How can an individual investor win in the stock market?
One way is to make use of your own strengths—your edge.
Peter Lynch, who managed the Fidelity Magellan Fund, put it this way:
Use your specialized knowledge to home in on stocks you can analyze, study them, and decide whether they are worth owning.
With limited time and information, winning in a stock market full of professionals is no easy task.
But in a field you are deeply involved in, you can notice changes earlier and more accurately than others.
To win as an individual investor, it matters to put those strengths to work.
You might feel that you have no such strengths.
But everyone has strengths of their own.
Do you know Seria, the 100-yen shop chain (stock code 2782)?
Its share price rose nearly twentyfold in the five years from the end of 2010 to the end of 2015.
If you regularly shopped there, you could have picked up on the appeal of its products, changes in its stores, and what people around you were saying about it, simply through your everyday shopping.
In fact, it seems Seria was already generating a lot of buzz among young women around 2011.
You do not have to be a finance professional to have an eye for a company as a consumer.
Even students who have never worked at a company probably know things other stock investors do not: what is popular among young people, for example, or how the graduate job hunt is changing.
Which job-search services are students using now, and what frustrates them?
People living through it have a feel for these things that is hard to gain just by researching from the outside.
Everyone lives a life of their own. Everyone has an edge of their own.
However, when you try to put your edge to work in investing, you run into another wall.
Knowing your field well and knowing the listed companies involved in it are two different things.
This field looks set to grow. Products like these are starting to be used on the ground.
Even if you form these ideas before anyone else, you may not know which companies actually have those businesses.
If you are new to investing, you may not know which financial criteria to use in your search, either.
These days, you can ask generative AI and get a few plausible company names.
But are those candidates the result of a data-based search across all listed companies?
Is it naming only well-known companies and missing others that fit your idea?
And even once you have candidates, checking their finances and businesses one company at a time takes time.
As a result, I think there are many times when you cannot put your information advantage to work in investing.
You have formed a thesis, but cannot find the companies that fit it.
“I wish there were a way to find the companies I am looking for, faster and more comprehensively.”
“I want to find out which companies fit my thesis, and then rank them.”
That is the thought that led me to build Katana Screener.
You want to put your strengths to work, but you do not know every company in detail.
I built Katana as a tool those individual investors should have.
Explore Katana’s features