About MoatMap & the Founder
“Built by investor, for investor.
Tilt the playing field in your favour.”MoatMap is how I have invested for over a decade: rank a stock on Quality, Value and Momentum against every peer, then check whether the people running it are buying. Skew your portfolio toward what scores well and is being bought from the inside, and the odds start to tilt your way.
Who runs this site
My name is Gavin Tan. My approach is quality-tilted and factor-based, across Malaysian and international stocks. MoatMap is the systematic engine I built for my own work, then opened up for anyone who wants the same framework applied to their watchlist.
In numbers: 18+ years of public-market investing, 8+ years of private-equity investing alongside that, and a portfolio I’ve been running for family and friends since 2018.
On the professional side, I’m a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales (ICAEW). The training is heavy on financial-statement analysis, audit, and corporate finance, which is useful when reading the ROIC and balance-sheet signals that drive the Quality factor.
Dogfood everything. The vast majority of my investable assets sit in the same portfolio MoatMap’s ranking helps me build. It’s the same engine I check before sizing any position. Good or bad, I’m in the same boat as the people who use the tool.
What it has already done in public
Anyone can say their scoring works. These are the things you can check today without taking my word for any of it.
The record is public and walk-forward. On the 10th of every month the Decile Tracker locks the whole ranked universe into ten deciles by StockRank and then publishes each decile’s forward return as it occurs, whichever way it slopes. Vintages form on live rankings before the returns exist, so there is no backtest to flatter and no do-over. It has tracked since July 2026: 4 vintages formed, 3 scored and frozen. If the staircase does not hold, you will see it there before I can explain it away.
The research is published, not promised. 508 AI deep-dive reports are in the library, each one dated. Every month a Best Stocks edition is formed for 32 countries and for the world, and the previous edition stays on file so you can see what entered and what left.
The factors are the ones with the longest paper trail. Quality, Value and Momentum are the three with the most robust published evidence (Fama-French, Novy-Marx, Jegadeesh & Titman). How each is built from the filings is spelled out on the methodology page.
What MoatMap commits to
- Published returns are never quietly restated. A decile month is frozen the day it is scored. The only way a published number changes is a deliberate, logged restatement, and a data repair is noted beside the series rather than used to rewrite a month.
- Retired scoring regimes stay published and frozen. If the weights ever change, the running series stops, keeps its label and the reason it was retired, and a new series starts. The old one never absorbs the change.
- Guards fail loud, not quiet. A feed that goes dark, a currency with no exchange rate, a parser that returns zero rows against stored history: each one pages me rather than serving a quietly smaller number. When a defect gets through anyway, the stored rows are repaired and the fix is dated.
- The free tier stays free. No card, no trial timer, 20 Feathers a month. The stock check on the homepage and the first rows of every insider and buyback feed are open before you sign up at all.
- It is a starting point, never a buy list. MoatMap does not know your risk tolerance, time horizon or tax position. Treat it as the start of your own work, not the end of it.
Investment philosophy (and what MoatMap operationalises)
Successful investing is participating in durable businesses with attractive economics and growth, for as long as possible. Everything below is a corollary.
Look for high-quality businesses with great value propositions. My anchor is companies that generate ROIC of at least 15%, grow revenue at single-high-digit % or better, convert most of their profits to cash, and treat shareholders fairly. Software, platforms, and marketplace businesses have dominated returns over the past decade for three reasons: network effects, low marginal cost to serve, and scalability. The five moat types are the qualitative version of this; the Quality factor is the quantitative shadow.
Pay up for quality, but with eyes open. Great companies almost always look expensive. The question isn’t whether the multiple is high, it’s whether the economics justify it once you account for long-term growth and the fact that R&D and marketing spend on tech businesses gets expensed where a factory would have been depreciated.
Micro over macro. Understanding a business’s positioning, how it serves customers, and how it defends its value proposition matters more than predicting inflation or trade wars. Macro is outside the business’s control. Position is.
Data-driven, factor-based screening. With the right database, you can rank ~50,000 listed companies globally on Quality, Value, and Momentum, the three factors with the most robust empirical backing (Fama-French, Novy-Marx, Jegadeesh & Titman). For years I have used Stockopedia’s StockRank as my own factor sense-check on every position, and remain a fan. MoatMap is what I built when I needed wider international coverage and integrated AI-driven research that the off-the-shelf tools did not offer. It scores 24,000+ stocks daily across 35 markets.
Be global, with a developed-market bias. The S&P 500 returned ~11% per year in USD over the past 30 years; the FBM KLCI returned under 5% in MYR, and the MYR weakened ~2% per year against the USD over the same window. Concentrating in one market means ignoring an 8-points-per-year structural headwind.
Concentrated portfolio. No more than 25 positions. Diversification is the only free lunch (Markowitz), but past 25 the marginal benefit drops fast and the cost in attention quality rises.
Manage emotions like everything else. The Malaysian investor Cold Eye (Fong Siling) talked about combining good “hardware” (analysis) with good “software” (emotional control). The best analysis in the world won’t survive panic-selling at the bottom. The factor screen is a hardware tool that supports good software by removing one source of emotional decision-making: the question of whether the names you’re looking at actually deserve attention.
What MoatMap is (and isn’t)
It is an educational research tool that scores 24,000+ stocks across 35 markets on Quality, Value, and Momentum, the same three factors with the most robust academic backing for predicting long-term returns. It produces deep-dive AI research reports, factor screens, sector hubs, and a portfolio tracker that lets you score your own holdings against the same framework.
It isn’t personalised investment advice. It doesn’t know your risk tolerance, time horizon, tax situation, or the rest of your portfolio. Treat MoatMap’s output the way professional investors treat a Bloomberg or Refinitiv ranking: a high-signal starting point, not a buy list.
Every position in any portfolio should pass the same three tests: you understand the business well enough to articulate the moat, the price is sensible relative to the cycle, and the position size matches both the conviction and the liquidity. The factor scores are inputs to all three.
Put the framework to work
Start with what is free: check any stock against the Q/V/M framework, or browse the stocks that already rank highest.
Holding more than one? The Portfolio X-Ray scores every position at once, and the free plan's 20 Feathers a month cover one.
Get in touch
Email [email protected] for product feedback, questions about methodology, or bugs. I read everything personally.
Disclosure: MoatMap is a research and education platform. Information on the site is for informational purposes only and does not constitute personalised investment advice. Investing involves risk, including loss of principal. Always do your own research and consider consulting a licensed financial advisor in your jurisdiction before making investment decisions.