To get to Ned Davis' Venice office in a nondescript strip mall on Bird Bay Drive and U.S. 41, you walk past the receptionist, turn right, go through a labyrinth of corridors, ramps, and seam-bursting offices that house many of the company's 62 employees, turn right again, climb two flights of stairs, and turn left and right again. By the time you're leaving the building, your internal compass is so messed up you're prone to make wrong turns into lunchrooms or closets.

This confusing maze is the headquarters of Ned Davis Research, a fixture in the financial industry, and reflects 26 years of steady, organic growth in the same humble building.

A major factor in NDR's success has been the company founder's fame. Davis may be working in a Southwest Florida retiree haven, but he is well respected among the financial crème in New York City. On Wall Street, the bearded Nashville native with the Southern drawl has steadily built a reputation as a cool-minded "quant wonk." Over the past quarter century, he became known as an expert number cruncher and chart plotter, looking for patterns and trends in market history in order to understand the present. His company's particular niche in the fragmented independent research market is to help institutional investors with huge portfolios decide when to buy or sell.

NDR has been thriving in this niche: Today, some 1,000-plus customers make revenues in the $20 million range. In a recent survey among such big institutional investors, NDR ranked fourth among all independent research firms in terms of number of clients. In the 2004 survey, NDR was in a tie with one direct competitor, Montreal-based BCA Research, and was nipping at the heels of another, ISI Group of New York. In other words, NDR is a top player in the quantitative research niche.

In the era of day trading, someone who looks back as far as 1881 may seem out of date. But NDR's detached long-term perspective leads to conclusions that are head-turners for investors.

Take this: What do you think is better for markets, high or low corporate earnings? Below-trend earnings growth typically boosts stock prices, NDR found in a report that correlated earnings and stock prices since 1958.

Or swallow this: Which is better for markets-Republican or Democratic presidents? Since 1901, NDR found, the Dow Jones average annual gain, after inflation, has been nearly twice as high when a Democrat occupied the White House. (To be sure, markets seem to love political gridlock: The biggest gains happened during Democratic president/Republican Congressional line ups).

Davis didn't get any formal schooling in his field. He entered the world of finance in the late 1960s with a degree in French from the University of North Carolina.

"My interests were all verbal, but my aptitude, quite frankly, is average," Davis says. "My math skills were high, but I wasn't interested in any math areas."

A summer job at J.C. Bradford & Co., a brokerage in Nashville that was later swallowed by UBS, gave him an opportunity to combine his talent and inclination-working with numbers and writing about his views. He got hooked for life and continued to work for Bradford for a dozen years.

Davis' data analysis skills are self-taught. "I like to encourage people to motivate themselves and do it," he says. "When you learn it yourself, you feel like you own it."

Research and analysis remain at the core of his activities today. Davis has always been more inclined to focus on the "product"-in other words, have fun with research-than to micromanage his growing company.

Personal inclinations are what made him move his business from Nashville to Venice in 1978. In the pre-Internet era, such a lifestyle decision was unusual. And southwest Florida isn't exactly an easy region for recruiting top-grade market experts.

At the same time, he is not so easygoing or wonkish to lose touch with the necessities of operating a business. From day one in 1980, when he started Ned Davis Research with two colleagues from J.C. Bradford, he and his partners decided to set up a full-blown, separate sales department.

Says Davis: "You'd like to believe that your research is so good it sells itself. But, in fact, this is very, very rare."

Partners Ed Mendel and Kent Regenstein founded Davis, Mendel & Regenstein Inc. to serve as the company's marketing arm and registered it as an NASD brokerage. The Atlanta firm is a full subsidiary of NDR and is conveniently located at one of the biggest airline hubs in the world.

"That's one of the reasons we've had a lot more success than some other independent research companies," says Davis. "I hate to say it, but marketing is 50 percent of the sale."