School is starting, which means a dozen college and MBA teams are about to email me asking how to win their stock pitch competition. So I made the answer. The core of it: a pitch is a game, and most people lose it before they open their mouth by picking an idea that does not fit the contest rules or the judges in the room.
From there it is three things. Design the pitch for the timeframe the contest actually asks for and for the people judging it, because what wins with a concentrated-book judge is not what wins with a pod shop. Lead with the one thing only you know, not a sell side price target or a multiple that has compressed. And make your bull case the base case instead of hedging yourself into a 15% price target that reads as average. Then the three traps I see every single year: burning five slides on a DCF nobody will ask about, drowning the room in risk factors, and death by background. I also walk through the La Quinta pitch that won me Ira Sohn in 2018, and why the CSL and DoorDash teams at the Pershing Square Challenge won on legwork rather than modeling.
Fair warning: I had AI build the slides, so do not hold the exact wording on any of them against me.
If you are pitching to get hired rather than to win a contest, the companion episode is here.
This podcast is sponsored by Trata
I already know you’re going to like trata. Why? Because you’re reading this blog post, meaning you’re interested in this podcast. And trata is just like this podcast (though without the handsome host!). Trata is anonymized transcripts of buysiders discussing stocks they are following and what they really think will drive the stock. I’ve been mentioning it on the podcast for months, and the most frequent complaint I hear from people who check it out is they wish trata had more content on more of their stocks. Even better: they recently released an MCP that lets you connect their transcripts to the AI model of your choice. If you’re interested, click here to learn more.
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Transcript for paid subs begins below (The initial transcript is AI-generated and is replaced with a professionally edited version when available)
Disclaimer: Nothing on this podcast or on this blog is investing or financial advice; please see our full disclaimer here. The transcript below is from a third party transcription service; it’s entirely possible there are some errors in the transcript.