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    Nicole Chen

    Investing Academy

    Judgment track · build an investor’s framework a few minutes a day

    – days
    – XP
    –/60 lessons

    📰 Case of the Day

    Narrative & sentiment · GameStop 2021: when positioning beats fundamentals

    A real historical case: make your call first, then see what happened. +15 XP daily

    Unit 1 · Market Cap vs Share Price

    A high price isn’t expensive; a low price isn’t cheap

    Start
    Share price says nothing about value
    Market cap: pricing the whole company
    Share counts change: buybacks vs dilution

    Unit 2 · The Language of Profit

    Every line from revenue to net income tells a story

    Four floors of the income statement
    Gross margin tells the story
    EPS and the "adjusted" games

    Unit 3 · Cash Flow & Capex

    Profit is an opinion; cash is a fact

    Profit is not cash
    Free cash flow: what owners can actually take
    The capex cycle: today’s spend, tomorrow’s depreciation

    Unit 4 · Interest Rates: Gravity of Valuation

    Why markets shake when the Fed speaks

    The risk-free rate is the yardstick
    P/E intuition: flip it into a yield
    Live replay: 2022, rates kill multiples
    🏢 L2 · Understanding Companies

    Unit 5 · Business Models

    How does this company actually make money

    Where the money comes from: four archetypes
    Unit economics: does one order make money
    Moats: why can’t rivals take it

    Unit 6 · Where Growth Comes From

    The source of growth decides its quality

    Volume × price: the first cut
    Penetration and the ceiling
    Second curves: when a new business earns a price

    Unit 7 · The Metrics That Matter

    Every industry watches a different number

    Subscriptions: retention is everything
    Retail and platforms: comps, GMV and measurement traps
    Hardware and cycles: the inventory pendulum

    Unit 8 · Reading Management

    What they say on the call — and what they don’t

    The language of guidance
    The Q&A: evasion is information
    The red-flag checklist
    🎭 L3 · What the Market Is Trading

    Unit 9 · Expectations: What Is in the Price

    Why great results can mean a falling stock

    Priced in: good news that sells off
    The expectations gap: the market’s only fuel
    Reverse engineering: what does the price assume

    Unit 10 · The Psychology of Multiples

    Same profit, sometimes 10×, sometimes 30×

    The Davis double play
    Ruler-switch moments
    Anchors and contagion

    Unit 11 · Marginal Change & the Second Derivative

    Markets trade change, not levels

    Second-derivative thinking
    Spotting turns: QoQ, inventory, guidance
    Marginal pricing: who is trading right now

    Unit 12 · Narrative and Price

    Stories drive prices; prices rewrite stories

    Narrative lifecycles and reflexivity
    Auditing the narrative with numbers
    Full integration: reading the market once, properly
    ✍️ L4 · Research Habits

    Unit 13 · How to Read Filings

    A 20-minute route through a 10-K

    The filing map: what to read first
    MD&A and footnotes: where bodies are buried
    Cross-examining the three statements

    Unit 14 · Write the Thesis Down

    If you can’t write it clearly, you haven’t thought it clearly

    Anatomy of a one-sentence thesis
    Grading evidence: not all information is equal
    Conviction and position size

    Unit 15 · Falsifiers and Stops

    Write "what proves me wrong" before you buy

    Pre-commit the falsifier
    Two kinds of stops
    Self-defense against cognitive biases

    Unit 16 · The Post-Mortem

    Without reviews, ten years of experience is one year repeated ten times

    Review the decision, not the outcome
    The five-question template
    The cognition profile: graduation and beyond
    🗺️ L5 · Industry Deep-Dives

    Unit 17 · The Causal Map Method

    Demand → chain → bottleneck → profit → price

    The five-step causal map
    Cutting the cake: where profit flows
    Bottlenecks migrate: follow the pricing power

    Unit 18 · The AI Chain in Practice

    Mapping the biggest trade of the decade

    Start from demand: who pays
    The chain map: chips to power
    Who keeps the money: judging the phase

    Unit 19 · Energy & EVs

    Old-world cycles, new-world gear shifts

    Oil: the living fossil of cycle language
    The EV chain: batteries, lithium, price wars
    Capital flows and the policy variable

    Unit 20 · Consumer & Pharma: Slow Variables

    The slowest variables dig the deepest moats

    Consumer stratification
    Pharma’s peculiar clock
    Graduation drill: a stranger industry, step by step

    🎩 Chapter Boss: Mr. Market

    「I knock daily with a new quote, only to test your nerves — dare you price by your own judgment?」

    🔒 Complete every lesson in this chapter to challenge

    This course is for educational purposes only and is not investment advice. All cases are historical reviews and do not predict future performance.