The method
How it works
SpotValue reads company filings so the reader does not have to, and presents what it finds as a dossier: ordered, sourced, dated, and free of opinion.
Anatomy
The dossier
Every company page has the same four parts, in the same order, every time.
The Plate. The dossier’s cover. Company name, classification, and the key figures (shares on issue, market capitalisation, per-share metrics), each dated and sourced.
The ten Leaves. The ten canonical sections listed below, in fixed order. An investor who has read one dossier can read all of them; the muscle memory is the point.
The Ledger. The Promise Tracker: every measurable commitment management has made, joined to the outcome the company later reported, with a verdict reached by arithmetic rather than judgement.
The Colophon. The page’s provenance: edition number, version, timestamp, and per-section data-freshness marks. The reader can say “I read dossier v3.2 of WHC on 21 April 2026” and be believed.
The architecture
Ten questions, mapped
The sections are not arbitrary. Each answers one of the questions a value investor asks before buying a business.
| No. | The question | The section that answers it |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | What does this business actually do? | Company Profile |
| 2 | What am I being asked to pay per dollar of ownership? | Valuation Surface |
| 3 | Is the business getting better or worse over time? | Financial Performance |
| 4 | How does management return capital to owners? | Dividends & Capital Returns |
| 5 | What are the underlying assets doing? | Operations |
| 6 | Who is running this and are they aligned with me? | Management & Board |
| 7 | Do they do what they say? | Promise Tracker |
| 8 | What has happened and what is coming? | Events Timeline |
| 9 | What is the moat and how durable is it? | Strategic Commentary |
| 10 | What could change the outcome? | Outlook & Catalysts |
Provenance
Where the facts come from
Every number on a dossier is extracted from the public record and carries a reference to the filing it came from.
The pipeline collects each company’s filings: annual and half-year reports, Appendix 4D and 4E, quarterlies, results presentations, AGM addresses, Appendix 3Y director notices. Each is extracted against a fixed schema, one fiscal year at a time, then validated for accounting identities, year-over-year continuity, and citation completeness. A year that fails validation is quarantined for review, never silently published.
Market data is limited to end-of-day prices with an “as at” date. There is no live ticker on a dossier, by design.
The obvious question
Why not just ask a chatbot?
Pasting an annual report into a chatbot yields one good answer, once. A dossier is built for the second reading, and the two-hundredth.
Consistency
The same question answered the same way across every covered company.
Continuity
Last year’s answers preserved next to this year’s.
Comparability
The same metric across peers without re-prompting.
Citation
Every fact linked to its source filing and location.
Freshness
The page updates on filing events without the reader lifting a finger.
Auditability
An exportable, dated, sourced record of what was known and when.
A chat session is a screwdriver; SpotValue is a workshop.
Guardrails
What SpotValue is not
The instrument earns trust by what it declines to do. Six refusals, and what each one buys the reader.
- Not a screener. Screeners rank the whole market by whatever fits in a column, and every screener surfaces the same columns. A dossier is the opposite instrument: one company, read properly.
- Not an adviser. No portfolios, no allocations, no recommendations, general or personal. A service that tells you what to buy is asking you to read its incentives; SpotValue gives you none to read.
- Not a social network. No comments, no follows, no crowd sentiment. What other people feel about a stock is not a fact about the business.
- Not a broker. No order routing and no referral arrangements. SpotValue earns nothing from what you do next, so the facts stay neutral; nothing rides on them.
- Not a newsletter. No weekly essay, no ideas list. The product is a standing record that updates when companies file, and it reads the same whoever opens it.
- Not a valuation engine. No DCF button, no price targets, no fair-value scores. The dossier supplies the inputs; the model, and the judgement, stay yours.