The chart is not the business

Price tells you what the crowd feels today. It does not tell you what the business is. Confusing the two is the most common, most expensive mistake in investing.

A stock down 60% triggers a reflex: it must be broken. Sometimes it is. Often it is a perfectly good business the market got bored of, or scared of, and put on sale. Meanwhile a stock up 10x feels like a winner you missed, when sometimes it is a flat, unremarkable company that simply got re-rated to a richer multiple with no more room to run.

So we score the business, not the price action. We ask what it does, how it makes money, whether the moat is widening, whether it can compound. The chart is an input to your timing decision, not evidence about the company's quality. Some of the best entries you will ever make will feel terrible, bought into a falling chart that the headlines hated. Some of the worst will feel great. Learn to look past the line and at the thing underneath it.