You know that scene in The Matrix where Morpheus offers Neo the two pills? "Blue pill: you keep believing the pretty story. Red pill: you see reality for what it is."
Well then. Yahoo Finance dropped a piece about Lamb Weston (LW) — the American frozen potato giant — with that classic PR-disguised-as-journalism headline: "Should You Be Confident in Lamb Weston's Attractive Long-Term Growth?"
But when you click to read it... guess what? There's no article. Just a wall of cookies, privacy policies, and digital tracking ads. Literally. The content was a Yahoo privacy notice.
And that, my friend, is the perfect metaphor for financial markets in 2025.
The Circus of Empty Headlines
Let me tell you something the suit-and-tie crowd doesn't like to admit: most of the financial content you consume wasn't made to inform you. It was made to generate clicks, to feed the algorithm, to keep you running on a hamster wheel.
A juicy headline — "attractive long-term growth" — is bait. It's the financial equivalent of that french fry smell in the mall that yanks you by the nostrils. You get to the counter and find out the fryer's broken.
Lamb Weston is a real company. It makes frozen fries for half the fast-food chains on the planet. Supplies McDonald's, Burger King, a ton of restaurants you eat at without even knowing. Nearly $6 billion in revenue. This isn't a joke.
But the reality? The stock went from almost $110 in mid-2023 to somewhere around $60 now. A drop of over 40%. And it wasn't because the world stopped eating french fries.
What's Actually Going On
Lamb Weston got hit by a perfect storm: rising input costs, weaker demand in Europe, growing private-label competition, and — maybe most importantly — a structural shift in post-pandemic consumer habits. Restaurants adjusted menus. Chains renegotiated contracts. The growth that seemed "guaranteed" started looking like a politician's campaign promise.
The company slashed guidance, laid people off, swapped out the CEO. The classic restructuring combo that Wall Street loves to call an "inflection point" when they want to sell you on buying the dip.
And here's the point Taleb would hammer into your skull: does the person recommending this stock to you have skin in the game? Did the analyst writing "attractive long-term growth" put his own money in it? Or is he just parroting the DCF model the intern ran in Excel?
Long Term: The Favorite Refuge of People Who Don't Want to Be Held Accountable
Look, I'm not against long-term investing. Quite the opposite. Buffett got rich sitting on positions for decades. But Buffett bought when nobody else wanted to. And he understood the business like few others could.
The problem is that "long term" has become a rhetorical crutch. Every bad recommendation hides behind the long term. "Down 40%? Chill, it's long term." "Cut the dividend? Think long term." "CEO got booted? Long term, bro."
It's like that buddy who owes you money and always says "I'll pay you next week."
The question that matters isn't whether Lamb Weston will grow over the next 10 years. French fries aren't going extinct. The question is: at what price does the risk-reward make sense for YOU? And beyond that: do you understand why it dropped and have independent conviction, or are you just parroting something you read in a headline that didn't even have an article behind it?
The Real Temperature Check
If you actually want to analyze LW, look at three things: operating margin (is it recovering or bleeding out?), free cash flow (does the machine actually generate money?), and debt levels versus ability to pay. Forget the pretty headline. Go read the 10-K. Listen to the conference call. Do the dirty work.
Because at the end of the day, the market doesn't reward you for repeating headlines. It rewards you for doing what nobody else wants to do.
The fries might be good. But if the cost of oil burned up the profit, you're eating reheated grease thinking it's gourmet.
So tell me: the last time you bought a "long-term" stock, did you read the balance sheet or just the article headline?
