The Seventh Moral Dimension

In the previous essay, we looked at Moral Foundations Theory, which contains five well-researched moral dimensions, and a sixth (liberty/oppression) that has some support. In this essay I propose that a seventh moral dimension, efficiency/waste, exists. 

The moral sense of efficiency is concerned with making good use of and conservation of resources, usually personal resources, or those of the kin group. Its opposite is waste, the profligate or uncaring expenditure of resources. It differs from care/harm in that care/harm generally applies to empathy and kindness to people, and neurologically involves the parts of the brain that concerns living things, while efficiency/waste applies to non-living useful things, and likely involves parts of the brain that are involved with understanding inanimate objects. 

Efficiency/waste is concerned with resources that are necessary to survival, especially food, water, and personal effects. It participates in mental accounting related to the effort needed in acquiring food and resources necessary for survival. Since it involves extra-body objects that are important to survival, having this moral sense reduces risk of shortages in food and water supply, and has a direct impact on evolutionary success.

Aspects of this moral sense are likely highly related to the endowment effect of behavioral economics. It likely also participates in supporting the conception of property rights. In psychology, it could be  intertwined with the parts of mind involved with calculating the relationship of the body to nearby objects. It may also interact with Prospect Theory, in which the pain of a loss is disproportionately felt compared to the pleasure of a gain of equal magnitude.

Examples and Illustrations

People with well-developed sense of efficiency/waste will be more careful with usage of all resources, especially those that they personally own. They will tend to perform more planning of expenditures and uses, and will be motivated to make use of planning tools to allocate usage over time. They are concerned with rates of income and expenditure, rates of return on investments, and are fairly interested in making investments that generate additional resources well beyond their investment.

A person with an over-developed sense of efficiency/waste may be a miser, a hoarder, or have trouble making investments. They may maintain inventories that are too large relative to their actual usage. In the case of hoarding, they may be unable to part with even worthless items, since further use could be made of them "if only the opportunity favored it."

A person with an under-developed efficiency sense will tend to be spendthrift, even to the point of using the resources of others when theirs run out. They find it more difficult to delay gratification, and would fail the "marshmallow test." A "waster" is able to readily part with anything, even if their own personal inventory of food and other resources is low. They may tend to look at resources owned by others as their personal backup, and rationalize their failure to plan by believing that planning is unnecessary when there are  resources owned by others nearby.

The phrase "there is no use crying over spilled milk" is rationally unnecessary, since once milk is spilled, it is gone and can't be retrieved. That such a saying exists indicates that people regret the loss more deeply, even though it is not directly painful.

Proposed Experiments to Test Efficiency/Waste

The Ultimatum Game is played, in which a proposer suggests a division of $10, and the responder has to decide whether to accept, or cancel the entire split. For those cases where the responder declines, one of two events then happen. In option 1, then experimenter then shows both players that the $10, in cash, has been shredded into particles that cannot be recovered, not even at the U.S Treasury and the participants are surveyed to find out their sentiments about the events of the experiment. In option 2, the experiment shows the players that the $10 will be recycled for future experiments, and again the participants are surveyed. The surveys ask the participants feel about the money, not about the other participant.

The experiment is repeated with other items that are to be divided. These could include bottled water, jars of food, or candy. Again, for those situations where the responder declines the offer, the items are visibly destroyed or ruined in front of the participants.

The game is also repeated, with groups being told before the start that they are dividing items, and that if no agreement is lost, the items will be destroyed. The control group is not told this information.

Use of Efficiency/Waste in Understanding of Society

If efficiency/waste is a valid moral dimension, then it would be worthwhile to find out if there are particular distributions of it in defined segments of the population. Disparities might arise due to family upbringing, social status, education level, income, financial circumstances, or acculturation.

Use of Efficiency/Waste in Investing

If this moral dimension exists, it would be worthwhile knowing the approximate level of efficiency/waste moral sense that the executives of a company possess. This might be especially important to know for the COO, who generally would have the most control over the efficiency of company investments. 

I would guess that among American CEOs, Warren Buffett would be among those with the highest sense of efficiency/waste. Others I would also rate high on this attribute are Jeff Bezos, and many of the executives that Peter Lynch mentioned in his book One Up on Wall Street.

