Investment Advice

What “one bet” means, and how it is measured

For every security this site computes its closest matches across the whole market, by one-year daily-return correlation. Cohesion asks a simple question of that: of the ten closest matches for each company in this industry, what share are also in this industry?

A high number means the classification is doing real work — these companies genuinely move together, and the industry is closer to a single position than to a set of independent ones. Trucking, shipping, homebuilders and airlines sit at the top of that measure, which is what anyone who has held two of them would tell you.

A low number means the opposite: the SEC's code groups them, but the market does not. That is worth knowing before treating an industry label as a diversification plan.

Where these numbers come from

• The classification is the SEC's own Standard Industrial Classification, taken from each company's filings. It is coarse and occasionally odd — it was designed in 1937 and last seriously revised in 1987 — but it is the official one, it is public, and it is not somebody's proprietary sector scheme.
• Volatility, beta, rate and volatility sensitivity, and cohesion are computed here from daily returns. They are derived statistics; no price or return series is published anywhere on this site.
• Everything under “on the public record” is a count or a sum of filings — Form 4, the STOCK Act, Form 13F, FINRA short interest, USASpending awards, SEC financial statements. As filed.

What is deliberately absent

No index, no sector return, no performance figure. Aggregating company returns into an industry return would be republishing the licensed price history in a thin disguise, and it would also be wrong — there is no defensible weighting to choose. The statistics here are all invariant to that problem: a median, a correlation, a count, or a sum of filed figures.

All industries, ranked · each company's own page is under security pages.