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The week's question
In March 2025, in the thread "Re: OT, out", Umm asked the members: "Do you think it is because America is made up of magical soil that makes businesses based in America magically profitable?" This week it is put to everyone again. The button below opens the small thread re-asking it - read what others have said so far, then give your own answer as an ordinary reply.
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Investment Strategies / Mechanical Investing
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Author: Knighted ✧  😊 😞
Number: of 6243 
Subject: Re: return on equity / mungofitch?
Date: 09/28/26 1:58 PM
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In theory you could use something like 2-3 year change in operational assets (total assets minus excessive cash, say), versus change in cash flow from operations in the same period. But there are just so many moving parts---were the start and end periods typical years or unusually bad/good? M&A? Are they in a weird business, or just a plain product or service company?

Thanks Jim - that makes sense on ROIIC. The endpoint sensitivity, M&A, and other one-off events seem like they’d make a mechanical screen pretty noisy.

On the simpler question, have you ever backtested ordinary ROIC (not incremental) versus ROE, or used both together as screening criteria?

I wonder if using ROIC instead of ROIIC might preserve some of the benefit without the measurement problems that come with incremental returns.
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This community has written 6,224 posts about Mechanical Investing. The article-length ones it recommended most:
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