Most retail comparisons on the Casablanca Stock Exchange go wrong for the same three reasons, and the remedy is surprisingly short. This article is the recipe: a framework you can run in twenty minutes that filters out the standard traps and leaves you with a reading that is actually worth having.
A Moroccan retail investor opens a broker app, sees two stocks on the watchlist, and starts comparing them line by line: P/E, dividend yield, price change over twelve months, ROE. The first number wins on one screen, the second on another, and the third on a third, and by the end the investor has "done the analysis" without discovering anything because the metrics were never comparable in the first place. This is the template that produces almost every bad comparison on the exchange, and it has three layers of problems: the wrong sectors being compared, the wrong periods being compared, and too many numbers being read instead of too few.
The rest of this article is four habits that together fix all three layers.
The most common mistake is reading the same ratio across two different types of business. A reader looks at ROE for Attijariwafa Bank and ROE for Maroc Telecom, sees one is higher, and writes down a conclusion. That conclusion is meaningless, because ROE at a bank and ROE at a telecom measure different things — the full explanation is in the ROE explainer. The short version is that a bank's equity base is a regulated loss-absorbing cushion and a telecom's is the accounting residual of decades of capital expenditure, so the same ratio carries entirely different signal in the two cases.
If you want to compare across sectors, you need to switch metrics rather than assume one ratio applies everywhere. For a bank, ROE plus PNB growth plus cost of risk. For a telecom, free cash flow yield plus EBITDA margin plus revenue trajectory. For an industrial, return on invested capital plus operating margin plus order book. The output of each framework is comparable at a high level (is the business earning its cost of capital?), but the inputs are different on purpose. The first step in any comparison is therefore: are these two companies in the same sector? If yes, proceed. If no, either stop or switch to a cross-sector framework.
On the Casablanca Stock Exchange, the two most useful same-sector pairs are probably ATW versus BCP (two universal banks) and IAM against either of the two unlisted competitors Orange Maroc and Inwi via any public data you can find (which is mostly ANRT sector reports rather than listed filings). The ATW/BCP pair is the better teaching example because both are public, both report under the same accounting standards, and both face the same Bank Al-Maghrib policy rate — but the structural difference between them is interesting enough to make the comparison meaningful.
The second mistake is subtler and easier to miss. People compare a half-year report from one company with a full-year report from another, or an interim press release from one quarter with a final annual filing from a different year. The numbers look comparable on a page, but they are not.
Banking income on an ATW or BCP half-year is never precisely half of the full-year number, because commission income is lumpy, FX volatility concentrates in specific months, and African subsidiary dividends are booked in specific halves. IAM's half-year is also not half of the full year, because the African operational cycles are not evenly spread. The only safe rule is to compare H1 to H1 and FY to FY, never across.
Scope is the second dimension of the same rule. Most Moroccan listed companies publish both consolidated accounts (including subsidiaries) and social accounts (the parent entity alone). These two versions of "net income" can differ substantially — sometimes the social figure is much smaller because the profitable subsidiaries have been stripped out, sometimes it is much larger because an intercompany dividend flowed in. On a stock page you want the consolidated group-share figure, because that is the version that maps to the economic interest of the shareholder. The Dalil parser deliberately refuses to mix the two scopes, and the methodology page explains why.
The third failure mode is metric-overload. A reader tries to compute twelve ratios, half-remembers what six of them mean, and ends up unable to prioritise them. Three well-understood numbers beat twelve half-understood ones every time, and choosing the right three is where experience actually matters.
For a bank pair like ATW and BCP, the three numbers that carry most of the signal are:
For a telecom comparison the three are different: consolidated revenue trajectory, EBITDA margin, and free cash flow yield (FCF divided by market cap). For an industrial, they would be different again.
Notice that in every case the three numbers reflect the three things the business actually does. They are not generic. That is the point — generic ratios applied universally are the reason most retail comparisons fail.
No ratio can tell you why this year's numbers look the way they do. The answer lives in the management discussion section of the source filing, where the executives who ran the business explain what happened — restatements, disposals, one-off legal charges, changes in accounting treatment, strategic decisions. Skipping this section is the single biggest source of wrong conclusions in retail analysis, because it is the only place where "the number moved because X" gets stated explicitly.
Practical items to look for in any Moroccan filing's management commentary:
Let us walk through an actual comparison to make the framework concrete. Assume you want to compare Attijariwafa and Banque Centrale Populaire for their most recent half-year. The steps, in order:
Step 1. Open the ATW page and the BCP page on Dalil in two tabs. Scroll to the Latest Filing card on each. Confirm both are the same period label — for example both RFS covering H1 of the same calendar year. If one is RFS and the other is RFA, stop. You cannot run the comparison until they match.
Step 2. Compare PNB year-on-year growth. The absolute values will differ because ATW is the larger bank by assets. That difference does not matter for the comparison; the growth rate does. If ATW's PNB grew five percent and BCP's grew two percent, ATW's lending franchise is pulling ahead this period.
Step 3. Compare net income group share growth. Same logic — absolute values differ, growth rate is what you are comparing. Then compute the ratio of net income to PNB at each bank. That ratio is roughly the bank's operating efficiency and is directly comparable across banks of different sizes.
Step 4. Compare ROE with the structural footnote. If ATW reports 17 percent ROE and BCP reports 11 percent, that is not a one-for-one gap. The cooperative base at BCP adds several points of equity that would not be there at a pure commercial bank. Mentally normalise to something like "15 versus 14" before drawing conclusions. The ROE explainer goes into this in detail.
Step 5. Open both source PDFs — linked from the stock pages — and read the management commentary sections. This is where you find out whether the ATW gap was produced by genuine outperformance or by a one-off item like a gain on the disposal of a non-core asset, and whether the BCP gap reflects operational drag or a prudential provisioning decision that will reverse next period. Without this step the comparison is incomplete no matter how careful the ratio work was.
Step 6. Write down a one-paragraph conclusion. It should identify which bank had the better period, by how much, and what the main reasons were. If you cannot write that paragraph cleanly, the comparison did not produce actionable reading and you need to either collect more information or accept that this particular period is not interpretable.
A habit for the next Moroccan earnings season: rather than opening the Dalil dashboard and scanning the headline movers, pick two same-sector names and run this framework on them. Twenty minutes, two PDFs open on a second monitor, a notebook for the three numbers. The payoff is that you end the session with a comparison that survives challenge, rather than a vague sense that one stock is doing better than the other.