Thank You

To Our Readers,

In the spirit of Thanksgiving, we wanted to express our sincere thanks to all of you. We are grateful for your continued support, feedback, and engagement over these last 12 months. It is our belief that through rigorous research, intellectual honesty, constructive debate, and humility, great ideas can and will be uncovered, and our community of readers represents this belief in action.

We also wanted to take this opportunity to share our most read research articles from the year.

Verdad’s Most Read Research Articles from the Past Year:

Every year at this time, we share the links to our most popular research pieces from the last 12 months.

Our most read piece of the year was “Yield Is Not Return,” in which we attempt to dispel a common misconception about fixed income: that you’ll earn the quoted yield. In fact, once you go far enough out on the risk spectrum, higher yielding bonds tend to underperform lower yielding bonds due to losses from downgrades and defaults. Be warned: fixed income is an efficient market!

Our second most read piece was “The Great Rotation.” The biggest story of 2024 was the outperformance of US equities relative to the rest of the world, and, in this piece, we warn that a rotation might be coming.

Our third most read piece was "The Dispersion Delusion." Private equity boosters often advertise the high dispersion of results in private equity, but, it turns out, this is largely a function of the concentration of the portfolio and the small size of the underlying companies.

Our fourth most read piece was "Activism at Scale in Japan," in which we performed a comprehensive analysis, using AI tools, of the corporate governance reform plans of every listed company on the Tokyo Stock Exchange.

And, finally, our fifth most read piece was “Rule, Britannia!” The UK may appear down and out, but we believe the pessimism is overdue and that, a few years post-Brexit, there might be room for optimism.

Thank you again from all of us at Verdad. We look forward to another year of research and discussion!
Yours,
Dan Rasmussen