Moral Foundations Theory

Over the past 40 years or so a collection of research into the psychology of morals has built up. Researchers in this area are sometimes labeled cultural anthropologists, cultural psychologists, or moral psychologists. The Wikipedia entry for Moral Psychology describes it as "a field of study in both philosophy and psychology." Historically, morals or ethics have been considered the domain of philosophy, but in contrast with the extensive body of traditional philosophical literature on ethics, meta-ethics, moral sentiments, and moral justice, moral psychology starts out by postulating that humans have moral feelings that exist due to human psychology. From this perspective, many moral sentiments can be traced to evolutionary and biological origins, traditional upbringing and cultural influences, and are located deeply within the brain. The field of moral psychology seeks to understand what already exists in terms of moral sentiments, not what ought to be, in contrast with much of the current literature in the field of ethical philosophy. 

Since it is a human study, there is a significant amount of overlap with other fields of human study, including anthropology, sociology, economics, and religion. One strongly connected field is Prospect Theory, initiated and developed primarily by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, and all of behavioral economics, which I hope to cover in a near future essay.

Early researchers in the field include Richard Shweder, Lene Arnett Jensen, Jonathan Haidt, and Craig Joseph. This essay will focus on the work that Shweder inspired.

Overview of Moral Foundation Theory

A particular flavor of moral psychology has been developed by a group of researchers that goes by the name Moral Foundation Theory. It was developed from Shweder's foundational work by Jonathan Haidt, Craig Joseph and Jesse Graham. Some the researchers using the MFT framework include Ravi Iyer, Jonathan Haidt, Sean Wojcik, Matt Motyl, Gary Sherman, Jesse Graham, Sena Koleva, and Pete Ditto.

A core idea is that moral feelings are the result of subconscious or "system 1" thought (as described in Thinking, Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman), a fast and automatic part of the brain. Though the conscious ("system 2") part of the brain can think about morals too, it is much slower, and is often rushing to catch up and explain why the fast subconscious system 1 decided what it did. John Haidt in his book The Righteous Mind uses the analogy of an elephant and its rider to describe this arrangement, where the elephant is big and decides on its own where it wants to go, while the much smaller rider on top is trying hard to provide guidance, but is very dependent on the elephant's decisions too.

The programming for moral reasoning comes from evolution, childhood development, culture, or a combination of all of them. Haidt relates evidence from research showing that moral intuition arises in babies, long before acculturation is possible. Certain parts of the brain are wired for making moral judgments; if those parts are impaired, moral reasoning is impaired. 

This structure therefore matches Hume's insight from A Treatise of Human Nature: "reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

Moral Dimensions

Within this framework, it is proposed that there are "dimensions" of moral reasoning that are used to make motivational moral judgments. Each dimension is like an aspect of taste (salt, sugar, bitter, sweet). Research has found good evidence for five, with a sixth proposed for which there may be some evidence. Haidt writes extensively on these moral dimensions in his book The Righteous Mind. They are:

Care/harm:  kindness and empathy, infant and child raising 

Fairness/cheating:  reciprocal altruism, punishing defectors from agreements

Loyalty/betrayal:  group, tribe, clan membership and defense of the home group

Authority/subversion:  efficiency of leadership and coordination of group efforts

Sanctity/degradation:  avoidance of disease and parasites, preventing contamination

Liberty/oppression:  freedom of action, self-agency

Not everyone has the same degree of sensitivity to these moral dimensions. Haidt's book has an extensive analysis of how different political leanings are correlated with different weightings of these moral dimensions. Published research on this is in the paper "Liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations". It is a very worthwhile treatment of the topic, which I will refrain from commenting on here, because you ought to either read the paper or Haidt's book for the full explanation of the methodology and results.

References for Moral Foundation Theory

You can find more information on MFT at MoralFoundations.org, which contains abstracts of a large number of scientific papers and links to some of them, and YourMorals.org, which is designed to allow anyone with an interest to answer a survey about their own moral sentiments.

The paper Moral Foundations Theory: The Pragmatic Validity of Moral Pluralism is available free at SSRN. It provides a fairly complete description of MFT.

