Avoid temporary winners with AI (Most “great businesses” don’t stay great.)
A prompt to test if returns can survive the next 5 years.
“Just buy exceptional businesses.”
Sounds easy when you hear it like that..
it’s look like you need only to:
Open any screener.
Sort companies by returns on capital…
buy the top names…
and wait.
But reality doesn’t work like that.
A 30% ROIC business is a target.
If the moat is weak, competitors arrive.
Margins compress.
and returns normalize.
We’ve seen it many times…
The real challenge is not reading the numbers.
It’s understanding why the economics are strong
whether they are actually protected
and what could quietly destroy them over the next 5–10 years.
That’s where AI became extremely powerful.
Because AI is very good at:
• Gathering scattered information fast
• Mapping competitors and substitutes
• Stress-testing assumptions
• Simulating competitive reactions
• Generating scenarios you may not think about
• Connecting weak signals across an industry
In other words:
AI helps move the analysis from:
“this business looks exceptional today”
to
“what could stop it from staying exceptional?”
In this article, I’ll give you the exact prompt I use to pressure-test whether a “great business” is actually durable.
Watch this video to see what the output looks like and how to read it:
How I Pressure-Test “Exceptional Businesses” With AI:
I’m not using a Claude Skill for this.
Because I don’t want to overcomplicate the workflow.
For this use case, one detailed prompt is enough.
The key is to run it inside Deep Research mode.
Why?
Because I want the LLM to gather fresh data…
read filings…
compare competitors…
pull industry signals…
It’s a research task so i will run a Deep Research inside Gemini
But Mostapha, why not Claude ?
You can use Claude too.
Claude is very strong, and honestly not far behind.
But for this specific workflow, I prefer Gemini because it is especially good at going out, gathering sources, and building a detailed research report from fresh information.
That said, don’t overthink the tool.
Use the one you already pay for.
I have the choice because I pay for all of them…
The real asset is the set of questions inside the prompt and the structure it forces the model to follow.
You are not asking:
“Is this a good company?”
You are asking:
Why are returns high today?
Why hasn’t competition destroyed them?
Can new invested capital still earn high returns ?
What could push the business back toward average in next 5 years?
That’s the value.
How to use it :
Go to Gemini: Open Gemini and choose Deep Research mode.
Use Thinking model
Paste the prompt:Replace
{Insert Company}with the company you want to test.