Interview with Philip Van den Berge MSc, Founder & CEO, Intrinsiqq

This interview is with Philip Van den Berge MSc, Founder & CEO, Intrinsiqq.

Philip, as Founder & CEO of Intrinsiqq, how does building a platform that derives investment fundamentals from primary company filings shape the expertise you bring to financial information and investor decision-making?

I built Intrinsiqq because I wanted to see whether a company had good fundamentals in one second, without trusting someone else’s summary of them. Every number on the site is parsed out of the company’s own SEC filings, so I spend most of my time in the gap between what a company reported and what the market repeats back.

That gap is wider than most investors expect.

1. The first thing you learn is that there is no single revenue number. One company can tag revenue three different ways across five years, restate it, and leave an abandoned tag sitting in the filing that looks perfectly valid to a parser. I have had to write company-specific rules to stop a stale tag from becoming a headline figure. When two sites show you different revenue for the same year, usually neither is lying. They picked different tags.

2. The second is that a correct number can still be a misleading one. One large-cap I track had trailing net income close to double its operating reality, entirely because of unrealized gains on equity stakes. The earnings were real and reported correctly. The P/E built on top of them was nearly meaningless. No screener warns you about that.

3. The third is that comparability quietly breaks at borders and across industries. Foreign filers report under IFRS with different statement structures, and a bank, an insurer and a REIT cannot be scored on the same template as a software company without producing nonsense.

What career experiences led you from your background in international economics and data analytics to founding an information-services company focused on transparent, filing-based stock analysis?

I have always focused on businesses and the macroeconomic environment. I have also always been interested in stocks, and when I started investing I aimed to obtain as much information as possible about the companies I was evaluating.

The gap I’m addressing is making the numbers visual, using many graphs and customizable charts.

When you negotiate a contract with a data, technology, or payment-services provider, which clause has proven most important for protecting your business, and how do you evaluate it?

The redistribution and display-rights clause — not price, not uptime, not the SLA.

Most people negotiating a data or technology contract start at the pricing page. I start at the section that says what I am allowed to do with the output. A lot of financial data is cheap or free for personal use and flatly prohibited inside a commercial product, and that restriction is almost never on the marketing site. It is three clicks into the terms.

That clause decided my entire architecture. It is why the fundamentals in my product are parsed from SEC EDGAR filings, which are public record, rather than pulled from a vendor feed I would not have been allowed to show to paying users. Getting that wrong would not have cost me a penalty; it would have meant rebuilding the whole data layer under legal pressure.

How I evaluate it, in order:

1. Can I show this to end users, or only use it internally? Those are completely different licences.
2. Does the licence survive the contract? If I stop paying, do I have to delete what I already stored? For anything cached or derived, that single question decides whether switching vendors is an inconvenience or an outage.
3. What exactly expires, and on what timer? I learned this one the hard way. A provider we had prepaid sold credits that expired on a calendar timer rather than on usage. It was in the terms and nowhere in the dashboard. Now I diff the contract against what the dashboard claims, and I monitor every dependency by its own failure mode instead of assuming a paid invoice means a working service.

The pattern underneath all of it is simple: read the clauses that describe the day the relationship ends. The ones about the good days take care of themselves.

How have you approached intellectual-property protection for Intrinsiqq’s proprietary methodology and analytics while remaining transparent enough for users to understand and audit your work?

I decided early that the methodology is not the intellectual property, and treating it as though it were would have made the product worse.

So we publish it in full. Not a summary of the approach:

• The actual weight of every component in the quality score
• The exact thresholds each component is graded against
• Which XBRL tags map to which line item
• How trailing twelve-month figures are assembled
• What happens in each fallback case

If a company scores a 72, a reader can rebuild that 72 by hand from the filings.

Two reasons for that.

1. The first is that this is people’s money. A score you cannot inspect is an opinion with a number attached to it. I would not act on it myself, so I am not going to ask users to act on it. Publishing the thresholds also makes the work falsifiable, which is the point. If a rule is bad, someone can tell me exactly which rule and why.

2. The second is that the formula was never the defensible part. A competent developer could copy our weights in an afternoon. What they cannot copy in an afternoon is everything underneath them: years of accumulated corrections for companies that tag the same line item inconsistently, restatements, filers reporting under IFRS rather than US GAAP with different statement structures, and separate scorecards for banks, insurers, and REITs, because grading them on a software company’s template produces nonsense. The moat is the data engineering and the maintenance, not the arithmetic.

The distinction I would press other founders on is auditability rather than transparency. Publishing a methodology page once is easy. We link individual metrics back to the specific filing they were derived from, and we keep a dated changelog of methodology changes, so when a number moves, a user can tell whether the company restated its figures or whether we changed a definition. That difference is the entire thing.

What is one compliance practice you built into Intrinsiqq early that has made the company more trustworthy or easier to operate as it has grown?

I drew a hard line at providing investment advice before anyone made me.

Intrinsiqq shows you what a company reported and how it scores against published criteria. It never tells you what to buy. No signals, no price targets, no recommendations anywhere in the product.

How do you use data analytics and Power BI to turn compliance, operational, or financial information into decisions that a founder can act on quickly?

I keep one nightly report that joins our product database, web analytics, and payment data into three visuals:

• weekly signups
• day two and day seven return rates
• trial conversion

Reading it takes about ten minutes on a Monday.

It paid for itself the week the cohort view showed my churn was happening on day one rather than in month three, which killed a quarter of planned feature work and sent me back to rebuild onboarding instead.

From your experience analyzing public-company fundamentals, what practical framework can individual investors use to distinguish durable wealth-building opportunities from stocks driven mainly by a compelling narrative?

Narratives live in press releases and guidance. Durability lives in the cash flow statement. So my framework is four questions, asked in order, applied to five years of filings rather than a single quarter of headlines.

1. Does the growth reach cash? Revenue and free cash flow should ideally both be compounding.

2. Is the share count moving the right way? This is the most reliable narrative detector I know, and the one individual investors skip most often. A company can grow revenue 20% a year and still leave you poorer if it prints shares to get there. You own a slice, not the whole, so check whether your slice is getting bigger or smaller.

3. Do margins improve as it scales? If a business is genuinely getting better, operating margin should widen over three years. If revenue climbs and margins do not, scale is not producing any leverage, and the story is doing the work the economics are not.

4. Does it earn more than its capital costs? A return on invested capital below roughly 8–10% means growth is destroying value rather than creating it. Growth is only worth paying for when the return on it beats what the money costs.

Only then look at the price. Valuation is the last question, not the first, because a cheap bad business is still a bad business.

Two habits matter as much as the checks themselves:

• Read the numbers out of the filings rather than a summary of them, because sources disagree far more often than people realize.

• Write down in advance what would prove you wrong, as a specific number in a specific future filing. A narrative you cannot falsify is not a thesis; it is a hope.

What is one investing or wealth-management discipline you follow personally that has become more important as markets have grown increasingly concentrated in a small number of large technology companies?

Diversification.

I always make sure to diversify my portfolio. In my case, that means buying stocks in different sectors and in different countries. I don’t want a fully US-oriented portfolio.