Deep Dive: How to Master the Two-Sided Take

Catch-up: Commercial Awareness Update: The June Wrap 2026 | Deep Dive: The Iran Deal and Its Economic Aftermath | Career Advice: Perfect Your CV Before Application Season Kicks-Off

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Before we get into it, I recently started playing around with AI and built an iOS app. Now it’s available on the App Store 🤯. It’s called Ayah Lock. You can check it out here (5 star ratings and reviews welcome! 😉).

Alright, back to today’s deep dive. This one's a bit different.

Most of our deep dives are about a specific story. Today's is about a specific skill. One that, once you genuinely have it, changes how you come across in every single interview, every networking call, and every commercial awareness question you'll ever get asked.

I call it the two-sided take.

It's not a complicated idea. But almost nobody does it well, and the people who do it well are immediately, obviously, more impressive than everyone else in the room.

Here's the thing that took me a long time to properly understand, even after years in the industry. The candidates who get offers at the best firms aren't the ones who know the most facts. They're the ones who can hold two competing ideas in their head at once and explain both clearly. That's it. That's the entire skill.

By the end of today's issue, you should understand:

Let's get into it.

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Here's a pattern I've seen play out in hundreds of interviews and mock interviews over the years.

An interviewer asks something like "what do you make of X" or "talk me through a recent story you've been following." The candidate has clearly done their reading. They know the facts. They can describe what happened in reasonable detail.

And it falls flat anyway.

Why?

Because describing what happened is not the same as demonstrating that you understand it. Anyone can read a headline and repeat it back. The interviewer already knows what happened. They're not testing your memory. They're testing whether you can think.

The giveaway is always the same. A one-sided answer. The candidate picks a position, often without realising they've picked one, and defends it as though it's simply true. "AI stocks are clearly the place to be right now." "The Fed should obviously cut rates." "SpaceX is a great investment."

Maybe. Maybe not. The problem isn't that the opinion is wrong. The problem is that stating an opinion confidently, with no acknowledgement that smart, well-informed people might reasonably disagree, is exactly what someone does when they haven't actually thought it through. It's the verbal equivalent of guessing.

The people who actually work in finance, the analysts, the portfolio managers, the people interviewing you, spend their entire careers living inside uncertainty. Every position they take has a counter-argument. Every trade has a bear case. The moment a candidate sounds completely certain about something genuinely uncertain, the interviewer learns something important: this person hasn't worked through the other side of the argument, which means they probably haven't worked through their own side properly either.

That's the trap. And it's an easy one to fall into, because confidence feels like the right thing to project in an interview. It isn't, not on its own. Confidence paired with nuance is what actually lands.

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A two-sided take is simply this: a short, structured answer that presents the strongest case for a position, the strongest case against it, and then your own genuine view on how those two things weigh against each other.

Not "here are some pros and cons, who knows." That's wishy-washy and just as weak as a one-sided answer, because it signals you can't actually form a judgement.

A real two-sided take has a point of view. It just earns that point of view by genuinely engaging with the other side first.

Think about how an actual investment decision gets made inside a hedge fund or an asset manager. Nobody just says "I like this stock" and buys it. There's a thesis. There's a bull case, built on specific reasons. There's a bear case, the reasons a smart person would short it instead. And then there's a final judgement call about which case is stronger, made with full awareness that the other side exists and has real merit.

That's literally how professional investors think. A two-sided take is just that process, compressed into something you can say out loud in fifteen to twenty seconds.

It does three things at once. It proves you understand the topic well enough to argue both sides. It proves you can form an independent judgement rather than just reciting facts. And it makes you sound like someone who already thinks the way professionals in the room think, before you've even got the job.

That third point is the one that actually wins offers.

Here's the structure, broken down so you can use it immediately.

Sentence one: the bull case. State the strongest, most legitimate argument in favour of a position. The actual best argument a smart person would make.

Sentence two: the bear case. State the strongest argument against it. Again, genuinely strong, not a token objection you're about to dismiss.

Sentence three: your synthesis. This is the sentence that actually matters most. Either give your view on which case is currently stronger and why, or connect the tension to a second story to show you're thinking about the bigger picture rather than just this one issue in isolation.

That's it. Three sentences. Bull, bear, synthesis.

Here's the skeleton in its simplest form:

"The case for [X] is [strongest argument in favour]. The case against is [strongest argument opposing it]. What I find most interesting is [your judgement, or a connection to something else happening]."

You don't need to memorise that exact phrasing. What you need to internalise is the shape of the thinking. Most people, when asked a commercial awareness question, jump straight to an opinion. The two-sided take forces you to slow down, articulate the tension first, and only then land on a view. That sequencing is what makes it sound considered rather than rehearsed.

Theory is fine, but this only really clicks once you see it applied. Let's use three stories from June, the kind of thing that comes up constantly in interviews right now.

Example one: the AI trade.

Weak answer: "AI stocks have been incredible this year, hedge funds are piling into chips, it's clearly the place to be."

Two-sided take: "The bull case is that infrastructure demand is real and visible right now, chip and data centre spending isn't slowing, regardless of which specific AI application eventually wins. The bear case is that the trade has become so crowded that even a modest wobble triggers an outsized move, which is exactly what we saw in the last week of June when the semiconductor index pulled back nearly 10% and Nvidia had its worst week in over a year. What's interesting is that doesn't necessarily mean the thesis is wrong, it might just mean the trade got ahead of itself and needed to cool off, which connects to the more hawkish path the Fed has signalled under its new chair."

