What Is an Economic Moat, and Can You Score It? (With Examples)

An economic moat is whatever stops competitors from taking a company's profits. Buffett's metaphor: a castle with a moat around it. Everyone repeats the idea; far fewer measure it.

The four things a moat actually shows up as

A durable advantage leaves fingerprints in the financial statements:

1. Stable, high margins. Competition erodes margins. Persistent high margins mean something is stopping it.

2. High return on equity without heavy debt. Anyone can lever up a mediocre business into a decent ROE; doing it debt-free is the tell.

3. Scale. Size lowers unit cost and raises the ante for entrants.

4. Consistency across a cycle. A moat that only works in a boom is a boom, not a moat.

Our moat score combines these into a single 0 to 100 number, so you can screen for it rather than argue about it.

Who scores highest right now

• Microsoft (MSFT): 90. Enterprise software with switching costs measured in years.
• Visa (V): 89. A network where every new merchant makes the network more useful.
• NVIDIA (NVDA): 88. The moat here is CUDA and the ecosystem around it as much as the silicon.

The limit of any score

A moat score is a filter, not a verdict. It tells you where to spend your reading time. Pair it with a fair value: a wide moat at any price is still a bad purchase, which is why our screener lets you set both sliders at once.

[Try it free](/register), no card needed.

Educational information, not financial advice.

The bottom line

Buffett popularised the moat. We turned it into a number from 0 to 100. Here is how, and which companies score highest today.

You can check the numbers behind any company mentioned here on SteadyShares, free and with the screen criteria printed. If the idea is new to you, how to research a company is the place to start.

This is educational information, not financial advice.