Fundamental Thinking featured image

Ramadan’s Shifting Dates Have Complex Effects on Businesses

The holy month of Ramadan affects companies and products differently each year, and it is essential for investors in Muslim-majority countries to understand these effects. The holiday, during which Muslims fast from dawn to dusk, starts 10-12 days earlier each year, unlike fixed holidays such as Christmas. This year, Ramadan starts at sunset on March 10 and lasts until April 9.

Ramadan’s Slowly Shifting Seasonality

Timing of Ramadan relative to Northern Hemisphere seasons, 2010-2040

The fact that the holy month moves each year means that the effects of Ramadan on businesses change over time. Recently, when Ramadan was during the summer, it was a significant headwind for companies such as brewers, as the fast suppressed demand for beer during what would otherwise be a peak month. But now as Ramadan is moving earlier in the year, that headwind will lessen.

Learn more about Ramadan’s effect on businesses in Muslim-majority countries, or those with significant Muslim populations, in our extended analysis.

OOOM featured image

How Persistent Are Quality and Growth?

At Harding Loevner, we are quality growth investors, which means we seek to invest in well-managed, financially sound businesses that can sustain profitable growth across economic cycles. But what do we mean when we talk about quality and growth as attributes of a company? While there is no standard definition of quality or growth in the investing world, our quality rankings consider factors such as the stability, level, and trend of a company’s profitability as well as its balance-sheet strength, and our growth rankings consider historical and estimated future changes in sales, earnings, and cash flows.

How companies perform on those measures can change over time. Industry dynamics evolve, which can lead to a shift in competitive positioning. Macroeconomic cycles and deviations in management strategy can also alter the long-term outlook. Even companies that consistently rank highly for quality and growth must be continuously assessed for signs of deterioration in their financial health, competitive advantages, and other factors. The challenge isn’t just determining the businesses that meet our criteria today, but also which businesses will sustain their quality and growth characteristics over the long run.

OOOM featured image

Meme Stocks and Market Structure

Unless your investment horizon is measured in milliseconds, it’s usually best to ignore what everyone else is doing. But, occasionally, the market throws up something so peculiar that you have no choice but to sit up and pay attention.

The GameStop debacle, and the meme stock phenomenon more broadly, certainly fit that category. The story bears all the hallmarks of a Hollywood script: how a ragtag group of mostly retail investors, armed with commission-free trading apps and loosely coordinated across online message boards, executed a colossal short squeeze on the hedge funds betting against a down-at-its-heels brick-and-mortar video game retailer while inflicting bloody noses on some of Wall Street’s supposedly most-sophisticated operators. Predictably, several films are already in the works. But beyond the thrill of extravagant market pyrotechnics served up with a generous side of schadenfreude at seeing the odd master of the universe brought low by the great unwashed, why should we care?

OOOM featured image

Big Health vs. Big Tech: A Fight over the Future of US Health Care

The $4 trillion US health care system represents both the best and worst of health care globally, responsible for the vast majority of leading-edge treatments and providers as well as high rates of uninsured, a staggering $11,000 in annual expenditures per person, and among the worst levels of infant mortality and life expectancy in the developed world. The system’s structure—a hodgepodge of private employer-subsidized, public, and quasi-public insurers, for-profit and not-for-profit networks and unaffiliated providers—famously incentivizes some providers to ring up higher volumes of procedures while inflating fees to cover the huge overhead required to administer the complexity.