Camden, I am not advocating ROE or ROIC as better than OCF / Maintenance Capex. I do feel they measure different things, and each gives information you might want to consider.
ROE incorporates all of the investments into the business, the retained earnings, and of course all of the accumulated mistakes like acquisitions that cost too much. A bad acquisition is not a scarlet letter that means we cannot look at anything else. But when you see ROE much lower than other metrics, and then you see a big goodwill number, then you have to realize someone made a boo-boo along the way, and you have to at least consider that datapoint. And what happened in the past might happen in the future. At least think about that issue.
Looking at ROIC and considering the return that the further investment made by debt implies, is also useful.
Both of those measures consider the history of how we got to where we are over time. That's useful.
Looking at Operating Cash Flow over maintenance capex looks more at something like capital efficiency. You are looking at the ability of the business to generate excess cash which it can then either invest or return to shareholders. That's more about defining the minimum capital needs of the business against its cash flow. It's very useful to know this as well, but I don't see this as competing with ROE or ROIC. Each is answering a different question.
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