numbers which are…
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Semiconductor and semiconductor capital equipment stocks have been stellar performers lately, a trend we have been a bit slow to recognize. So, I decided to do a deep dive on semis and semiconductor capital equipment stocks to see if there is opportunity left to capture….
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If you don’t know the name Diageo, that’s because Diageo wants it that way. This Knowledge Leader would prefer you to know the names Johnnie Walker, Smirnoff, Baileys, Captain Morgan, Tanqueray and Guinness, the group it calls its “Global Giants,” representing 41% of the firm’s…
Read More“Subscribers Are the New, New Thing in Business” declared The Economist (April 11, 2018). The magazine says that “Subscription models are seen by many investors and executives as the holy grail, because they promise a recurring stream of revenue…. The attractions of subscription businesses are obvious. Firms…
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A common asset possessed by every highly innovative company in the Knowledge Leaders Indexes is a rich store of intangible capital. Such reservoirs of knowledge take the form of trademarks, brands, software, even manufacturing processes, and there is only one way to amass them: over…
Read MoreA recent report by The Wall Street Journal identified a new generation of supercomputers as the fuel behind Big Oil’s “digital arms race to find oil and trim costs.” Indeed, make a quick visit to the websites of most of the Supermajors – that’s BP,…
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Baruch Lev is the Philip Bardes Professor of Accounting and Finance at the Stern School of Business, NYU. This article first appeared at the Lev End Of Accounting Blog and is shared here with his permission. Today’s Wall Street Journal published an article that caught my attention: “Next Up: The…
Read MoreLater this year, Rio Tinto will seek board approval to spend $2.2B to build the world’s first “intelligent” mine, a network of robots and autonomous vehicles all working together on the site of the earth’s largest iron ore complex in Western Australia. Whether or not…
Read MoreIn the midst of the worst flu season in a decade, Japanese pharmaceutical company Shionogi & Co., Ltd. is making headlines for a new drug it says can kill the influenza virus in 24 hours with a single dose. Today, only a handful of treatments…
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