Applied Finance Group, Ltd. provides independent investment research to clients in the United States and other major international markets.

Introduction

The Applied Finance Group (AFG) is one of the world’s leaders in developing corporate performance measurement and valuation frameworks. Founded in 1996 by University of Chicago Graduate School of Business graduates Rafael Resendes and Daniel J. Obrycki, the equity research firm has expanded its operations beyond its Chicago headquarters. Many of the firm's analysts are based out of the company's satellite office in Fresno, California.

Currently, over 175 corporations, investment houses, and consulting firms from around the world utilize the company’s research. AFG provides their clients with fundamental valuation based research on over 6,000 companies.

Growing Media Influence

As a widely recognized expert on equity markets and valuation, Mr. Resendes is a frequent contributor to leading financial publications and investment programs, including The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Bloomberg TV, CNBC, and Forbes on Fox.

Innovations

AFG’s innovations include: systematically linking economic profit to corporate value; developing intuitive value driver models to explain economic profit; empirically linking competitive advantage periods to company specific fundamental factors; developing market based discount rates that mitigate the problems with CAPM based costs of capital.
The company has revolutionized the understanding of economic profit with its Economic Margin model.

AFG helps answer questions regarding the valuation of a project or firm while providing the tools to determine whether a project or firm is well managed. In addition, the Applied Finance Group focuses attention on whether the market is placing too high or too low expectations on a company's stock price.

Historical Performance

Over the last decade, AFG’s buy-and-sell recommendations, and model portfolios have consistently outperformed their benchmarks across size, style and economic sectors. Since its June 2004 launch, the company’s large-cap model portfolio, the AFG 50, has significantly outperformed the S&P 500.

AFGView.com

Since the release of the AFGView software in 1996, AFG has set new standards for investment analysis tools. AFGView allows its users to efficiently analyze numerous pro-forma scenarios to discover the intrinsic value of a company.

In 2000, the Applied Finance Group released AFGView.com, which raised the bar for equity analysis by combining the interactive nature of the Internet with AFG’s powerful Economic Margin Framework. AFGView.com allows users to access saved pro forma models, disseminate models and research to co-workers, create custom graphics and quickly analyze portfolios. The Applied Finance Group maintainst that AFGView.com is one of the most efficient daily due diligence and research tools available to institutional investors.

The company is currently in the process of launching an international equity investment database. Confirmed additions include databases on Canada, Japan, and the United Kingdom.