Every selection committee has, at some point, dropped a batter who scored a fifty in the last match, and kept one who scored a duck. The scoreboard was not the reason either time. Selling a stock well works exactly the same way — and the reasons that actually count have almost nothing to do with the price.

A village well can serve every household for fifty years and then sit almost untouched within five. Nothing was wrong with the well. The world around it simply found another way to get water — and that is exactly how a company’s strongest advantage can disappear while the company itself changes almost nothing at all.