Module 5: The Deep Dive Method

A deep dive is the full job: reading a company’s own filings, building the numbers yourself, and deciding what the business is worth before you look at anyone else’s answer. In this module we do the whole thing once, slowly, on Apple, and every figure comes from a real filing you can open and check. By the end you will have a complete worked example you can copy for any company, and a second one from the publisher’s weekly newsletter: the same method run on an insurer.

1. What a deep dive is (and why most people skip the work) - reasoning, not arithmetic, and the three checks every real dive runs.
2. Thesis first: one paragraph you can defend - eighteen plain questions, then four sentences you can defend.
3. Industry and moat: the castle and the moat around it - how deep, how long, and who is actually locked in.
4. The numbers spine: ten years in one table - the single most useful table in any deep dive, and the forensic checks that run on it.
5. Valuation: a DCF simple enough to argue with - a discounted cash flow where every assumption is visible.
6. Audit your own work: the pre-mortem checklist - how to catch your own mistakes before anyone else does.
7. The full Apple deep dive, end to end - a guided tour of the complete finished document, plus the newsletter’s Travelers dive on an insurer.

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