The Moat Manifesto
Most equity research describes what happened: revenue grew, margins moved, EPS beat or missed. Useful, but incomplete.
Moat & Margin exists for the harder question:
Can this business compound capital for a decade without its moat being competed away?
We publish independent, long-horizon research on businesses with durable moats, healthy margins, and disciplined capital allocation — primarily Indian listed companies, with selective global coverage. Fully reader-funded. No advertisements, no sponsored coverage, no algorithmic filler.
How the research is built
Every piece published here runs through the same instrument, not through opinion:
- MoatSCORE 6.0 — our moat-identification system. Seven scored mechanism dimensions (network effects, switching costs, cost advantage, price discretion, intangibles, efficient scale, counter-positioning), hard gates that cap or reject weak moats, evidence rules that bar outcomes from proving mechanisms, and a reproducibility standard: two independent runs on the same evidence must land within half a point. How MoatSCORE works →
- Receipts. Claims are anchored to verbatim management quotes, character-verified against the actual filing, with source and page attached. Quotes that cannot be verified are dropped, never repaired. Where we find no evidence for a claimed moat, we say so — "we found no direct evidence of switching costs" is a finding, not a failure.
- Exchange Filing Digest — the same verification pipeline pointed at every NSE and BSE filing instead of one company's evidence file. Published Weekly every Sunday, and Daily every trading day. The Weekly Filing Digest → · About the Daily edition →
What every issue contains
Each issue follows the same three-act structure, because the discipline is the product:
- Moat — why returns persist. Dimension-by-dimension evidence from MoatSCORE 6.0: verbatim management and filing quotes, character-verified against the source, with the adversarial evidence presented alongside — never just the flattering half of the file.
- Margin — how the economics show up. The financial footprint: margin structure, unit economics, and the multi-year series that says whether the claimed advantage actually appears in the numbers.
- Money — whether shareholders benefit. Capital allocation.
Every issue ends with a framework verdict — no moat, narrow, or wide, with the moat trend — and a short list of falsifiable things to watch. Never a buy or sell call, never a price target.
Who writes this
Moat & Margin is researched and written by A K Karthikeyan, an independent researcher who builds the systems above and applies them, one business at a time. No affiliations with brokers, promoters, or the companies covered. Reach out at a.k.karthikeyan@hotmail.com. Corrections: if you find an error in a published note — a misquoted filing, a wrong number, a broken citation — email the address above and it will be corrected with a visible changelog note, not silently edited.
The ground rules
Read this before reading anything else here:
- This publication is educational research and data analysis. It is not investment advice and is not personalized to any reader's situation.
- We publish no buy/sell recommendations and no price targets — durability verdicts and valuation work, with the evidence attached.
- Moat & Margin is not a SEBI-registered Research Analyst or Investment Adviser.
- The author may hold positions in securities discussed; any such interest will be disclosed in the relevant note.
- Markets involve risk. Do your own diligence, and consult a SEBI-registered adviser before acting on anything you read anywhere — including here.
Why subscribe
A monthly in-depth deep dive, plus frequent moat snapshots as new companies are scored — and the full research library as it grows. Free subscribers get every public issue in their inbox. If the work proves useful, a paid tier will fund deeper coverage — the reader-funded model is what keeps the research independent.
Moats. Margins. Mastery.
Follow Moat & Margin on X: @moatandmarginhq.