I like the process of investing (and of course, the outcome); if someone had asked me two years ago, “What do you want to work as?” I would have said equity research, because it seemed to be congruous to investing then. Unfortunately, for reasons that I will explain, I no longer believe that to be true.

Conservatism

An equity research analyst’s job is to predict the most probable outcome in terms of financial performance for a specific company. I mean, no firm would pay an analyst to simply assume 0% growth projection for the sake of conservatism. In a nutshell, research analysts value firms based on the most probable outcome of events, the mind-set of a value investor, as I would like to think, cannot be more different. An ideal investment is one which is still undervalued even if the improbable happens and financial performance isn’t as good as ......