The market doesn't care about your credentials, how smart you are or what books you've read. This is all about stress testing your ideas before the market does and ends up costing you money for the learning experience.
Here is how most investors build a thesis: they get a feeling, form a conclusion, and then go hunting for evidence to back it up. That is not analysis. That is just confirmation bias.
Academia and academic literature often make the problem worse. In finance and economics especially, researchers have a habit of starting with the answer and working backwards. Given how many studies are published, you can almost always find something credible sounding to support whatever you already believe. It looks like research. It feels like research. But it isn't.
Here is the thing academia, outside of the exact sciences, consistently misses: a self-correcting mechanism. The financial markets are self-correcting, in the same way that a bridge design that defies gravity is self-correcting. In academia, a bad paper can survive peer review, rack up citations, and quietly shape policy for generations. A bad trade gets repriced by close of business, week, or the year. Writing a hypothesis costs nothing. Putting money behind one costs everything. That gap matters enormously.
The Australian Army's Military Appreciation Process was built for exactly this problem. Rather than developing one idea, plan, or strategy and defending it, analysts build several competing options simultaneously, then bring in a team whose entire job is to tear each one apart. Nobody gets attached to their own idea because nobody owns just one idea. The plan that survives is the one that earned it.
For investors, that distinction is worth sitting with. A position that has been war gamed against its strongest opposition is a fundamentally different beast to one that survived only your own internal monologue.
You should create a plan, and then use every means and method at your disposal to stress test it. As with everything investment related, there will always be an unaccounted or unknown variable that throws a spanner in the works. If you've stress tested appropriately, you'll understand there are varying degrees of success depending on the variable. It might not destroy the plan entirely, simply adjust the yield or capital gain over time. This is where another military tool comes in handy, the OODA loop.
The MAP gets you to the starting line. The OODA Loop, observe, orient, decide, act, is what keeps you honest once the money is in the market. We then treat decision making as a loop rather than a finish line, because the financial markets are real life, with real events, meaning the variables of your initial plan are continually changing. You act, then you observe again. The critical step is orient, forcing yourself to check your assumptions against real outcomes before you decide anything new. Without it, investors do not update their views when fresh information arrives. They defend their original thesis and call it conviction. The OODA Loop is the structural habit that keeps those two things from getting confused.
Financial Disclaimer. This content is general in nature and has been prepared without taking into account your personal objectives, financial situation, or needs. It does not constitute financial product advice under the Corporations Act 2001 (Cth). Before acting on any information contained in this post, you should consider whether it is appropriate for your circumstances and, if necessary, seek independent financial advice. References to specific companies, markets, prediction tools, or investment strategies are for informational and educational purposes only and do not constitute a recommendation to buy, hold, or sell any financial product. Past events and probabilistic frameworks discussed are not reliable indicators of future performance.