Value investing · Course 24 of 39 · The practice
The research process
Where ideas come from, how to kill a bad one fast, the forensic pass, research beyond the filings, the variant view, and the memo that becomes a thesis.
For a reader who has read a statement, judged a business and put a value on one, and now wants the process that turns an idea into a decision.
This course covers where ideas come from, a five-question filter that ends most of them inside an hour, the fixed forensic pass to run before trusting any figure, and scuttlebutt, the evidence a filing cannot give you. It closes with stating a variant view and writing the one-page memo that becomes a thesis, guardrails and all.
After it you can take an idea from first sight to a memo someone else could read and check.
It assumes the statements, accounting-quality, credit, valuation and masters courses before it, and the screens and special-situations courses this course's first lesson draws ideas from.
The method, not the running of it
The research process is 7 lessons on running the whole method on one company. Running it is the part that only happens against real filings, on a real date, and this course has none of yours. It also cannot tell you the day one of your reasons stops being true, which is the part that matters after you have bought.
See our methodology for how the product reads a filing and what it refuses to compute.