Does doing stock pitches and reading all day earlier on (like in college) create a lasting edge as an investor?
If you could go back in time, would you have dedicated more time to doing more pitches, reading more books, and becoming a "better investor." Does reading intensely about different companies/industries and doing lots of pitches early in college actually have a high ROI in the real world (meaning it materially makes you a better investor relative to peers) or does that advantage mostly wash out once everyone starts working and gets exposed to the industry. In other words, when you enter the real world, is the kid who did pitches/read constantly in college meaningfully better as an investor than the kid who just did enough for banking recruiting and didn’t go much beyond that?
My view as someone who did a lot of stock pitches / investment club stuff in college is that the type of person who does these things is more likely to be genuinely interested in investing and therefore will invest more time into learning (reading industry materials, investor letters, researching names, etc) and do better as a result of that (not the fact that they did stock pitches in college per se).
There is also some value to following companies and learning about different business models earlier on (e.g., starting freshman year of college) and just starting to get reps in.
I really appreciate your perspective. One quick follow-up for everyone. I’ve heard the stories of how the great investors of this generation spent countless hours reading, learning, and perfecting their craft. However, given how the public markets have changed, do you think it's still possible to achieve the success they did by putting in the work early on? I genuinely enjoy reading and investing, and I’m considering committing a lot of my early career to it but with all the ‘headwind’ talk, I’d love your honest take on whether it’s still worth going all-in.
This is just my opinion as someone junior, but investing is not going anywhere and there will always be a need for intelligent, thoughtful, well-informed investors who can manage teams and convince LPs to invest. There will always be pockets that are performing better or worse, and new strategies and strategies that are falling out of favor. Yes, the industry (very broadly speaking) is more competitive today, but it’s still overall quite lucrative. Public equities are one of the toughest areas to invest, but if you genuinely love public markets it would still likely make sense for you to work there and do what you enjoy.
15 years on the buy-side, former 5-Star Morningstar rated PM here and have heard 1,000+ pitches. The first answer is right that the type of person matters. But how you practice matters more than volume—and most students practice wrong.
Here's what I mean. I've heard countless pitches that sound like this: "Long Walmart. World's largest retailer, dominant scale, low-cost operator, defensive positioning, trades at a discount to peers." Technically accurate. Well-presented. And indistinguishable from every other candidate.
That's a book report. It describes the company. It doesn't predict a mispricing.
A pitch that actually lands sounds different: "Consensus spent five years waiting for Amazon to kill Walmart. They got it backwards. Walmart's store footprint isn't a liability—it's a last-mile advantage. Curbside pickup, Walmart+, and grocery delivery are all inflecting because they have 4,700 locations within 10 miles of 90% of Americans. The market priced this as a melting ice cube. It's actually an omnichannel compounder with distribution infrastructure Amazon would spend $50B to replicate."
Same company. One gets rejected. One gets a callback.
The problem is most students practice the first version over and over. They get feedback from classmates and competition judges who reward polish and thoroughness. Then they sit across from a PM who's heard the same pitch fifty times and is waiting for someone to tell them something they don't already know.
What actually compounds: training yourself to ask "what does the market believe, and why is it wrong?" before you touch the model. That's the muscle. Build it early and it's a real edge. Do more reps without it and you're just reinforcing habits you'll have to unlearn.
great answer but unfortunately this is chatGPT
I think the point here is to avoid making the pitch sound like an investor presentation
I am a junior asw so take with a pinch of salt. Investing at the end of the day becomes pattern recognition and massive exposure is the simplest way to get better at it. Once you read enough pitches you will realize that all ideas fall in not more than 10 buckets (separately for L/S). If you read pitches and find yourself thinking that i have seen this one before again and again that's kind of a good indication that you are at a point where the return on time can be better somewhere else but till then it is incredibly useful in developing your intuition for what makes a successful pitch.
The more you start creating your own pitches you will realize that there are specific elements of your pitch that are weaker/you struggle with and I would particular focus on those aspects of other people's pitches to adopt better practices. (Eg. Your catalyst path is shit or you haven't given enough attention to the downside case or no channel checks etc.)
At the end of the day I strong believe more time must be spent creating your own pitches and getting feedback is much more useful than reading other pitches. But if you do find a really good pitch read it 10 times to understand all its nuances than reading 10 random pitches. It is similar to what Naval Ravikant said about books on Joe Rogan.
Can't comment on whether it gives you a sustainable edge in the industry so curious to hear other opinions on that.
There were some interesting comments above... I'll just add one note.
I think a critical mistake that is getting harder for people to avoid because of social media endless scrolling, AI + LLMs, and everything else in the world... people don't "think" for themselves. We are all overly served information, analysis, and opinion on a platter non-stop these days.
Original and independent thinking, backed by evidence, and weighed with conviction and prudent judgement / decision making - that is a literal muscle in your brain that you must train.
So much of the world, especially college days, can be gamed out. Here is the product I want to replicate, what do I do to get the check mark stamp of approval?
There are a ton of process oriented people in finance. That is fine, but it doesn't tend to make for great public markets investing longer term. In my earlier years I spent too much time looking at other people's opinions to support, validate, or otherwise stand-in for my own thinking, because I wanted a good sounding finished thesis to get backed with $. I suppose its natural. This is not the way...
TLDR: what matters most is:
- intellectual honesty
- wisdom in decision making; AKA "good judgement"
- issue identification
- original + independent thinking, with appropriately measured conviction in your analysis
The more you can practice solving for these in a thoughtful manner, the better you will be. This only comes from repetition and experience. So crafting a million pitches as a stamp of approval for clubs, and then getting a good pitch in an interview that sounds like it fits in, tends to be a lot easier than actually doing good work.
But ignoring the noise, and put in a black box room with zero other opinions on a stock, how confident are you in your own decision making.
do you feel like there's a divergence between making your boss/peers think you're good at the job, versus actually being good at the job?
As a junior especially, I feel like you're incentivized to prioritize SEEMING like you know what you're doing, even at the expense of intellectual honesty.
i realize this might just be a seat/PM dependent issue.
i second this, def feel the same way but recognize it might be very PM-dependent
1000% - I think truly very good PMs and bosses wont let this be at odds, but over my career it has tended to be at odds (i think I am just "ok" at best btw)
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