Working with assumptions
Every investment thesis is built on assumptions. Some are explicit — a view about revenue growth, a judgement about competitive dynamics, an expectation about interest rate direction. Others are implicit, embedded in the way you have framed the question or the data you have chosen to weight most heavily. The implicit ones are the more dangerous, because they are harder to challenge and easier to overlook when circumstances change.
A useful discipline is to make assumption-surfacing a deliberate step in your research process rather than something that happens only when a thesis goes wrong. For each view you hold, ask what would have to be true for this to play out as expected. Then ask which of those conditions you are most confident about and which you are least confident about. The answers will often reveal that a thesis rests more heavily on one or two pivotal assumptions than the overall structure suggests — and that is exactly the kind of insight that improves decision quality.