Finding investment ideas by example

John Hempton from Bronte Capital is sleuth type.
I was reading his blog post link about fragrance ingredient supplier and I thought this is a good case study for
"finding investment ideas" topic.

What points can we carry out from it?

Curiosity leads to unusual places. Paying big buck for a small bottle, asks what's it made of, finds ingredients looks up what do they cost and who suppliers are, looks into supplier financials, runs into another fragrance supplier compare financials, leads to discovery of fraud (numbers to good to be true for Hung Kong-listed company, lack of information about products etc.)

Lazy habit of thinking

    There were no posts for almost three years and there are many reasons for that. But the most troubling is not the lack of time, but what I suspect is lack of deep thinking and as a result the deficit of ideas worth posting.

Having ability to subscribe to the blog posts, i.e. thought product of others, stimulates lazy habit of thinking . It MUCH, MUCH easier to consume other people thought that to produce one.

The question is how to brake bad habit and train a good one?

Breaking bad habit.

• Make enough time to think, spend less time on reading "shallow" or irrelevant material.

Training good habit.

• Reading investment-related blogs have education value. To increase positive effect either reply to the post with opinion or write summary of lessons learned or detail what valuable thoughts gained.
• Try to figure out how and why author reached expressed conclusion
• Make posts more frequently. It's better than nothing. It's a learning process.