Your research starts in the world, not the spreadsheet. The packed store, the product your friends won't stop recommending, the software your industry quietly standardised on: you notice demand while it is still anecdote, quarters before it becomes data. Your professional and personal life is a scanner most analysts would pay for.
You verify with the numbers, but the numbers confirm what your feet already found. That sequencing is your edge: by the time growth is in the filings, the easy part of the repricing is often done.
Where you’re strong
- Primary research by instinct: stores, products, and people, not just filings
- Finds ideas in plain sight that screens structurally miss
- Early to inflections because anecdote leads data
Where you’re blind
- Extrapolating your own enthusiasm into the whole market's
- Loving the product and skipping the balance sheet
- A sample of one city, one industry, one circle of friends
Archetypes describe temperament, not skill, and this page is for education and self-reflection. Nothing here is investment advice or a recommendation to buy or sell any security.