Commentary: Relevance of Moral Psychology and Moral Philosophy

Market prices of goods, services, equity and debt prices are driven by human decisions, and if moral reasoning is an important part of the decisions humans make, then an investor or equity trader may find it quite useful to have a more highly evolved understanding of it. If we especially believe that moral reasoning is fast and subconscious, that impacts how we model the decision-making of others. Furthermore, understanding people may help us understand what is happening politically, to the economy, within companies especially, and to make predictions about what will happen in the future, including probabilities of existential risks.

I've not made any mention of moral philosophy in this essay because so far it has had very little to do with predicting how people think, understand the world, and make decisions. Moral philosophers have had thousands of years to extract profound truths from their contemplation of the human mind. So far, what we have seen is that the pinnacle, in philosophy, may have been reached with David Hume in 1739. Although ethics remains among the most popular sub-disciplines of philosophy, much modern ethical philosophy has an activist, normative taste. Normative treatments, lacking objective models, tend to be poor at predicting outcomes, and investors tend to have an interest in accuracy of predicting outcomes, or at least being able to put bounds on the limits of prediction. That severely limits the utility of modern moral philosophy.

The only intersection so far I can imagine between moral philosophy and investing is that some moral philosophers might say that investors ought not to make a profit, especially if some aspect of the investment is zero-sum. Of this, I can say primarily that such a normative judgment would be repugnant, morally speaking, as it ignores the positive sum aspects of investment practice. Hence, their rational argument would collide with my own moral disgust. I think the elephant would, and should, win.

Defeating HFT

Sometime around 2006 to 2007, high frequency traders began to be a problem for large traders. Michael Lewis told the story in his 2014 book Flash Boys, which highlights the experiences of Brad Katsuyama in first trying to make money for his employer, RBC Securities, in electronic trading, and later as a founder of Investor's Exchange (IEX). Though the story isn't new, it's worth exploring because HFT is still present and it is a feature of the investing landscape.

This passage from Flash Boys shows how pernicious the HFT traders were:

If that was the case, he asked them, why did the markets in any given stock dry up only when he was trying to trade in it? To make his point, he asked the developers to stand behind him and watch while he traded. "I'd say, 'Watch closely. I am about to buy one hundred thousand shares of Amgen. I am willing to pay $48 a share. There are currently 100,000 shares of Amgen being offered at $48 a share--10,000 on BATS, 35,000 on the New York Stock Exchange, 30,000 on NASDAQ, and 25,000 on Direct Edge.' You could see it all on the screens. We'd all sit there and stare at the screen and I'd have my finger over the Enter button. I'd count out loud to five...

"'One...

"'Two.... See, nothing's happened.

"'Three.... Offers are still there at 48...

"'Four.... Still no movement.

"'Five.' Then I'd hit the Enter button and --boom!--all hell would break loose. The offerings would all disappear, and the stock would pop higher."

At which point he turned to the guys standing behind him and said, "You see, I'm the event. I am the news."

To that, the developers had no response. ...  "Then they'd disappear and never come back."

In other words, there was nothing wrong with the software. It was behaving exactly how the market-making HFT crowd wanted it to function, which means that it allowed them to perform time arbitrage on large orders, front-running on nearly every trade. If you want to buy, they first mark the stock up. If you want to sell, they first mark the stock down. Was this new behavior, enabled by the avalanche of new internet technologies that had been brought to the market in the last 15 years?

Later in the book, Lewis describes how John Schwall, who worked for Banc of America when Merrill Lynch was fraudulently forced onto Bank of America's books by the U.S. Government, costing BAC shareholders $100 billion, began to trace the history of Wall Street regulations by first digging into the internet on his iPad, and then searching in the Staten Island branch of the New York Public Library:

Several days later he'd worked his way back to the late 1800s. The entire history of Wall Street was the story of scandals, it now seemed to him, linked together tail to trunk like circus elephants. Every systemic market injustice arose from some loophole in a regulation created to correct some prior injustice. "No matter what the regulators did, some other intermediary found a way to react, so there would be another form of front-running," he said. ... He'd learned several important things, he told his colleagues. First, there was nothing new about the behavior they were at war with: The U.S. financial markets had always been either corrupt or about to be corrupted. 

What does one do with this? Avoid equities, raise your fist and voice to the sky, and yell defiance? 