Notice what that does. It shows genuine knowledge of the bull case in detail. It shows awareness of a real, recent counter-argument with a specific data point. And it ends by connecting two separate stories together, which is one of the highest-signal things you can do in any interview.

Example two: the SpaceX IPO.

Weak answer: "SpaceX had a huge IPO, the stock is up a lot, it shows how much investors believe in the company."

Two-sided take: "The bull case is that Starlink, the core profitable business, is growing fast and has a genuinely defensible market position in satellite internet. The bear case is that Morningstar's own fair value estimate came in at around $63 a share, against a price that traded well above $160 in the weeks after listing, which is a significant gap between price and what a rigorous valuation model suggests. My read is that a lot of the initial move was driven by index-fund mechanics and sheer excitement around the listing rather than fundamentals, which is a useful reminder that price and value aren't the same thing, especially in the weeks right after a major IPO."

Example three: the Fed under Kevin Warsh.

Weak answer: "The Fed held rates, but they might hike later this year because inflation is high."

Two-sided take: "The case for a more hawkish Fed is that inflation hit a three-year high in May, largely driven by the energy shock from the Iran war, and the new chair has signalled he wants markets reacting to data rather than guidance. The case against staying hawkish is that oil has fallen sharply since the ceasefire, which could ease inflation meaningfully over the summer and give the Fed room to be more dovish than the current dot plot suggests. What I think is genuinely interesting is that Warsh has deliberately made the Fed's future path harder to predict by dropping forward guidance, so the usual playbook of reading the dot plot for certainty doesn't really work the same way anymore."

Read those three examples back to back. None of them are long. None of them require you to have insider information. They just require you to have actually thought about both sides before opening your mouth.

A few things genuinely matter here, because done badly, this technique backfires and sounds more rehearsed than a normal answer, not less.

Mistake one: weak strawmanning. If your "bear case" or "bull case" is obviously the weaker of the two, deliberately undersold so your own opinion looks stronger by comparison, interviewers notice immediately. The whole exercise only works if both sides are genuinely the strongest version of that argument. If you can't actually construct a strong opposing case, that's a sign you don't understand the topic as well as you think.

Mistake two: no synthesis. If you just present both sides and stop, "well, there are pros and cons," you haven't actually demonstrated judgement. The synthesis sentence is the one that matters most. Don't skip it.

Mistake three: hedging instead of synthesising. There's a difference between genuine synthesis and just saying "it's complicated" or "time will tell." Those phrases sound like you're avoiding having a view. A real synthesis takes a position, even a tentative one, or makes a specific connection to something else. "It's nuanced" is not an answer. "What's interesting is X" followed by an actual point, is.

Mistake four: using it for everything. Not every question needs this structure. If someone asks you a simple factual question, just answer it. The two-sided take is for genuinely contested, opinion-based commercial awareness questions, not for "what is EBITDA." Overusing the structure makes you sound like you're following a script rather than actually thinking, which defeats the entire purpose.

The honest truth is this only works if it stops sounding like a structure and starts sounding like how you naturally think. That takes practice.

Here's how to build it.

Pick one story a week from the newsletter and force yourself to write out a two-sided take. Literally write the three sentences down. Don't skip this step by just thinking it through in your head. Writing it forces precision that thinking alone doesn't.

Say it out loud, not just on paper. A two-sided take that reads well on a page can sound completely different spoken aloud. Practise saying it naturally, the way you'd actually say it in a conversation, not reciting it like a memorised script.

Apply it to things outside of finance too. This is a thinking skill, not a finance-specific trick. Practise it on whatever you're curious about. Should football clubs spend more on youth academies or first-team transfers. Is remote work good or bad for company culture. The more you practise the underlying skill of holding two genuine positions in your head, the more naturally it'll show up when you're actually in an interview talking about interest rates.

Notice when you catch yourself giving a one-sided answer, and rebuild it on the spot. This is the fastest way to actually internalise the skill. Next time you find yourself stating an opinion confidently in conversation with friends or family, pause and ask what the strongest counter-argument would be. Do this enough times and it becomes instinct rather than effort.

The goal isn't to memorise example answers, including the ones in this email. If you walk into an interview and recite the AI trade example word for word, it'll sound exactly like what it is: memorised. The goal is to build the underlying habit of mind so that when you're asked literally anything, your brain automatically reaches for both sides of the argument before you speak.

That's what separates candidates who sound coached from candidates who sound like they genuinely think this way. And interviewers, who do this for a living, can always tell the difference.

If an interviewer asks:

A strong answer, using the structure from today, could be:

That's a complete, confident, nuanced answer in under thirty seconds. No memorised script. Just a clear structure, applied to genuine knowledge.

The thing I want you to take from today isn't a script. It's a habit of mind.

Most candidates walk into interviews trying to sound certain, because certainty feels like confidence. But the people who actually work in finance know that the real skill isn't certainty. It's being comfortable holding two competing, well-argued positions in your head at the same time, and still being able to form a clear judgement anyway.

That's not a finance skill specifically. It's closer to what separates good thinkers from average ones in any field. Finance just happens to reward it constantly, because every trade, every investment, every strategic decision involves weighing a case for against a case against.

If you take one thing from this email and actually practise it, properly practise it, not just read it and nod along, it'll change how you come across in every single interview you walk into from here on.

Bull case. Bear case. Synthesis. Simple!

You got this.

Afzal

Ps. Useful tools for serious candidates: