Overvalued? Undervalued? Trading sideways? Bull? Bear? No one really knows what’s happening in the equities market. We need a better way. The numbers can get overwhelming if you look only at the trend lines and the equities values. For example, the total value of the US stock market has grown by 6.8% per year since the peak…

Non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) are a funny way to protect intangible assets. They are meant to stop signees from speaking about what they see, hear or read at a company. But they don’t stop information from getting out eventually because no form of censorship (and NDAs are a type of censorship) will ever stop a good…

Not too long ago, we hypothesised that copyright law might be the best way to short-circuit the looming artificial intelligence (AI) apocalypse. Our reasoning was simple: If the courts forced AI companies to pay the full market price for each article, video, or audio they needed to train their machines, it would quickly become prohibitively…

Every time McDonald’s comes up in conversation, we find a new addition to the list of why it remains one of the most successful business models in history. Ruthless consistency — that’s what makes McDonald’s so special. Consistency is effectively an intangible asset for any fast-food brand, and McDonald’s will do anything to maintain consistency…

We love to laugh at conspiracy theories. Who can possibly believe that extraterrestrials secretly rule the world or that aircraft exhaust brainwashes people? Conspiracies are silly, right? Well, not exactly. Most conspiracy theories are a category of the mind (as in, imaginary patterns). But conspiracies are real. Very real. In fact, conspiracies may just be…

To see the power of intangible assets, try reframing a problem and asking how the hidden value can be unlocked. It will be there, but it just needs to be seen – because it might just change the world. A normal valuation of a company looks at all its assets and liabilities to create a…

At the end of September, major parts of the notorious shadow library LibGen (Library Genesis) were switched off after a US court ordered it to pay $30 million to compensate rightsholders. The judgement said the digital library, which is full of works that are still under copyright, had committed “wilful infringement” and that the site…

The elevator pitch was simple: “software made by tradies, for tradies.” Now the New Zealand-based company has been sold for north of $100 million. “Tradies,” in case you don’t know, is a colloquial term for “tradesperson.” It’s an umbrella word that includes all types of professions from construction, electrical, plumbing, earthmoving, welding, mechanical, painting and…

It can be devilishly hard to value what a key person in a business knows, who they know, why they know what they know, or why they know who they know. If you’re feeling dizzy, spare a thought for our poor analysts! The entire point of intangible assets is they often aren’t recorded precisely because…

Lots of experienced travelers to China say the country has changed drastically over the past few decades. Nowhere is this more accurate than in its IP laws. Major tier-one cities like Beijing or Shanghai are barely recognisable compared to what they were in 1994. These highly modern cities are packed with technologies that countries in…