Dear Investor,

Fighting Financials is a regulated investment research platform focused on public investment opportunities in the financial services (financials or “FIG”) sector. Our objective is to provide high-conviction, independent investment ideas across the capital structure, with a core focus on financial services and real estate issuers. I founded the firm in 2023, following almost a decade working on both the buy-side and sell-side across public equities, high yield, private credit and distressed.

After a career working in large investment banks and asset managers, I was dissatisfied with the quality of investment research in general, and financials investment research in particular:

  • Whilst traditional sell-side research offered detailed insights into banks, insurers and diversified financials, such research was often non-actionable (cf. the pervasive "Hold" rating), whilst analysts themselves were often siloed, both in terms of asset class (e.g. equity or credit only) and coverage universe (the same analyst might cover the same 10 stocks for their entire career).
  • On the trading floor, meanwhile, desk analysts were often more incentivised to "make markets", prioritising returns to the bank's balance sheet rather than generating great ideas for clients.
  • Finally, across both published research and trading floor analysts, investment recommendations typically lacked genuine independence from the sell-side institutions' corporate finance and brokerage operations.

For these reasons, I decided to launch Fighting Financials.

Fighting Financials exists to address a gap in the market for financials research, a market that is - all too often - biased, low-conviction, and siloed.

Based on ten years of investing in financials credit and equity, across distressed and performing, public and private, Fighting Financials seeks to bring differentiated, actionable investment ideas to the professional financial services investor.

With a permanent, live book of 20 actionable publicly traded investment recommendations at any given time, the platform seeks to better equip investors to generate alpha in a sector characterised by complex fundamentals and evolving macroeconomic and regulatory contexts.

Ultimately, our mission is to be the partner of choice for the professional financial services and real estate investor.

As we continue to grow, we look forward to you joining us on this exciting journey.

Your Analyst and Founder

Andrew O'Flaherty

Our difference

Our difference lies in our commitment to producing high-quality, creative investment research that is simultaneously sector-specific, capital-structure and instrument agnostic, high conviction and independent.

Sector-focused

Our core focus is on finding investment ideas within the global universe of liquid financial services and real estate. This sector focus contributes to our analytical edge in identifying the best risk-reward opportunities in an industry that is typically poorly understood and under-examined. For us, financials represent one of the most unique and investible sectors.

Instrument agnostic

Fighting Financials is agnostic regarding asset class, capital structure, and security instrument. We select investments opportunistically based on our view of the most attractive risk-reward opportunities across asset classes, sub-sectors and geographies. We aim to find the best investment opportunities across tradeable financials securities at any given time.

High conviction

Our live portfolio comprises actionable "Buy" and "Sell" recommendations only. We don't believe in coverage for coverage's sake and thus have no active “Neutral” or “Hold” recommendations. We think each of our active recommendations is fundamentally misunderstood by the market and, therefore, likely to generate material upside. If we see no investment opportunity, we’ll wait patiently until the market gives us something to do. All non-active ideas and research remain archived for clients to access.

Independent

We are a 100% employee-owned, independent research-only platform. We produce unbiased, unfiltered research with no brokerage, banking or market-making operations. Everything we write is our own opinion. Our sole influence in recommending investment ideas is the fundamentals of the companies and markets to which said ideas relate.

Our Subscription Offer

All subscribers to Fighting Financials have access to our latest investment ideas across public credit and equities, our live investment portfolio, including associated research and earnings models, as well as our full historical archive of financials investment research.

Institutional and elective professional clients benefit from all of the above, as well as full, one-to-one access to our analyst research team and the option to make bespoke analysis requests.

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