Making Cents Sense

I used to believe the market was rational. Not perfectly rational—I'm not delusional—but rational enough. Rational in the sense that if you understood a company’s fundamentals—revenue growth, margins, free cash flow, competitive positioning—you could reasonably estimate its value and expect the market to converge toward that reality over time. That belief didn’t collapse overnight. It eroded. Slowly. Quietly. Trade by trade. Because what I started noticing—what I couldn’t unsee once it clicked—was that large-cap stocks weren’t just moving on fundamentals. They were being repriced in real time by something far less tangible and far more powerful: Narrative. And once I understood that, I realized I hadn’t been investing in companies. I’d been investing in stories. The First Time I Noticed Something Was Off It started with a stock that made no sense. On paper, nothing had fundamentally changed. Revenue growth was steady. Margins were stable. Guidance hadn’t materially shif...

Why Slower Growth Doesn’t Mean Slower Returns There’s a certain romance in hypergrowth. Explosive revenue curves. Total addressable markets measured in trillions. CEO interviews that include phrases like “paradigm shift” and “category-defining platform.” Wall Street loves a rocket ship. But rockets burn fuel fast. And eventually, gravity wins. Meanwhile, over in the unglamorous corner of the market, something quieter happens every day: companies grow up. Revenue expansion slows. Margins stabilize. Capital allocation becomes more important than market domination. Narratives shift from “disruptor” to “incumbent.” The market often responds with boredom. And boredom, my friends, is where opportunity hides. This is the world of mature but mispriced companies — enterprises that have decelerated but not deteriorated. Businesses whose best hypergrowth days are behind them, yet whose cash flows, assets, and competitive positioning still justify far more respect than their multipl...