Holiday Reflections and the Debt Buying Market

The holiday season leads all of us to reflect on our blessings. We in Kaulkin Ginsberg’s Research Group do not need to reflect for very long to recognize the people who have made 2005 special.

If our perspective here is unique, it’s because research is all about access to unique information.

Say Mike Barrist gives a press conference about NCO Group’s fourth quarter earnings. Mike is giving all of us business news, but he is not giving us business research.

News becomes research only when it provides information that is not already available in the market. In fact, the less efficient the market, the greater the value of this research. That’s because strategic research about inefficient markets can be acted upon profitably. I’d go so far as to say that the profit potential of strategic research increases when the research informs us intelligently about markets that lack efficiency.

This brings us back to our holiday blessings.

A researcher’s greatest asset is his or her sources – the people who provide the information that makes his or her research unique and valuable.

Finally, this brings us to debt buying.

For the past six months, Kaulkin Ginsberg’s Research Group has been doing some extensive, primary source research on the debt buying market, not only in the U.S., but around the world. This research has been taking place thanks in part to the generous sponsorship of LexisNexis.

In the U.S., we spoke with 30 Sector Experts and asked them questions about pricing, volumes, portfolio sizes, competition, globalization, emerging classes of debt and industry forecasts. These subjects have long been considered within the "black box" of the largely opaque debt buying market.

These industry insiders, ranging from CEOs of public companies buying all types of debt to owner/operators of smaller private companies focusing on specific types of debt, gave us keen insights into the state of the market. Interestingly, these insights were both positive and negative.

We also incorporated the observations of Country Experts in Australia, Belgium, Bulgaria, Canada, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, New Zealand, Poland, Spain and the United Kingdom into this research. These debt buyers described nuances of the debt buying markets in their countries – which differ in many ways not only from the U.S. market, but from each other as well.

In January, we will publish a substantive research publication containing the insights of these Sector Experts and Country Experts. I believe this research publication will be the first of its kind in many respects. In its exploration of the private debt buying markets and debt buying activities in other countries, this publication will meet our test above for how we differentiate research and news.

In the meantime, we are especially grateful in this holiday season to all of research sources, as we are to you for your time in this busy time of year.

Happy Holidays. I look forward to sharing more research with you in 2006.

As Director of Research Services for Kaulkin Ginsberg Company, Paul oversees custom research projects and publications focusing on the accounts receivable management industry. Previously, Paul served as Research Manager of Thomson Financial, a leading provider of market information to the worldwide financial services industry, and as Research Manager of Term Sheet Intelligence, a provider of market research about venture capital transactions.

Paul has also served on the investment team of the venture capital firm New Vantage Group, where he reviewed business plans, interviewed business managers and performed due diligence on companies raising capital. He received his MBA from Georgetown University and an undergraduate degree from The College of William & Mary.