The Idiot Index

Applied to chemicals, industrial gases, mining, metals, and packaging companies. COGS captures raw material extraction, refining, and primary processing — this sector is the "stuff that becomes other stuff" layer of the economy. Markup ratios are cyclical with commodity input costs; sector medians are the right comparison. Shareholder Extraction is informative because materials companies face structural choices between buybacks and reinvestment in capacity.

Required disclosure under Dodd-Frank Section 953(b) since 2018. Filed in DEF 14A proxy statements. The dashboard aggregates the disclosure across the top 50 and ranks.

Source data: CEO total compensation and median employee compensation, both as filed in the company's most recent DEF 14A. When the ratio is XBRL-tagged we use the tagged value; otherwise the narrative disclosure is parsed (~99% accuracy).