Working with assumptions and blind spots
Every investment thesis rests on a set of assumptions about how the world works, how a company will perform, or how a market will behave. Most of those assumptions are never written down. They live in the background of your thinking, shaping what you pay attention to and what you dismiss. The problem is not that assumptions exist — they are unavoidable. The problem is when they go unexamined.
A blind spot is simply an assumption you do not know you are making. It might be a belief about a sector's growth trajectory that you absorbed from years of reading without ever testing directly. It might be an implicit view about interest rates, consumer behaviour or competitive dynamics that you have never articulated out loud. Making these visible is one of the most valuable things you can do in a research process, because it turns a hidden variable into something you can actually examine. This section covers practical techniques for surfacing and testing the assumptions that shape your thinking.
Reading and interpreting market information
The volume of market information available to a private investor today is extraordinary. The challenge is not access — it is interpretation. A single piece of news can be read as a signal, as noise, or as confirmation of something you already believed, depending entirely on the framework you bring to it. Without a clear framework, you are likely to interpret new information in whatever way is most consistent with your existing view, which is one of the most reliable ways to make a research process less useful over time.
This section explores how to approach different types of market information — company announcements, macroeconomic data, sector commentary, analyst reports and market price movements — with the kind of structured scepticism that makes interpretation more reliable. The goal is not to distrust everything, but to develop a consistent habit of asking what a piece of information actually tells you, what it does not tell you, and what you would need to see before treating it as a meaningful input to your research.
