Learning objectives
By the end you can:
- Run a scuttlebutt program from Fisher's 15 points, treating each point as a research question with a named source, knowing exactly what a customer, an ex-employee, a supplier, and a competitor each reveals, and which of the 15 the numbers can already answer versus which require primary legwork.
- Deploy the modern qualitative toolkit: expert networks (Tegus, AlphaSense), channel checks, Glassdoor/AmbitionBox, app reviews, and web-traffic/alt-data. Know precisely what each reveals and where each lies, and reconstruct all of it as a solo learner with only free sources.
- Read the incentives cold from a US DEF 14A and an Indian Board's Report + related-party annexure + promoter-pledge disclosure, and predict the capital-allocation and disclosure behavior each structure buys (applying and extending the M3.07 §4.8 framework as a mandatory Day-3 step).
- **Review four to eight earnings calls across good and bad quarters** and score management on the four tells, learning most from how they handle adversity: do they answer straight, own mistakes specifically, keep prior promises (a quarter-by-quarter promise ledger), and hold a consistent story?
- Steelman the bear: locate the short/bear thesis, rebuild it stronger than its authors made it, and convert it into a short list of falsifiable break-variables, each with a monitoring metric; and classify it as a valuation-bear (wait) or a thesis-bear (fatal).
- Run the written checklist and write a one-page thesis in the exact six-part structure (business · why it's a good business · the variant perception · the three things that must go right · valuation & expected return · sell criteria) so that all five spine questions are answerable from one page.
- Conduct a pre-mortem ("it is three years later and this was a disaster — what happened?") and turn each disaster path into an early-warning trigger and a pre-committed action.
Prerequisites & connections
Builds on. M8.03 most directly: the history spreadsheet, the incremental-ROIC exhibit, the peer benchmark, the base/bull/bear model, and above all the reverse DCF are the raw material Day 3 pressure-tests, and the variant perception is literally your view minus the reverse-DCF's implied view. From M3.07 §4.8–4.9, the incentive-reading framework (comp-metric → allocation bias) and the decade allocation scorecard are consumed here as finished tools and made a permanent Day-3 step. The written investment checklist you assembled in M6.05 is the gate you run in §4.7. M6.02 gave you Fisher's scuttlebutt and the growth school; M6.03, inversion and pre-mortems, and expected-value/base-rate thinking; M6.04, the confirmation bias that steelmanning exists to defeat. M4.04–M4.06 hold the moat lenses that scuttlebutt confirms or refutes in the field (a claimed switching cost that ex-employees and customers deny is not a moat). M2.06–M2.08 built the forensic reflex, now pointed at proxies, RPT notes, and management tone instead of the P&L. M5 is the sector playbook that tells you which scuttlebutt questions and KPIs matter for this business.
Feeds forward. M8.05 (reps & certification): the one-page thesis and pre-mortem are half of what the certification grades, now under time pressure on never-studied companies. Phase 9: the thesis's valuation-&-return section feeds position sizing (M9.01), and the sell criteria and pre-mortem triggers become the decision-journal entry (M9.03–M9.04) written before the outcome is known. Phase 10: the institutional capstone deep dives (M10.01–M10.02) are this method run unaided. Competency map: this module is a primary builder of C7 (evaluate management & capital allocation: the incentive read and call audit), C3 (understand a business model cold, because scuttlebutt closes the gaps the filings leave), and C10 (the signature skill, where the write-up is the deliverable), and it carries the ethics & governance thread (§8.1) into live judgment.
The one-sentence version of this module. The numbers are shared by everyone; your edge is what you learn about the customers, the culture, the incentives, and the bear case that the market has priced lazily, and the discipline to write it down as a falsifiable, one-page thesis you can be held to.