Triangulation: Building a Read the Analysts Cannot Give You
Faraday's read on the whole discipline: no single source is the answer, and treating any analyst house as gospel is how competent people get confidently wrong. The practitioner's edge is triangulation, holding analyst coverage, measurement data, trade reporting, and primary signals in tension and reading the disagreements. Where sources converge, you gain confidence. Where they diverge, you have found the interesting question, and the divergence is often worth more than any single source's answer. Analyst research is a powerful input and a poor master. Build your own read from many partial views, weight each by its franchise and its tilt, and stay honest about what you still do not know.
Knowledge check
In a triangulation approach, why is a divergence between two credible sources often more valuable than their agreement?
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Because agreement can be an illusion of shared sourcing or shared assumptions rather than independent confirmation, while a genuine divergence between credible sources points to something real that is unresolved: a definitional mismatch, a measurement gap, a timing difference, or a market changing faster than one source has captured. Chasing the divergence forces you to find why the sources differ, and that inquiry usually surfaces the actual dynamics of the market, which is exactly the knowledge a single confident source would have let you skip.