CGP creates value by tracking and understanding retail customer behaviors and converting that understanding into actionable insights for institutional investors addressing the retail and consumer sectors. 

CGP focuses on analyzing companies, not stocks, and neither makes stock recommendations nor trades in stocks.  In its institutional investor practice, CGP focuses on factors driving changes in retail performance and on recognizing these inflection points before they are understood by the market—and sometimes even by management.

CGP’s buy-side clients, both domestic and international, typically comprise five categories: 

• Major asset management firms with longer (three to six year) holding periods
• Hedge fund (long-short) firms, characterized by shorter time horizons and more active trading
• Quantitative-oriented firms seeking insight into broader changes in consumer spending behaviors
• Institutional investors active in the distressed debt sector, typically generalists
• Selective private equity firms
• Clients typically rely on CGP to provide real-time, “feet-on-the-street” metrics on retail activity, with a deep historical database going back many years, combined with the strategic insight and cross-industry experience that Management  provides.  Key advantages that CGP makes available to client firms include:

Ability to identify emerging inflection points in retailer performance, particularly downturns, on a real-time basis.  The flagship Retail Growth Vectors report identifies retailers entering inflection points, up or down, in sales and comp store performance, and is issued about 8 times a year.

Broadly accurate predictions of real-time near term retail performance, drawing on our Big Data platform.  The Retail Read Report, issued quarterly for each retailer we cover, provides Total Sales and Comp estimates at quarter-end and prior to earnings, drawing on the thousands of observations we conduct quarterly at each retailer.   This report series includes key performance drivers, emerging threats, competitive dynamics, and selected retail metrics such as units per transaction, average selling prices, average transaction size and conversion rates.

 Annual, Holiday and Back-to-School Forecasts have been conducted since 2001 and are believed to be unparalleled in their accuracy in predicting future performance in these key retail selling periods.