Interesting little write up, thank you for sharing!

Great post, a wonderful product/service is not necessarily a great investment. I think when we fall in love with the product it’s very easy to overlook the financial and valuation profile. $DIS and $BA come to mind.

Excellent write up Benjamin. All retail investors need to read this article and give it the full attention it deserves.

I'm a disciple of Peter Lynch's teachings, learning my early investing principles from "One Up On Wall Street" and his follow up "Beating The Street".

Back in the late 80s and early 90s when those books were published, the Institutions had a definitive information and analytical advantage (edge) over the retail investor. There was no internet, there was only newspapers, magazines and books. By the time the retail investor got information about their stocks, it was a day, week or in the case of magazines, a month late. That information was already reflected in the stock prices. You generally saw the stock price movement in the paper a day after the trading session, then the explanation for that move would come later ! Investing in what you know and the products you engaged with every day was the most viable way of investing in an information constricted landscape. Most Gen-X of my age (or geriatric Millennials as we've been called) who survived 35+ years in the markets tend to have portfolios whose largest individual stock positions are in companies like Proctor & Gamble ($PG), Johnson & Johnson ($JNJ), McDonalds ($MCD), Coca Cola ($KO, Kellogg ($K), General Mills ($GIS), Colgate Palmolive ($CL) etc. These were companies whose products we engaged with every day, and the best way to keep track of these companies was by keeping tabs on the quality of their products and reading their annual reports once a year. Everyone's long-term portfolios tend to be a reflection of their generation, just like most young investor portfolios tend to be tech heavy because they are a product of a tech generation.

Confirmation bias was all part of the deal with our generation and it was a major hazard. There was no internet to search out contrary opinions. If you were lucky, you might find the odd article on Worth or maybe the Wall Street Journal (if you could afford the subscription) with a contrary opinion piece on a stock you owned.

Nowadays, it's so easy and cheap to find the bear case on any stock you hold or intend to buy. As your article intimates, it should be a mandatory step in your due diligence to seek the bear case, especially when that information is easily accessible today. Retail investors now have the means to plug up the blind spots that my generation couldn't easily avoid. Confirmation bias is easier to combat today than it ever was 30+ years ago. Retail investors should take advantage of that. Know what you own, know why you own it, but also know what can go wrong. That last piece of information might just save you a lot of money.

I’m addicted to Twitter and Spotify, but ultimately decided none of them was a good investment😞

Uber is a service that I get a lot out of a consumer but have always felt as though was being subsidised by Uber investors (and so I’m not too keen on becoming one!)

Except he never actually said that :) Like all catchy quotes, it seems to be a modification of what he actually said

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​Peter Lynch wants you to know that his ideas are being misquoted widely.

“I’ve never said, ‘If you go to a mall, see a Starbucks and say it’s good coffee, you should call Fidelity brokerage and buy the stock,’” Lynch says, some 25 years after his retirement from running Magellan Fund was front-page news.