We’ve all seen or heard the saying a number of times in investing circles… something to the effect of, if you are right and everyone else is wrong, it really doesn’t matter that you are right until eventually everyone else realizes it. If that moment doesn’t come, you can be logically right about something but wrong on paper when it comes to the P&L behind the idea. And tragically, the crowd has proven that it can go along being wrong for quite a while (even indefinitely).
If there is one thing we’ve learned after helping buyside analysts and PMs for 10+ years now, it is that they are very far from your average consumer. The average consumer can be messy – not always incredibly logical, sometimes reactionary and overly emotional, short-sighted, and sometimes uniformed or impulsive. Hedge fund analysts tend to be more analytical, disciplined, logical, and methodical. Stop me if you can see where we are going here, but there can be a disconnect between how a hedge fund analyst and the average consumer thinks and oftentimes you can park more than a truck between them. The trouble is that the sentiments and behaviors of the average consumer often underpin buyside investment theses, and you can’t bend them to your will with logic.
Every line item in a model is laboriously toiled over and countless dollars are spent on external data to gain marginal improvement in precision. Those data inputs are viewed as “need to have” because you can mathematically calculate the ROI of having that data in a post mortem analysis/backtest. If you move further toward the beginning of the idea funnel – it is harder to mathematically calculate an ROI on the inputs you use to generate ideas and to create a foundation of knowledge that will impact every assumption in your model.
Focusing on the idea gen, thesis support, and knowledge foundation – we believe there is opportunity both in the under-investment in data for that part of the funnel and in the disconnect between how institutional investors think and how the average consumer thinks.
The net/net of all of this, is that if you are investor you should consume more survey data and run more of your own custom surveys.
Request a trial to explore our library of surveys or contact us if you have any custom survey needs ([email protected])… you’ll be hard pressed to find a larger library of buyside generated surveys out there or a vendor that will get you high quality data at a faster speed.