Please introduce yourself and tell us about your business.
My name is Andrew Stotz and my firm is called A. Stotz Investment Research. I’ve been a sell-side analyst for most of my career, but over the last four years, I’ve brought my sell-side stock selection methodology into my own company. And so I blend a quantitative style with a fundamental style.
How is your research differentiated?
Everybody’s doing traditional research: go visit the company, go analyse this sector, go see the factory, meet the management. That’s what all the traditional funds are doing. I realised that I really wanted to have a different way of looking at it.
So the way that I look at it is: I use a quantitative methodology that I call FVMR – Fundamentals, Valuation, Momentum, and Risk. I look at every company on those measures. There are a lot of different possible measures that we could have. Under fundamentals, like ROE, net margin; under momentum, it could be earnings momentum, it could be price momentum. And then it could be that particular stock and that particular measure relative to others in that country, or relative to others in that region in the same sector.
What is your special sauce?
One of the things about my methodology is that I’m not so concerned about what people or other analysts are saying about it. What I’m concerned about is what my whole data set, let’s say a huge amount of data, related to price and fundamentals, is saying about that stock.
What is the number one thing you offer the buy-side?
You can trust me that I’m giving Independent Research. So I think trust is the number one thing. My success is going to be the quality of the research and the quality of my calls.
