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:

• MoatOS 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 MoatOS works →
• ValuationOS — our deterministic intrinsic-value engine, built on the Damodaran FCFF/WACC framework. The analyst supplies the story and sourced assumptions; the engine owns every calculation, so the same inputs always produce the same value. How ValuationOS 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.

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.

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

One in-depth analysis published monthly, plus the 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.