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Module 15 · Capstone — Your Own Case Studies

What this module does. It turns the course into a practice. Modules 00–14 taught the method on companies whose endings are known, or on fictional ones built to teach. The capstone applies the same method to real, live companies. You choose them, the outcome is unknown, and you will find out later whether you were right. The work lives in a private casebook repository, separate from this public course.

Why it matters. Case studies with known endings train pattern recognition. They cannot train judgement, because hindsight is always in the room. The only way to learn whether your process works is to write down a decision before the outcome, with the reasons, probabilities and the evidence that would prove you wrong, and then score it. A trader keeps a P&L by strategy. An investor needs the equivalent: a record of decisions that can be marked against reality.

The public / private split

Public course (this site) Private casebook
Repository fundamental-investing-course fundamental-investing-casebook (private)
Contains Lessons, exercises, fictional companies, historical cases, mocks, tools Your real cases: kill tests, full case files, models, memos, decision journal, quarterly updates, post-mortems
Why Teaching material, safe to share Positions, sizes and unpublished views should not be public; it also frees you to be wrong in writing
Links Templates are described in 15.2 templates/ holds the fill-in versions; tools/ imports the course library

The casebook's tools/pull.py imports the course's fi library from a sibling checkout (../course), so both repos sit side by side on disk.

Lessons

# Lesson One line Time
15.1 The case-study method Six stage gates from idea to post-mortem; time budgets; the funnel; calibration 60 min
15.2 Templates Every template in the casebook, with what each field is for and a filled example line 45 min
15.3 Worked example — Kaveri, end to end The whole method on the running example, stage by stage, as the casebook stores it 90 min
15.4 Grading rubric & review Scoring a case; a red-team review protocol (peer or AI); calibration and the annual process review 45 min

What the capstone asks of you

  1. Three full case studies in the first six months, each on a different kind of situation:
  2. a long idea you would own;
  3. an "avoid" — a popular stock you conclude is overpriced or flawed, written with the same rigour;
  4. a lender, a cyclical or a special situation, where the method has to change (07, 12.3).
  5. Twenty kill tests in the same period. Most should end in "kill". The funnel is the point: it shows your filters working and keeps the deep dives for ideas that have earned them.
  6. Quarterly updates on every full case, for as long as you own the stock or it stays on the watchlist.
  7. A post-mortem on every exit, and on every case after three years whether or not you acted.
  8. An annual process review (15.4): your calibration, your hit rate by type of idea, and one change to the process.

Real money

The capstone is where research meets your capital. Nothing in this course is investment advice. The sizing rules in 11.4 exist so that no single case can do serious damage while you learn whether your process has an edge. Start small: the first year's job is to produce a record, not a return.

Connections

You're ready to call the course finished when you can…

  • Show twenty dated kill tests and three complete case files in the casebook.
  • Point to each case's thesis-breakers and say which have fired.
  • State your calibration: of the things you called 70% likely, how many happened?
  • Name one change you have made to your own process because a post-mortem told you to.