The Stock Analysis Template I Use Before Owning Any Stock

ELI5/TLDR

Vishal Khandelwal walks through the 15-question template he actually uses before owning a stock, organized into three columns: business, management, and price. Five questions per column, plus one “gut check” at the bottom of each. The point is not to score companies or generate a verdict — it is to make visible where your conviction is real and where you are pretending. He stress-tests the template on Demart and lands in the uncomfortable middle: business mostly understood, management in transition, price demanding. The honesty is the work.

The Full Story

Why three columns and 15 questions

Khandelwal opens with a workshop attendee who reads the annual reports, listens to concalls, follows the right people on LinkedIn, and still freezes at the buy button. The diagnosis: not too little information, too much. The fix is not more inputs — it is a smaller set of the right questions. Three columns is small enough to hold in your head and large enough to catch what usually hurts investors. He explicitly rejects treating the template as a checklist or a score (2/3 → buy, 3/3 → buy more). The columns are not addable. They are three independent yes/no/maybe judgments, and a no on any one of them should kill the trade.

Column 1 — Business (do I really understand it?)

“Real understanding is much different than just understanding the over-the-top kind of things.”

The five questions:

What does this company actually do? The one-sentence-to-a-15-year-old test. No buzzwords, no annual report phrases. Khandelwal calls this the hardest question on the template precisely because most investors skip it as too basic.
How do they make money and from whom? A B2G company is a different animal from a B2C one. A 50% gross margin business lives in a different world from an 8% one. If you cannot describe who pays and why, you own a ticker, not a business.
Am I pretending to understand this, or do I really? The honesty question. His test: if you sat across from the CEO, would your three sharpest questions sound like a pro’s or a beginner podcast host’s? If the latter, put the template down.
Would I be happy owning this for 10 years if the market shut tomorrow? The Buffett test. Strips away the chart, the ticker, the business channel. What is left is the business itself.
What could kill this business? Tech shifts, regulation, consumer habits, deeper-pocketed competitor. Holding “this is wonderful” and “this could fail” in the same head at the same time is uncomfortable, which is exactly why most people only hold the first.

Check question: Do I truly understand this business?

Column 2 — Management (can I trust them with my capital?)

This is the column most investors underweight. Hours on Excel, ten minutes on the people. Khandelwal flips that priority.

Would I trust these people to run my family’s money? A gut check that comes before the spreadsheet. Most of us know the answer before we finish asking; we just don’t want to admit it.
How do they treat minority shareholders when no one is watching? Related party transactions, share pledging, dilution, salaries, running the company for the family vs. for owners. In Indian markets, he calls this non-negotiable. A no here ends the analysis regardless of how cheap or wonderful everything else looks.
What do their last 10 years of capital allocation tell me? Reinvestment, buybacks, acquisitions, dividends, debt — what did they actually do with the cash? Ten years is the right window because anything shorter lets luck dominate. Reading a decade of annual reports back-to-back is tedious even after 20 years of doing it. He says this is still one of the highest-return things an investor can do, AI summaries notwithstanding.
Do they tell the truth in good years and bad? The test: pull the chairman’s letter from the worst year of the last decade. Honest, grounded, owns the mistakes? Trustworthy. Defensive, vague, blames the weather and the regulator? You have your answer without needing more data.
Do they have real skin in the game, and for how long? Not whether they own some shares — whether the company’s fate genuinely affects their net worth, and how long they have been at it. A 20-year founder with most of his wealth still inside is in a different category from a three-year executive quietly selling parcels.

Check question: Can I trust these people with my capital?

Column 3 — Price (am I paying a sensible price?)

The column where most investors do the least honest work. They do the homework, fall in love with the story, and then pay any price as an afterthought. Sunk-cost bias compounds the problem — you spent the weekend reading the annual report, of course you’re going to buy.

