To stand out, Gary Black believes analysts must challenge consensus views, uncover hidden market insights, and simplify investment models. Effective research involves direct conversations with industry insiders and a relentless pursuit of critical data.
TRANSCRIPT
What maybe the one or two key insights you either learned or were taught that kind of makes a great analyst versus maybe an average analyst?
Well, I think there's three things that, and I've tried to do my whole career. One, embrace controversy. You got to have a fight in order to make money. Usually with research, there's got to be some investment controversy where people are either evenly divided or adamantly fighting about some issue. So we try to find an investment controversy. Two, find a research edge that you can actually cultivate. You've got to be able to say, I'm finding out something that the rest of the market doesn't know. And we always are trying to look for a research edge. And if you can't get it from the company, which usually you can't because they're not going to tell you everything. You got to go out and do your own work, talk to distributors, do mock juries, talk to customers, talk to competitors, and then figure out the one or two drivers of a stock. And then just really research that relentlessly.
We used to call it the key drivers, right? In any company, what's the key driver?
But a lot of analysts get, they want to build these elaborate models. And not that I'm against elaborate models, I've got my own elaborate models, but what you find is if you can get those one or two key variables right, you can get the stock right. And I've kept that through my career.
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