MIDWEEK ALPHA · v.02 HOW TO BECOME A BETTER RESEARCHER A lot of people on CT don’t have a research problem. They have a discipline problem. You see a project you like, read a thread about it, find another account saying the same thing, save a few charts, and suddenly you feel like you’ve done your homework. You haven’t. You’ve just seen the same story from a few different angles. I’ve been working on this in my own research too, and I can already see the difference. I question claims more. I go back to the source more. I spend less time asking, “What is everyone saying?” and more time asking, “What can I actually verify?” I still catch myself slipping sometimes. That’s exactly why I’m writing this. If you want to become a better researcher, start by becoming harder to convince. Someone makes a claim about a protocol. Don’t believe it because the account has 200k followers. Don’t believe it because the chart looks clean. Don’t believe it because three respected researchers posted it. Instead, make these part of your normal research process: ➤ FIND THE SOURCE Don’t stop at someone else’s explanation. Go to the announcement, documentation, dataset or original report and see what was actually said. ➤ CHECK THE CONTEXT Look at the date, methodology and what the number actually measures. A number can be completely real and still be used to tell you the wrong story. ➤ VERIFY IT INDEPENDENTLY Five accounts repeating the same statistic are not five confirmations. If they all got it from the same source, you still have one piece of evidence. ➤ TRY TO PROVE YOURSELF WRONG Think a protocol is growing? Go find the numbers that could challenge that conclusion. Think a token is undervalued? Find the strongest argument for why the market might be right. Love the project? Good. Now look for the reasons you might be wrong. This is where research can go bad. Once you get attached to a thesis, you can stop investigating and start defending it. You become the lawyer, the judge and the person deciding what evidence gets admitted. I’ve caught myself doing this too. So before I get too comfortable with a thesis, I ask: “What would make me change my mind?” Then I go looking for it. And don’t blur the line between what happened and what you think it means. ➤ SEPARATE FACTS FROM INTERPRETATION “Protocol generated $2M in fees” is something you can verify. “Therefore the token is undervalued” is an interpretation. Know where the evidence ends and your conclusion begins. Sometimes, after doing all of this, you end up with: “I don’t know yet.” That’s fine. You don’t need to force an answer just because you’ve already spent three hours researching. None of this guarantees that you’ll become a great researcher. There’s no magic formula. But these habits make it harder to fool yourself, easier to catch weak assumptions, and much easier to tell the difference between something you know and something you simply believe. That’s what I’m working on too. So when you research something, don’t focus on how much information you collected. Focus on whether you actually tested your own belief. Find the source. Check the context. Verify it independently. Try to prove yourself wrong. Separate facts from interpretation. And if the evidence gives you a different answer than the one you wanted, take the different answer. If you found this useful, show some love with a like, drop your thoughts in the comments, and follow for the next research piece. See you on the next one.