A RANDOM WALK FROM COPENHAGEN TO CLEVELAND – 4TH QUARTER, 2023
By Claire Thornhill
At EdgePoint we talk a lot about our proprietary insights – the ideas we have about a business that aren’t widely held by others. They usually explain why we think we can buy the business at an attractive price.
One of the most-common questions we get asked is how we find these proprietary insights. In one of the early commentaries, Geoff and Tye spent a lot of time trying to explain our approach to new investors:
Proprietary insights typically evolve from meaningful research acquired over time. There’s no way to filter for them and no simple formula to nurture them. Their development is unpredictable and can often be an unconscious act. We generate insights by accumulating facts and applying reasoning to those facts. The reality is that the majority will prove worthless in fostering a proprietary view. They may help you know what others know, but no more than that. The rare time you can logically connect the facts that really matter, you gain a unique insight.
Every name in an EdgePoint Portfolio has a story behind our proprietary insight. Each one’s different, but the common thread among them all is that the idea rarely comes from a single data point. There’s usually a tale about how dots were connected or how the jigsaw pieces fell into place.
This story is about the random walk that led to two big ideas ending up in the Global Portfolio today.
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