Independent thinking often means standing alone before the rest of the market catches up.
Independent thinking often means standing alone before the rest of the market catches up.
The loneliest moment in investing isn’t losing money. It’s holding a position the market hasn’t yet validated, with no reliable way of knowing whether you’re early or simply wrong. From the inside, the two feel identical. The same silence. The same scepticism from people you respect. The same daily temptation to retreat back towards the comfort of consensus.
Every investor who’s achieved anything meaningful has spent time in that silence. But most investment writing skips over it entirely, preferring to begin at the moment of vindication. That’s a pity, because the silence is where the real work happens.
Consensus is expensive. By the time an idea feels safe, it’s usually reflected in the price. The returns available from a comfortable position are, almost by definition, the returns everyone else has already accepted.
Markets don’t reward agreement. They reward the willingness to hold a view before the evidence is widely accepted, and to look wrong while everyone else waits to be proved right.
That’s not a criticism of markets. It’s exactly how they should function. Prices aggregate the judgement of millions of participants, and most of the time that collective judgement is remarkably effective. That’s precisely why outperforming it is so difficult. The consensus isn’t a fool waiting to be outsmarted. It’s a formidable opponent that’s right far more often than it’s wrong. Anyone who suggests otherwise is usually selling contrarianism rather than practising thoughtful investing.
Which brings me to what conviction isn’t.
It isn’t disagreeing with the crowd simply for the sake of it. Reflexive contrarianism is just consensus-following with the sign reversed. Your thinking is still being dictated by everyone else’s, only from the opposite direction.
Nor is conviction the same as stubbornness, although the distinction isn’t always obvious, especially when you’re the one holding the position.
There’s a simple test I come back to. Conviction responds to evidence and ignores sentiment. Stubbornness responds to sentiment and ignores evidence. If fresh information would change your mind but criticism wouldn’t, you’re probably exercising conviction. If criticism makes you dig in while evidence makes you uncomfortable, you’re drifting into something much less useful.
Good investors don’t change their minds because the market disagrees with them. They change them because reality does. Holding an unpopular view isn’t the objective. Getting closer to the truth is.
Conviction isn’t a personality trait. It’s what remains after you’ve done enough independent work that the crowd stops being your primary source of confidence.
Everything starts with primary work. Derivative research produces derivative conclusions. Reading what everyone else reads and meeting who everyone else meets rarely leads anywhere interesting. Conviction usually comes from getting closer to the source: the scientists, founders, customers and underlying data that the market hasn’t fully absorbed.
We also write every investment thesis before capital is committed, including the conditions that would prove us wrong. That document becomes a conversation with our future selves. Years later, it helps us distinguish between a thesis that’s being disproved by events and one that’s simply moving more slowly than the market expected. Those are very different situations, and they deserve very different responses.
The people matter just as much. Balance sheets explain where a business has been. The people building it tell you where it could go. Judgement, curiosity and resilience often become visible years before they’re reflected in financial performance. Over time, we’ve found those qualities to be among the most reliable indicators of long-term success.
The final ingredient, and perhaps the most overlooked, is time. A view that takes seven years to prove correct looks no different from a bad investment if your capital is judged every quarter. Permanent capital, particularly family capital, can remain invested through that uncomfortable middle period in a way that more impatient capital often can’t. That’s not a moral advantage. It’s a structural one. The question is never simply whether we’re right. It’s whether we can remain intellectually and financially committed for as long as being right actually takes.
Theory is easy. Practice is what matters.
When we began investing in artificial intelligence for healthcare, the idea attracted little attention outside specialist circles. The prevailing assumption was that medicine was too regulated, too complex and too dependent on biology for machine learning to make a meaningful difference. The evidence we were seeing told a different story. The science was improving. The quality of founders entering the field was exceptional. The underlying data pointed in one direction long before public enthusiasm caught up.
Today, much of that investment case feels obvious. It certainly didn’t at the time. That’s often how conviction works. Eventually it stops looking like conviction and starts looking like common sense.
Women’s sport followed a similar trajectory. For years, the accepted wisdom was that audiences would remain limited and media rights would never justify significant investment. But attendance, engagement and the widening gap between the quality of the product and its valuation suggested something very different. Capital eventually followed. Looking back, the opportunity now appears straightforward. It wasn’t straightforward when very few people were paying attention.
Quantum cybersecurity is different because that story is still unfolding. The risks remain largely invisible to most markets because the threat hasn’t fully arrived. But the mathematics behind quantum computing leave very little room for wishful thinking. Waiting for certainty in this case risks waiting until the opportunity has disappeared. We’re still early. Ask me again in ten years.
Of course, conviction sometimes fails. Any investor who claims otherwise is describing luck rather than process.
The genuinely difficult discipline isn’t holding your nerve through uncertainty. It’s recognising the moment when you’re adding to a position because the market has become irrational, rather than because you’ve become emotionally attached to your original idea.
The written thesis helps. Humility helps even more.
The moment conviction becomes part of your identity, the investment is already in danger. The goal was never to be proved right. The goal was always to understand reality more clearly than the market had managed to do so.
In the end, conviction is really a statement about time. Insight is more common than people imagine. What’s rare is having the patience, discipline and organisational structure to wait while that insight matures.
Markets usually recognise value eventually. The challenge is surviving, intellectually and financially, until they do.
That’s why I’ve increasingly come to see patience as a competitive advantage rather than simply a personal virtue. In investing, the greatest opportunities are rarely the ones everyone agrees on. They’re the ones that still require conviction.
Conviction before consensus isn’t a slogan. It’s the discipline of thinking independently long before the market catches up.
Nicole Junkermann is an international investor focused on technology, sports and media. She leads NJF Holdings, a global investment group, and its sports platform Gameday by NJF Holdings, which invests in sports leagues, media rights and technology-driven fan engagement. Her work in the sector focuses on building long-term sports infrastructure and expanding the commercial and global reach of professional leagues.