It's not quite that bad, because first you have to realize that most markets, including product markets, real estate, and even government services, are going to have at least some of this problem. Think about buying a car. You also have a lot more agency than Lewis' prose implies. First of all, we're talking about 0.01% or perhaps 0.1%, which is far less than the spread in the days of fractional stock prices. Second, if you hold your stock for five years, your prospective gain is something like 50% to 100%, which dwarfs the loss to the HFT. Third, this is only a problem if you are trading too much or trying to optimize all trading costs out of your investing. 

A short piece of fiction: Alien lands on earth. Knowing nothing, the alien asks, where can I invest? Broker sells him a 6% investment. If the alien had known better (he did no research at all), he could have had the same investment for a 12% gain. Was the alien ripped off? Perhaps not. After all, he could have gotten nothing. At least he got half.

So the lesson here is that agents acting on your behalf will want something. Without those agents acting, we wouldn't have access to equities at all.

So now that I've almost excused the thieves from their deeds, let's learn how to rip them off.

How to Defeat HFT

It's quite simple, but it requires discipline. First, notice that HFTs make money when you trade. If you don't trade, they make nothing. If you own the stock, they make nothing. So the best way to defeat the HFTs is buying and holding for the long term. If you hold your positions for five, ten, or twenty years, the HFTs make no money all for a very long time. And since they didn't get paid much to start with, when you bought your stock, they never really got much money for their trouble. 

Second, with zero commissions, you can buy even small lots of one to ten shares, which make practically nothing for the HFT, but which gradually build your portfolio. In the 1970s brokerage fees on any trade might have been $100 or $200. In the 1990s they dropped to $30 to $100. Before Robinhood the discount brokers were still charging $5 to $20 per trade. Zero commissions make up for a lot of other friction, including losses to HFTs. The lower obstacles to getting started with equity investing is a huge bonus. Just two years ago, if you were concerned about the "load" you were paying in the form of commission, your minimum sensible investment was perhaps $500 to $1000. In the post Robinhood era, you could place trades for $50 of stock, and there is practically no friction at all.

The ultimate trading pattern for the anti-HFT trader is therefore buy-and-never-sell. In practice, this might mean five to ten years between opening and closing a position. From the perspective of the HFT, this is cheating. They don't make enough from a single trade to cover their costs. It is when you trade repeatedly that they make up the overhead of maintaining the fiber optic lines, computers, and custom software on the many small slices they take from those many trades.

Let's suppose that an HFT is manipulative, and they temporarily open up a lower price for a minute or two, to draw interest in. If you place a buy order during their maneuver, they may think of that as an investment in which your subsequent sell, additional buy, and so on recoup the cost of the temporary dip in price. Your role, as they think of it, is to then trade several times. If instead you hold the stock for ten years, in effect you've taken the ball and gone home, refusing to play the game further. In this scenario you did your homework, bought the stock at a price you figured was less than the company was worth, especially over the long term, and held it for ten years, obtaining a successful outcome.

This is a strong move, can be done unilaterally without any cooperation from your broker, exchange, or counter parties, and you need provide no warning to anyone, including the SEC or your Congressman. You buy and go home, and you don't need to think about it again.

Each day that you allow to pass without further action is a day of grinding down the HFT. They may make money from others, but in absence of a trade from you, they are losing a little bit each day. Again, you need do nothing to win daily. The fluctuating stock price may not reflect it, as it will go down as well as up, but the average daily movement, provided that you chose a profitable and growing company, will be up. You win. 

The Rule of 72 and How to Make Your First Million by Age 18

Long ago I learned from Sylvia Porter's Money Book that you could rapidly estimate the length of time it would take to double your investment by using the rule of 72. The rule is

time to double = 72 / interest rate

For example, an investment returning 6% would take about 12 years to double. You can see the exact equation and much more at the Wikipedia page on this topic. This is one of those formulas that one should have memorized because you can quickly evaluate the performance of very long term investments, and using it helps see the enormous value of compounding. Now that you have this simple formula in hand, let's put it to use.

Teenagers! Here's How to Make Your First Million

One reason for mentioning the rule of 72 is that I want you to believe me when I say that it is entirely possible to build up enough cash at an early age that allows you to cease investing further for your retirement, for the rest of your life. For the sake of this demonstration, I am going to assume that you want to retire with a million dollars. The trick is to get started in your mid-teens, earn money from summer jobs, paper routes, or Bitcoin, accumulate $8,000 in savings, then invest it in equities. From there, you do nothing. You can live the rest of your life as you want to, including saving more money, but assuming that future long term stock returns do not differ appreciably from those in the past, this is what you will get:

Large Cap Stocks, 10% ROR
Your	# of
Age	Dbls	Gain	Balance
18	0	1x	$8,000
25	1	2x	$16,000
32	2	4x	$32,000
39	3	8x	$64,000
46	4	16x	$128,000
53	5	32x	$256,000
60	6	64x	$512,000
67	7	128x	$1,024,000

This table assumes that you invest in large capitalization stocks, which could be the Dow Jones Industrials, S&P 500, an index fund of large cap stocks, or similar. It assumes that you reinvest the dividends and pay for the taxes on dividends outside the account. Or you could put the money into an IRA and avoid the tax accounting during the investment period. Otherwise, you do not need to contribute any more money. The table shows the growth of the initial investment, with no more money added.

If you invest in small cap stocks, then it is possible to get to your destination a little faster:

Small Cap Stocks, 12% ROR
Your	# of
Age	Dbls	Gain	Balance
18	0	1x	$8,000
24	1	2x	$16,000
30	2	4x	$32,000
36	3	8x	$64,000
42	4	16x	$128,000
48	5	32x	$256,000
54	6	64x	$512,000
60	7	128x	$1,024,000

To buy this investment, you could use any small cap index fund, which most of the major mutual fund families have, or a small cap growth or value fund, preferably both if you can't find a broad index fund. Funds that track the S&P Smallcap 600, Russell 2000 index, or similar would be useful for this style as well.

There is no need to pick stocks, worry about downturns in the market, time the market, use an advisor, or buy any special help. Buying the index is sufficient.

The assumptions here are driven by the historical studies of stock returns. You can find them represented on page 22 (39th sequential page in the PDF file) of Stocks, Bonds, Bills, and Inflation® (SBBI®): 2020 Summary Edition.

Okay, I did trick you a little. This strategy will make you a million dollars, and you can do it before you are 18, but you do have to allow time and compounding to work their magic. You don't actually get a million dollars at age 18. Nevertheless, is it not a clever trick that by investing early and earnestly, that you can effectively quit worrying about saving for retirement thereafter? It's not that hard. Of course, you have to be willing to not spend money instead of spending it, but I hope that now the opportunity gained by choosing to invest is much easier to see.

If you didn't manage to read this at age 14, and you didn't get your $8,000 invested by age 18, you can still use the tables above to figure out where you stand on your retirement investment "trajectory". A 25-year old can make a plan to save, knowing that over the next five years he or she needs to set aside $32,000, but can then stop. But if you don't want to stop after your first million, I understand perfectly if you want to keep going. 

Market Conditions Are Changing: Inflation, Tech, Contagion to Follow?

I don't usually post on fast-paced market activity, so this will be an unusual entry.

As said before, conditions are ripe for an increase in inflation. U.S. monetary and fiscal policy are aligned towards it, real estate markets are tight, and we are seeing food prices rising. As COVID-19 constraints fade, economic activity will increase and pent-up demand will be unleashed.

U.S. 10-year Treasury bonds have been gaining in yield, recently jumping rapidly:

Big change in 10 year Treasury (^TNX) yield today.
1.2990% +0.0990 (+8.25%)https://t.co/o5Saa1vO6R

— Richard Lucas (@PolarizedCenter) February 17, 2021

As things go back to normal, people will stop working from Zoom meetings at home, in their pajamas, will travel more, will live more, and will no longer accept that interest rates will stay near zero forever. Yields on debt will need to rise to keep up with the newer, higher implied discount rate, and stocks will be worth less than they are now. 

As I write this we're in the second or third day of declining tech stocks, with Tesla (TSLA) collapsing another 9% to $650, not far from where I said it might be worth selling in December. Between then and now I was wrong, but then what does that matter in the long run? That's not the call I make, nor what I would advise any friend to do. We either invest for the long run or we're just gambling. The current market since about September has been much more of a gambling than investing market. During COVID-19 time you can watch Netflix in your pajamas or trade stocks on Robinhood, and some have chosen the latter. Soon they will stop.

