The method
Every company page on AerInvest is laid out as these four axes. The order is the method: you do not get to the valuation until you know what the business is and whether its numbers back it up.
Quality is not a buy signal. It is the filter that decides whether a company is worth your research time at all. A business that fails it does not become worth owning at a lower price — that is what a value trap is. And nothing here is a recommendation: the output is evidence with its source attached, and the judgement stays yours.
Five questions. Three are answered from filings today, two are not — and the page says which is which rather than filling the gap with prose.
The reported revenue segments and what share each one carries — not the sector, which is the same sentence for hundreds of companies. The question behind it is what happens if the largest line disappears. A company earning 86% of its revenue in one place is a different risk from one earning 42%, and neither is disqualifying as long as the position is sized for it.
The segment note in the annual report, reconciled against total revenue.
Not assessed yet. A moat claim needs return on invested capital held above the cost of capital through a full cycle, plus a barrier expressible in the time or money a competitor would have to spend to cross it — a certification that takes three years, a network that gets more valuable with each user, a switching cost customers will not pay. A single year of high margins is not evidence of a moat; it is what a moat would produce if one existed.
Not computed. The margin trend on the financial-health axis is supporting material, not an answer.
Not assessed yet. The classic way to be right about everything that does not matter is to find a good company, with good management and a real moat, in an industry customers are leaving. The test is whether volumes are rising in units rather than in revenue — inflation hides a shrinking market — and whether a substitute is taking share.
Not computed. We show the sector and industry classification, which is not the same thing.
What insiders actually did with their own money. Only open-market purchases and sales count: a grant vesting, an option exercised, shares withheld for tax and a gift are compensation mechanics, and adding them together is what turns routine vesting into a headline about executives dumping stock. Buying is the part that costs them something.
Form 4 filings over the last twelve months, with the proxy statement linked for the ownership table.
The shape of the revenue series, not the latest number. Two good years and ten bad ones predict more bad ones; thirty years of performance and one bad year predict a recovery. This also decides how much weight the valuation can carry: a company that grew through a recession and a rate cycle is projectable, one that zigzags is not, and a single fair-value number on a zigzag is a wide range pretending to be a target.
The annual revenue series as filed, up to ten years.
Revenue, margins, cash conversion, the balance sheet and dilution — read as a series rather than a snapshot. If the financials contradict the business description, the description is wrong, not the financials: an eroding gross margin is the first sign that a moat described on the previous axis is not really there.
Only meaningful once the first two hold. A great business at a bad price is still a bad investment, and a cheap price on a failing business is a trap. Any fair value shown comes with the assumptions that produced it, because a number without its inputs is not an estimate, it is a guess with a decimal point.
What would have to be true for the thesis to work, what would break it, and how much of a portfolio the position should be. Written before buying. After a fall is when everyone discovers they never wrote it down.
Company filings wherever they exist: the segment note and the annual statements from the SEC's XBRL data, Form 4s for insider activity, 13F filings for what large managers reported holding. A market-data vendor fills the gaps. Each page names the source that answered it, because a figure from a company's own filing and a figure from a vendor should not look identical when only one of them is there.
Filings are late by design. A 13F reports positions as of a quarter end and is due 45 days later, so the freshest holdings on the site are six weeks old and the manager may have sold since. Every screen that shows them says so.
Not financial advice, and not a stock picker. There is no list of what to buy, because a tip is the least useful thing anyone can give you: you would not know what you bought, when to sell, or what to watch. The method is the part that transfers.