"Scuttlebutt" beats the annual report

Fisher's signature research method is what he calls scuttlebutt: instead of relying solely on official filings and management's own pitch, you gather the unfiltered opinions of the people who deal with a company daily — its customers, its suppliers, its competitors, and even former employees. A rival's engineers, he found, will often tell you more candidly where a company's technology genuinely leads or lags than the company's own glossy materials ever will.

This works because every one of these outside parties has a different incentive and a different vantage point, and triangulating across enough of them exposes the gaps between a company's self-image and its real standing. A competitor complaining that a firm's sales team is unusually sharp is a stronger signal than that firm's own claim to have a great sales team.

Fisher treated this legwork as unglamorous but decisive — the edge wasn't in reading the same numbers everyone else read faster, it was in gathering qualitative information almost nobody bothered to collect.

Takeaway: before buying a stock, talk to people who actually deal with the company — not just people who cover it.