Carl Zeiss Meditec: When the Thesis Gets Punched in the Mouth
•February 15, 2026
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Why It Matters
Understanding how to adapt investment theses in real time is crucial for avoiding costly anchoring bias and for capitalizing on fresh information. This episode offers a rare, actionable lesson in disciplined analysis, making it especially relevant for investors who want to turn conviction into consistent performance rather than static opinion.
Carl Zeiss Meditec: When the Thesis Gets Punched in the Mouth
Everybody has a model until the earnings call starts.
Last week, I published our deep dive on Carl Zeiss Meditec. Some of you may have noticed the timing was, shall we say, aggressive. The Q1 FY2025/26 analyst conference was days away. I knew that. You knew that. I published anyway, and I did it deliberately, because I wanted to do something I don’t think enough investment writers ever do: show you what happens to a thesis when fresh data arrives.
See, most analysts publish their write-up, collect the applause (or the hate mail), and then quietly update their model in a spreadsheet nobody ever sees. The original article lives forever, frozen in amber, while reality moves on without it.
That’s not how real investing works.
Real investing is a continuous conversation between your convictions and the market’s evidence, and the interesting part, the part that actually makes you money or saves you from losing it, is what happens in the space between your thesis and the next data point.
So I rushed the Zeiss piece out the door before the Q1 call on purpose. Not because I was sloppy, but because I wanted to create a live case study. A before-and-after. An opportunity to show you, in near-real time, how new information should change your thinking, your model, and your positioning. Think of the deep dive as the “before” photograph. What you’re reading now is the “after.”
Three days ago, Carl Zeiss Meditec held its Q1 FY2025/26 analyst conference, and I need to be honest with you: some of our assumptions need recalibrating. Not because the structural thesis is wrong (I’ll explain why it isn’t), but because pretending new data doesn’t exist is not analysis. It’s religion. And we don’t do religion at The Boredom Baron.
Today’s post is a mini master class in intellectual honesty. The skill I want to teach you, knowing when and how to update your priors without panic-selling your convictions, is arguably more important than finding the idea in the first place. Anybody can screen for cheap stocks. The rare thing, the genuinely valuable thing, is the discipline to hold your thesis up against hostile evidence and ask: does this change the “if,” or just the “when”?
Let’s be good students.
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