About Return Factor

Hi, I’m Nico

Welcome to Return Factor.

About me — I recently graduated from the University of Waterloo with a Bachelor of Mathematics, double major in Finance and Statistics.

About the research — Return Factor is my independent equity research and less of a news digest. Plenty of publications already report what happened, and most of it stops being useful the moment the move is over. What I publish here is more involved: company research, themes and theses, the occasional breakdown, etc. For the most part, pieces are built around one question: where is something mispriced, and why. Hence the name: the factors that actually drive returns, not the headlines that follow them.

More about me

• My focus lies within Tech, Industrials, and Energy & Power.
• I also follow select sub-sectors and tickers within Consumer.
• Secular trends I’m passionate about right now: AI / Data Centers · Power & Energy Crisis · Physical AI / Robotics · (want to look into: Space Economy)

More about the research

The way I work starts from good information and turns on synthesis: connecting dots across a theme or a supply chain, finding where the market has the direction right but the magnitude wrong, and following it upstream to the binding constraint. That keeps the work forward-looking: what’s underappreciated now, not what already played out.

Like I said, most pieces are theses or deeper dives. Now and then I’ll post a shorter “quick hit” (a chart, an idea, a resource worth sitting with), but the deeper work is what I enjoy most.

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Source: About - Return Factor Newsletter.pdf (published Jan 8, 2026).