"I think I've been in the top 5% of my age cohort all my life in understanding the power of incentives, and all my life I've underestimated it," Warren Buffett's business partner, Charlie Munger, once said. "And never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes my limit a little farther."

For corporate boards, using bad incentives for management pay can be disastrous. (Think Lehman Brothers.) Incentives based on singular metrics such as revenue growth, EBITDA, return on equity, or earnings per share are easily manipulated and gamed. Fortunately, EVA Momentum provides a better alternative.

Creator Bennett Stewart of EVA Dimensions, who also co-created EVA (Economic Value Added), calls EVA momentum "the only percent metric where more is always better than less. It always increases when managers do things that make economic sense."

So what does this mean for investors? A positive reading on EVA Momentum means a company has created value by increasing its EVA, and a negative EVA Momentum means EVA and, thus, value have decreased, signaling a destruction of value. EVA Momentum is one of the few performance measurements, if not the only one, with such a clear dividing line between good and bad performance.

The best companies, then, create value in excess of their cost of capital, as reflected by positive EVA momentum. The higher the EVA momentum, the more value management is creating.

Let's look at VMWare and three of its software-industry peers to see how effectively they create value. Here are the trailing four quarters' worth of EVA momentum figures for each company over the past three years, along with rankings by percentile versus the application and systems software industry for the past 12 months' EVA momentum.

Company

2008

2009

2010

Industry Percentile

VMware (NYSE: VMW) 9.9% (2.8%) 3.0% 74
Tibco Software (Nasdaq: TIBX) (1.1%) 2.9% 2.8% 66
Lawson Software (Nasdaq: LWSN) 2.0% 2.2% (1.9%) 23
American Software (Nasdaq: AMSWA) (3.2%) (2.2%) 0.2% 41

Source: EVA Dimensions LLC.

Nearly all of these software companies created value this past year, with only Lawson Software destroying shareholder value. Of the remaining three, VMWare created the most relative value, slightly edging out Tibco Software by 0.2%. American Software created just slightly more value than its cost of capital, but at least it's not destroying value.

Businesses with high EVA momentum are effectively creating value. It will be interesting to see how useful this extremely new metric proves to be for companies and investors. If it lives up to its promise, it will be an essential tool in investors' arsenals.

Another tool for better investing
Most investors don't keep tabs on their companies' fundamental value. That's a mistake. If you take the time to read past the headlines and crack a filing now and then, you're in a much better position to spot potential trouble early. Better yet, you'll improve your odds of finding the underappreciated home-run stocks that provide the market's best returns.

We can help you keep tabs on your companies with My Watchlist, our free, personalized stock-tracking service.