Articles
Guides and analysis on economic moats, competitive advantage, valuation, and how AI is reshaping durable businesses.
How AI Is Reshaping Economic Moats
Which competitive moats AI strengthens, which it erodes, and how to score a company's AI opportunity and threat — a framework with examples.
Morningstar Moat Ratings vs. MoatScan: What's Different?
How MoatScan's AI-generated moat analysis compares to Morningstar's analyst-driven Economic Moat Rating — methodology, coverage, scoring, and price.
How to Identify Economic Moats: A Practical Checklist
A step-by-step process for spotting durable competitive advantages — the financial evidence, the qualitative tests, and the false moats that fool investors.
Efficient Scale: The Moat of Markets Too Small to Fight Over
How natural monopolies and niche dominators are protected by their market's own economics — the least intuitive moat pillar, explained with examples.
Cost Advantages: The Moat of Being Structurally Cheaper
How scale, process, and unique assets let some companies produce at costs competitors can't match — and how to tell structural cost advantages from temporary ones.
Intangible Assets: Moats Built on Brands, Patents, and Licenses
How brands with pricing power, patent portfolios, and regulatory licenses create economic moats — and how to tell valuable intangibles from famous ones.
Switching Costs: The Quiet Moat That Keeps Customers for Decades
How switching costs lock in customers and create pricing power, the three types investors should know, and the metrics that reveal real lock-in.
What Is an Economic Moat? A Practical Guide for Investors
What an economic moat is, the five sources of durable competitive advantage, and how to tell a real moat from a temporary edge — with examples.
Network Effects: The Most Powerful Moat in Modern Markets
How network effects create winner-take-most businesses, the four main types, how to tell real network effects from fake ones, and where they break.
The Widest Moats of 2026: What We Found Analyzing 520+ Stocks
We ran 520+ US-listed companies through a five-pillar AI moat analysis. Here are the highest-scoring wide moat stocks of 2026 — and the patterns behind them.