What am I paying today? P/E, earnings yield, P/B, P/S, DCF — whichever lens fits. The point is to say the number out loud.
What is the market implicitly expecting, and do I agree? A P/E of 80 isn’t just “expensive” — it is a story about the next decade. Sustained high growth, margins holding or expanding, near-flawless execution. Decode the story instead of accepting it. Better question: what would have to be true over the next 10 years for this price to make sense, and do I believe all of it?
What would I pay if I were buying the whole business? Imagine no stock market exists, you buy the entire thing with your money, can’t sell for 10 years. The gap between that number and the listed price tells you how much of today’s quote is the business and how much is other people’s enthusiasm.
At what price would I sell, and why? Decided before you buy, not after. Two triggers worth writing down: (a) multiple expansion that earnings can’t justify, (b) the business itself underperforming your assumed thesis.
If the stock drops 40% next month, do I buy more or panic? If the honest answer is panic, the stock owns you, not the other way around.

Check question: Am I paying a sensible price?

The Demart walkthrough

Khandelwal applies the template live to Demart and is careful to flag this is a process demo, not a recommendation. Three honest answers:

Business: Simple to describe (no-frills supermarket, owns its real estate, ~8% operating margin, wins through inventory turnover not unit economics). Genuinely uncertain whether the storebased model holds as quick commerce scales over the next decade.
Management: Damani is the long-term anchor with deep skin in the game. But the operational baton has just passed from Neville Noronha (two decades) to a new MD/CEO from Deliveroo with three years on the job. Conviction here requires patience, not a quick conclusion.
Price: Trades at 80–100x earnings, sometimes 120. That multiple bakes in sustained high growth, stable-to-expanding margins despite quick commerce, and flawless execution under new leadership. Whether you agree with all three is the central question.

Three columns, three different answers, one company. The point is exactly that good investing lives in this uncomfortable middle and the template makes the discomfort visible instead of letting you paper over it.

Key Takeaways

Business

What does this company actually do? (one-sentence-to-a-teenager test)
How do they make money, and from whom?
Am I pretending to understand this, or do I really?
Would I be happy owning this for 10 years if the market shut tomorrow?
What could kill this business?
Check: Do I truly understand this business?

Management

Would I trust these people to run my family’s money?
How do they treat minority shareholders when no one is watching?
What do their last 10 years of capital allocation tell me?
Do they tell the truth in good years and bad?
Do they have real skin in the game, and for how long?
Check: Can I trust these people with my capital?

Price

What am I paying today?
What is the market implicitly expecting, and do I agree?
What would I pay if I were buying the whole business?
At what price would I sell, and why? (decide before you buy)
If the stock drops 40% next month, do I buy more or panic?
Check: Am I paying a sensible price?

Process notes: fill it by hand, not on a computer. Notice which column you keep wanting to skip — that is usually the one telling you something. The columns don’t add up to a score; a no on any one is a no overall.

Claude’s Take

Nothing here is new. The Buffett-Munger-Pabrai-Mauboussin canon has covered every one of these 15 questions in more depth than a 44-minute video can. What Khandelwal does well is compression — putting business, management, and price into a single one-page artifact you can actually fill out before pulling the trigger, with a non-negotiable check question at the bottom of each column that prevents the addability trap.

The two genuinely useful design choices: (1) refusing to let the template produce a verdict — it’s a clarity tool, not a scoring tool, and (2) the “what does the market implicitly expect” reframe of the price column, which is a more honest valuation question than any single multiple. The Demart walkthrough earns its keep by demonstrating the discipline of not landing on a verdict — a lot of investing pedagogy collapses into a thumbs-up at the end.

Where it’s thin: the price column treats DCF, P/E, EV/EBITDA as roughly interchangeable lenses without saying when each fits, which is where most price-column work actually lives. The “what would I pay for the whole business” question is a useful gut-check but in practice tends to anchor on the listed price anyway. And the management questions are great for screening out frauds and fading-promoter situations but less useful at the margin between “good” and “great” management — the kind of distinction that compounds for a decade.

Score 7. Solid framework, nothing revolutionary, executed cleanly. Good as a one-page laminate for the desk drawer. The mastermind pitch at the end is mild and earned given he gave away the actual template.