It’s been over a year since I last wrote here, and it isn’t “life got busy.” Life is always busy.Here’s what actually happened. Late 2025, I looked at my portfolio one day, then I looked at the market, and I couldn’t reconcile the two.The indexes were making new highs. It was a bull market. Stocks were breaking out everywhere I looked. And my portfolio was just... flat. Doing nothing.The hardest part was that there was nothing wrong with what I owned. These were good companies — strong management, real growth, defensible positions. But there was a gap between the quality of my research and the quality of my results. I could explain a company better than I could profit from it.That’s when it clicked: a good company is not the same as a good stock. I had built an entire process around finding good companies. I had never built one around finding good stocks. Those are different skills, and I’d only been practicing one of them.So instead of writing through it, I went quiet and went to work.A gem of a bookThe thing that reframed my thinking was a deeply underrated book — Brad Koteshwar’s The Perfect Speculator. There’s a passage I keep coming back to, because it described me exactly:“When I was a young man and new to the market, I made the mistake of trying to catch a move before the trend began. I used to think that I had to get in before the crowd got in... It took me years and huge almost insurmountable losses to figure out that more money has been lost in trying to catch the bottom or the beginning of a move than anyone ever knew.”And the line right after it is the one that actually changed how I invest: buy "when the move has definitely begun and not one second before." Anticipating a move, he says, is just another human failing that makes paupers out of most of us.That was me. My flat portfolio was a portfolio of bets on moves that hadn’t begun, and might never begin. I thought patience with a good company was a virtue. Sometimes it’s just dead money while the leaders run.The stock that crystallized itThe moment it all came together was watching SanDisk Corporation (Nasdaq: SNDK).It broke out of its IPO base in early September 2025 in the high $50s. As I write this it trades around $2,000 — roughly a 35x move in nine months. And here’s the part that matters: at the time it broke out, it had no spectacular earnings. The blowout numbers didn’t arrive until quarters later. The stock was telling the story long before the fundamentals confirmed it.I got curious in a way I hadn’t been before. Not “why did I miss it” — but how would I even scan for something like this? What are the actual characteristics of a stock that does this?So I studied the leaders. Not the companies — the stocks. The ones that actually moved. I lined them up and looked for what they had in common before they ran. And as I did, everything Koteshwar was pointing at stopped being abstract and became obvious.What I narrowed down toThe framework is narrower than how I used to invest. The narrowing is the point.All-time highs. When I lined up the leaders, every single one had one thing in common: they were making new highs. Not 52-week highs — all-time highs. The difference matters more than it sounds. In any given year there are 500 to 1,000+ stocks hitting fresh 52-week highs, so that filter narrows nothing. All-time highs cut the list to a handful. And a stock at an all-time high has nobody trapped in a loss waiting to sell into a bounce — no overhead supply. The market has already voted it a leader.Young companies, roughly the last 10–15 years. I skip the legacy names. The older a company is, the more likely it has already had its big move in a prior cycle. The newer names are where the fastest, farthest moves tend to live. I'll miss some great old compounders, and I've made peace with that — there are more than enough newer ones, and the constraint forces focus.The market is forward-looking. Price doesn't pay you for what a company earned — it pays for what it's about to earn. Investors are paying up for future cash flows. SanDisk ran before its numbers showed up — a near-perfect demonstration of the principle. The income statement is the rear-view mirror; the price is the windshield.Live themes. When a whole industry gets supercharged — semiconductors right now — a strong name can get carried with the group. It's one of the strongest places to hunt, and when a leader lines up inside a leading theme, the move can be amplified. But it's not the only place I look. Some leaders run on their own, with no theme behind them, and those count too.There's more to the method than this — position sizing, where I buy, when I sell. But I'm not turning this into a technical-trading newsletter. The point of this post is the lens: what I'm hunting and why.Where I actually amThis is still new to me. I’m learning every day — that’s why this is a diary, not a premium service promising you winners. But I’m a far better student of the market than I was last year, and I’ll keep getting better.Next post, I put it to work on something I actually own — a young company at all-time highs — and walk the full thesis through this lens: why it qualifies, and where the future is being repriced.If you stuck around through the silence: thank you. The version of The 10x Radar you get from here is the one I wish I’d been writing all along.Let’s go find some leaders.— AdityaThanks for reading The 10x Radar! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.