about CFRA

Competitive advantage
Founded as the Center for Financial Research and Analysis (CFRA) in 1994, CFRA is a global independent research business that provides forensic accounting, earnings quality, and legal research and solutions to institutional investors, underwriters, and other financial institutions. CFRA is the recognized leader in Forensic Accounting Research and develops unique exception-based research products that help clients sift through the noise and assess the quality of inputs into their models and processes.

CFRA's products and services provides:

A unique and objective perspective to reviewing earnings and cash flow quality and sustainability, corporate governance, legal/regulatory risk, and overall business health
Important information and early warning signs of business deterioration
Coverage of an extensive universe of companies in North America, Europe, and Asia with an exception-based accounting methodology that has proven to be an early warning signal for many high profile frauds and bankruptcies as well as countless earnings disappointments.
High-touch service by an expert team of accredited analysts
A valuable resource for idea assessment, risk management, portfolio monitoring, continuing education, due diligence, and special project work
Company history
With a relatively small staff, CFRA was founded in 1994 and immediately began serving long-only funds that thought they would benefit by understanding alpha-killing time bombs in their portfolios and hedge fund clients looking for early signs of company weakness to support short strategies. CFRA was able to add meaningful insight and early warnings to such frauds as Worldcom and Parmalat as well as provide prescient calls on several other large stock declines. 2002 also saw the formal launch of CFRA's European company coverage, a first in the industry.

In 2005, CFRA acquired Criterion, LLC, who had developed a quality of earnings model based on accrual anomaly research by professors Richard Sloan and Scott Richardson. In 2006, CFRA received broad recognition for its market moving work on the growing options backdating scandal, identifying early several companies at risk for scrutiny around this controversial practice. In addition, CFRA's series on the growing risk in the subprime mortgage space received wide media recognition and culminated in the addition of New Century Financial to the Biggest Concerns list, several months before that company filed for bankruptcy related to risks we identified. In 2006 CFRA launched its Legal Edge service. In 2007 RiskMetrics Group acquired CFRA.

CFRA's research product has continued to thrive, underperforming the broad market index each year and by a cumulative 67% in North America from 2005 - 2011*. In 2008, CFRA received awards for its coverage and contrarian view on General Electric and in 2009 for its early call on risks in the alternative energy sector, with many stocks down 30 per cent or more from where coverage was initiated. On June 1, 2010, MSCI acquired the RiskMetrics Group which included CFRA. In 2011, CFRA launched coverage of Asian companies and now has analysts located in Singapore and Manila in addition to US based analysts focusing on Asia

* Note: The performance data shown represents past performance, which is no guarantee of future results. Current performance may be higher or lower than the performance data quoted.

Career opportunities
Junior Salesperson
Mid-Level Developer
Research Analyst - Europe