Where to go? Buy companies that do well in inflationary markets, such as food, beverages, tobacco, construction. Watch MO, PM, BTI, MDLZ, KO, PEP. Corporate bonds and Federal debt will perform poorly. Cash will perform poorly. This is the time to refinance your home at low rates if you need to, or to swap a home that is mostly paid down with one that has a larger, but still affordable mortgage. You could try specialized vehicles like this Horizon Kinetics ETF (of which I have no opinion, unfavorable or not).

If you were born after 1980, you won't remember the inflationary days from 1970-1982. It might be worth having a conversation with someone who remembers those days and what it was like back then to have a mortgage, save money in the bank, and to deal with 5%, 7%, and 13% inflation in the prices of gas, food, clothes, and rent.

Not Everything Good is Worth Knowing

In Tracy Kidder's The Soul of a New Machine, Tom West informs Kidder that "Not everything worth doing is worth doing well." Obviously, the power of this maxim is its shock value, a rebuttal to a timeworn, and usually quite valuable maxim that anything worth doing, is worth your best shot at making it good. (Because if you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?) West and Kidder are passing on a lesson taught through the brutal experience of designing a computer in a race against time: Some things must be great, and some things get in the way of the greatness, and will have to be compromised.

Clearly, one can't know everything, so applying this principle to the acquisition of knowledge is straightforward. The problem is that decisions about what to know, what to learn, where to spend your time can be quite challenging. I have a short story to tell about one of my own recent experiences. 

In August 2019, I was reading something online, and encountered an article in The Economist that I wanted to read. Knowing the value of it, I decided to plunge in and subscribe on the spot. I got behind the paywall, read the article (since forgotten), and soon began receiving the paper magazine in the mail.

In June of 2020 I started a program where I tracked the books I was reading, aiming at a minimum of five books per month. Shortly thereafter I recognized a conflict: academic papers and magazines like The Economist were not books, but they would certainly take up the same kind of reading and thinking time that could be allocated to books. By setting a specific goal of completing five books each calendar month, I was impacting both my time and motivation to read other sources.

To solve the problem, I decided that there needed to be an equivalence between a "book" and other materials. In the case of The Economist, I decided that at about 80 pages per issue, two issues of the magazine were very roughly equivalent of one book. Though most of the books I was reading were more than 160 pages, The Economist uses a triple-column format, smaller type, and a much larger page size than most hardcover and paperback books.

Setting the equivalence worked. Though previously I had been making poor use of my subscription, I was able to schedule in more reading of issues of the magazine, and have it count towards my reading program. All was well, or so I thought.

As I continued through October of 2020 it became clear that The Economist was not going to fit. Just keeping up with four issues per month would consume 40% of my scheduled reading, and since the topics were varied and most were outside my learning program, it was actually detracting from my other projects. Worse, I was finding that reading two issues of the magazine was more difficult than reading a single book on a relevant topic. The quantification made it clear that, despite some annoying cognitive dissonance, that The Economist did not fit my life. I cancelled it in December.

The lesson here is not about the quality of The Economist. It is a relatively politically neutral, wide-ranging, well-informed and outstanding article of journalism. Some day it might be worth it to read it at the library, or to search its article repository. For the present, for me, it is too much of a distraction from things that are more valuable.

You are probably wondering what I am reading. In February 2021:

• WEIRDest People in the World, Joseph Henrich
• The Righteous Mind, Jonathan Haidt
• Atomic Habits, James Clear
• The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, John Jay
• The Discovery of France, Graham Robb

Rejection of Investment Knowledge as a Strategy

If we allow that the efficient market hypothesis is approximately correct, then we can assume that the current stock price reflects what is known about the company. Common knowledge is mostly reflected in the current price. The price of Coca-Cola (KO) is supported by the knowledge that the brand is well known, liked, and nostalgically revered as a piece of shared heritage, and slightly undermined by the knowledge that consuming sugar is a slight detriment to a healthy eating style. It doesn't help us as investors to learn these things, nor does it help much to know the basic earnings and revenue numbers for the last few years. That data is known. It is reflected in the price.

Instead, we are looking for unusual information that the market doesn't know. We are looking for blind spots in institutional investors, normative judgments that are objectively false, emerging science, widespread miscommunications. Some would call that contrarian thinking. More specifically, this process helps you refine how you spend your time, so that you can get a better payoff from the research you do. Though you likely should be aware of KO's revenue, earnings, shares, cash flow, and marketing campaigns, you will find better competitive insights from other places.