Cross Company Validation

Use This Skill When

• The user wants to test whether management commentary is consistent with evidence from elsewhere in the value chain.
• A thesis depends on assumptions about demand, pricing, inventory, market share, or product adoption that should appear in peer disclosures.
• The task involves triangulation across suppliers, distributors, customers, competitors, or ecosystem partners.
• Management's narrative feels either unusually strong or unusually defensive and needs outside validation.

Required Inputs

• The exact claim, KPI, or management narrative to validate.
• Company name, sector, and the relevant period.
• A list of obvious ecosystem nodes if the user already has them.
• Any available third-party evidence such as supplier commentary, competitor results, channel data, or customer behavior.
• The intended use of the conclusion: thesis support, red-team challenge, or earnings read-through.

Workflow

1. Define the claim precisely, including direction, timing, and implied magnitude.
2. Map the evidence chain: suppliers, customers, distributors, implementation partners, regulators, competitors, and substitutes.
3. Compare what each external node is signaling against the company's claim.
4. Separate confirming, contradicting, and non-comparable evidence. Not every data point deserves equal weight.
5. Reconcile timing mismatches, geographic scope differences, and segment-mix distortions.
6. Produce a credibility-weighted conclusion and specify what evidence would move confidence higher or lower.

Output Requirements

• Use a triangulation tone: evidence-first, explicit about source relevance, and careful with mismatches.
• Organize the answer around the claim under review, not around a loose list of other companies.
• For each outside signal, explain why it is truly comparable or only directionally useful.
• Make unresolved gaps visible; a lack of confirming evidence can matter even without direct contradiction.
• End with a clear credibility assessment, not just a dump of mixed datapoints.

Output Template

Quality Checks

• Confirm the target claim is narrow enough to be tested against external evidence.
• Check that each third-party signal includes a reason it is comparable or only partially comparable.
• Make sure timing and segment differences are addressed before calling evidence contradictory.
• Verify the conclusion weights evidence quality, not just the number of confirming datapoints.
• Ensure unresolved gaps are listed when the evidence chain is incomplete.

Guardrails

• Do not treat any adjacent company commentary as automatically relevant.
• Do not overstate certainty when the value chain is fragmented or timing lags are meaningful.
• Do not ignore contradictory evidence just because management narrative is cleaner or more familiar.
• Do not mix different product categories or customer cohorts without flagging the mismatch.
• Do not replace triangulation with consensus repetition.

Example Prompts

• Validate whether ASML demand commentary is supported by what chipmakers and equipment peers are saying.
• Cross-check a management claim that enterprise seat growth is healthy using partner, customer, and peer evidence.
• Test whether an auto supplier's inventory normalization story is consistent with OEM commentary and channel data.