All,
I feel pretty confident about my quantitative assessments for companies from their financial statements, investor relations material, etc. The thing that I don’t feel confident about is my qualitative assessments of a given company. I would really appreciate hearing from the board how you go about assessing a company’s future prospects, sizing them up in relation to their competition, moats, etc. Most of the information I use for my research comes from the company’s own releases and I am not sure what to look for or what to trust from sources outside of the company since everyone has a different opinion. As a simple illustration, how do I determine the capability and future potential of CRWD versus ZS since they both now have zero trust IP? Say from my quantitative assessment I see that revenue growth is decreasing. How would I determine the cause outside of what the company releases since there could be multiple reasons? Could be TAM, competition, product deficiencies, etc and the company might downplay it as a normal part of business.
I have learned a lot from this board and would value any insight on this topic.
-Marcus