Advocating and valuing independent thinking, Collins Stewart is a leading financial advisory group with services covering institutional stock broking, UK, European and US research, corporate broking, corporate finance advisory services, debt capital markets advice, restructuring and debt advisory services and private client wealth management.
On directing to its homepage, the first thing you will notice is the motto of this corporation-independent thinking. You can judge how much it is valued in this financial advisory group.

As I mentioned in the first paragraph, Collins Stewart provides services in a broad range. But each product is designed to be unique under the governing of the corporate philosophy: independence, innovation, intellectual rigor and flexibility in meeting clients’ needs. Here, the product I would like to introduce is Quest™, which is Collin Stewart’s proprietary brand, offering a unique approach- Cash Flow Return On Capital (CFROC™) – for analyzing corporate wealth creation and valuation, encompassing a global company database, on-line valuation models, analytical tools, and a variety of research publications.
Valuation method
CFROC™ is the basis of their assessment of corporate performance and share values for non-financial companies (for banks, use a Real Return on Equity). Using CFROC™, all the information needed to calculate a CFROC is available in published accounts, and it is comparative across different companies. To calculate CFROC, first you have to take the income statement and adjust net income or earnings to gross cash flows. This adjustment is necessary to have a higher correlation between the accounting-based performance measure and its linked valuation measure. The second step is to take the balance sheet and shift from net assets to gross invested capital. This adjustment overcomes the limitation that convectional return measures suffer from. The third step is to use the gross cash flow and gross invested capital, non-depreciating assets and asset life figures as inputs into an internal rate or return (IRR) calculation.
This innovative method is becoming more and more popular for several reasons.
1. All the data involved in calculation is available published accounts.
2. According to empirical statistics, there’s a far higher correlation between Quest™ market-to-book and CFROC™/ cost capital, than the traditional relationship of P/E versus EPS growth and price-to-book versus ROE.
3. CFROC™ allows a consistent comparison to be made between companies and across time.
Database
The Quest™ Database differs from other database service on the market in 4 aspects.
1. Timeliness: data is weekly updated and covers a wide range of changes;
2. High quality: enormous energy and effort and a long period of time have been devoted to get the most high quality data, and some of them are not available from commercial vendors.
3. Relevance: analysis and research on the major corporate events that affects the universe of companies are constantly publicized in the data base.
4. Coverage: Over 350 data items for use is in the products on 2700 companies from 28 countries across Europe, North America, Asia and Africa.
Publications
CITN, Newsletter and triAngle™ Commentary are the 3 weekly publication supporting Quest™. CITN™ (Companies in the News) provides a weekly summary of views on topical company and market events from the prospective of Quest™; the Newsletter is an equity strategy publication examining the latest issues in valuation, accounting and topical market themes; and triAngle™ Commentary is a weekly publication that provides clients with trading and investment ideas based on the triAngle™ Commentary.
Other relevant products:
1. The Quest™ triAngle is Collins Stewart’s stock-picking tool, which measures Value, Quality and Momentum. It is innovative in that, instead of using Value& Quality and Momentum separately as a picking standard, Quest™ triangle uses a combination of these 2 standards, and tests carried out afterwards show that this combined approach improves the reliability of returns. Sevices such as TriAngle on-line, Bespoke services are available.
2. Quest™ Momentum is a daily email service providing daily momentum, trends and technical analysis for stocks. According to empirical tests, following the price momentum is one of the most reliable and robust strategies to improve portfolio performance.
Overall:
Quest™ series of products and service serves as a good exemplification of Collins Stewart’s innovative products. Instead of following the traditional trend, this company does its own researched and puts forward new approaches, puts them into practice, back-tests the model, and constantly revises the model. I have to say that I appreciate this entrepreneur spirit a lot.
Press release
Not only providing timely information to their customers, Collins Stewart’s also publicize a series of press release on its website to its investors, reporting on events of the company, corporate governing , financial report and etc. on a regular basis. For more information, ‘Press’ will direct you to another webpage.
Careers
Knowing the innovative atmosphere within the company, a chance to be a part of this entity should be great! Although Collins Stewart does not publicize job opportunities on their website, for jobseekers who are interested in getting a position there, email information can be found by clicking ‘Our People’ on the homepage and then on ‘career’.