Northstar quarterly market reports
The Northstar Market Report provides powerful empirical evidence as to why we are confident that our investment philosophy and process, closely followed, will deliver market beating returns for our clients over time. This work again points to controllable factors - markets move wildly, falling in and out of love with different sectors and companies, but we have a defined formula that works and we stick to our guns by only owning quality companies when they are incorrectly valued by other investors. We discuss stocks in this report, delving into our investment cases for specific securities which we own.
CURRENT QUARTERLY REPORT
2026 – Quarter 1
-
THE BIG PICTURE
No Rational Manager Would Buy Gold; No Rational Manager Would Sell Gold!
This article explains our rationale for allocating to gold when it was deeply out of favour, and subsequently reducing exposure as our modelling indicated that we had reached reasonable price levels. This demonstrates our probabilistic and portfolio aware investment approach. In late 2021 and 2022, we faced sustained criticism for holding gold when it was widely regarded as an unattractive asset, it offered no yield, had underperformed for years, and was often viewed as irrational to own. By 2025, sentiment had fully inverted: gold prices had risen sharply, and the same investors questioned why we were reducing our exposure. These experiences highlight the behavioural cycles that often dominate asset pricing. Our approach is not based on forecasting prices, but rather on probabilistic frameworks, diversification benefits, and disciplined portfolio construction — accumulating gold when it offered diversification assistance and asymmetrical payoffs, and reducing it when it exceeded reasonable expectations.
-
FROM THE ANALYSTS
S&P Global: Owning Quality Through the Noise
This article outlines the investment case for S&P Global, highlighting its durable competitive advantages, resilience, and opportunity arising from AI-driven market dislocations.
-
FROM THE ANALYSTS
S&P 500 Returns: A Tale of Two Eras – And Why the Next Decade May Feel Very Different
The S&P 500 has been one of the most reliable wealth-creation machines in history. Over the past 66 years, it has delivered double-digit nominal returns in one stretch and solid single-digit gains in another. Yet dig beneath the surface and the story changes dramatically. What drove those returns was never the headline GDP number alone – it was the quiet interplay of productivity, corporate profit share, inflation, dividends, and valuation multiples. Today, that same mix points to surprisingly modest prospective returns over the next ten years… unless a true productivity revolution (think Elon Musk’s Optimus robots and AI scaling at warp speed) finally arrives.
QUARTERLY REPORTS ARCHIVE
Browse all our quarterly reports available by selecting the period from the dropdowns using year and date.