Blogs

Every investor is taught to ask whether rivals can get into a business. The more revealing question is often whether the weak ones can get out.

Some businesses never have to find a customer. The law finds the customer for them. It sounds like the safest business in the world. It usually is not. Here is how to read a business whose demand is written into a rulebook, and the three questions that decide whether that rulebook makes it wonderful or merely busy.

Every company spends money on its customers. It also spends money on itself: offices, staff, travel, perks. The second kind of spending is small in the accounts and loud about character. Here is how to read it, and how to tell careful from merely cheap.

When a new industry booms, everyone tries to guess which company will win. There is a quieter kind of business that does not need to guess. It sells something every competitor must buy. Here is how to spot one, and the three ways it can still go wrong.