Back in my informal Jedi Knight training days, I used to play the "what if" game with my mentor, who was then an equity PM (portfolio manager) for Wellington Management. Although he was amused by imaginative stock pitches, he would often "ding" my arguments as too "what if" or "if/then" dependent. Moreover, he would colorfully write back - as the investment ideas were mostly via email exchanges, due to time constraints and to help improve my writing - that "what if" thinking can get investors in a lot of trouble. Moreover, try telling the equity committee that underperformed your annual benchmarks because your "what ifs" and "if/thens" didn't play out. For perspective, at the pinnacle and end of his career he was managing $4 billion in equities for Wellington, and was a PM there for upwards of ten years. He retired in 2016, but the last time I spoke with him was in early Q2 2017 when he was interviewing with a few shops in London as after nine months of retirement he missed the game.
So despite the fact that many of my ideas would be shot down at the fancy institutional and elite buyside shops like Wellington, the beauty of Seeking Alpha is that I have latitude to let my investment imagination run wild. This intellectual freedom makes the investment process so much more fun, as I am not constrained by pesky mandates, investment committees and bosses - and, lo and behold, my intuition based research and ideas, at least sometimes, come to fruition.
