Viewpoints
October, 2026
In this issue of Viewpoints: The Courage to Think and Rethink
The other pilot got to start on his tail. That was the advantage John Boyd offered anyone willing to take him on in a simulated dogfight at the Air Force’s Fighter Weapons School. Boyd would then have forty seconds to turn the tables and get behind his challenger. If he failed, he would pay forty dollars. It was an audacious wager, and it earned him a nickname: “Forty-Second Boyd.” By most accounts, he never paid.
I came to Boyd the way many people come to their heroes: someone handed me a book. My father, General Michael R. Moeller, USAF (Ret.), counted Boyd among his own idols. He gave me Robert Coram’s biography, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War. I laughed. I cried. I have been reading about the man ever since. The bet made Boyd a legend among fighter pilots, and what followed helped change the American military. Yet outside military circles, his name remains surprisingly unfamiliar.
Boyd could have been satisfied with being an exceptional pilot. Instead, he became fascinated by what happened in those few seconds when an advantage changed hands. Why could one aircraft escape a dangerous position while another could not? How much depended on the pilot, and how much on the machine? He wanted answers that could help the next young aviator climb into a cockpit with a better chance of coming home.
Working with mathematician Thomas Christie, he began putting numbers to what pilots experienced in the air. A fighter might be impressively fast in a straight line, yet struggle once it had to turn or climb. Boyd and Christie developed a way to compare those strengths and weaknesses. They called it energy-maneuverability theory. The name sounds forbidding; the purpose was practical. Give pilots a clearer understanding of what their aircraft could do, and give designers a better basis for building the next one.
Getting those ideas accepted was a longer fight than any he flew. Boyd was blunt, difficult, and unwelcome in offices where careers were built on agreement. He knew the cost. He told younger officers that everyone eventually reaches a fork in the road. One path leads to being somebody, with the promotions and comforts that follow. The other leads to doing something that matters, and it is the lonelier road. “To be or to do?” he would ask. Boyd chose to do, and he retired as a colonel.
The consequences became visible in metal and machinery. His work helped shape the F-15 and F-16. Later, his interests reached beyond aircraft to the conduct of war itself: how a force could unsettle an opponent, create confusion, and gain the initiative. His ideas influenced the Marine Corps’ approach to warfare and reached people responsible for commanding entire military campaigns.
There is a temptation to tell this as the familiar story of a stubborn man who was eventually proved right. Boyd’s story is more interesting than that. His colleague Franklin Spinney recalled him pulling his own ideas apart, checking them against reality, and pursuing the discussion in middle-of-the-night phone calls. He was willing to discard his own work when it failed that scrutiny.
That willingness helps explain the idea for which he is best known: the OODA loop. The letters stand for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. It grew out of a problem a fighter pilot understood very well. The situation keeps changing, including in response to your own actions. An advantage can disappear while you are still acting on the assumption that you have it.
Imagine following the action from the cockpit. You notice what the other aircraft is doing, make sense of it, choose a response, and maneuver. Now the positions have changed. You have to look again. The crucial step is making sense of what you see, which Boyd called orientation. Experience helps, but so does recognizing when events no longer match your expectations.
Orienting: From the Cockpit to the Portfolio
Most of us will never face that test in a fighter aircraft. Investors face a slower version of it every quarter. We have studied a business, bought its shares, and explained why we like it. Then something changes. Sales weaken. A competitor gains ground. Management’s explanation sounds reasonable, but the next quarter brings more of the same. Noticing is the easy step. The hard one is Boyd’s second: making sense of it. Is this a good business having a bad year, or a business that is becoming less valuable?
The share price alone will not tell us. A falling stock may be a chance to buy a sound business at an attractive price. It may also be the market noticing something we have missed. If weaker demand is temporary and the company remains financially strong, the case for holding may be intact. If customers are leaving for a better product and the company is borrowing to pay its dividend, we have different questions to answer.
Human nature does not make this easier. In a well-known study of 10,000 brokerage accounts, the economist Terrance Odean found that investors were far quicker to sell their winners than their losers, and that the habit cost them.¹ Research on forecasting actually points to the remedy. The most accurate forecasters revise their views often and in small steps. The least accurate tend to restate their first opinion, or to change it rarely and drastically.²
Boyd’s habit gives us three questions. What do we believe? Why do we believe it? What evidence would cause us to change our minds? The third is most valuable when the first two have become comfortable. Deciding in advance what would undermine our reasons for owning a company helps us recognize a meaningful change before we have spent months explaining it away.
People who know the OODA loop often hear it as a call for speed. For us, the lesson is to see sooner, which is a different thing from acting faster. None of this requires constant trading. A business can reward shareholders for many years while enduring difficult quarters along the way, and repeated analysis may support holding exactly the same investment. Patience has substance when we can explain why the reasons for ownership still hold.
The Fork in the Road
At Slocum, Gordon & Co., this discipline begins with the responsibility entrusted to us. Client capital serves real purposes: income in retirement, support for family, charitable commitments, and plans that may extend well beyond the next market cycle. Those purposes keep us pointed in the right direction when market commentary turns loud or contradictory.
Our preference for Dividend Aristocrats is one expression of that discipline. These S&P 500 companies have raised their dividends for at least 25 consecutive years. We use that record as an initial screen for business quality, our first line of defense. Then we look forward: can the business generate the cash and sustain the financial strength needed to keep increasing those payments? That is why we call ourselves Dividend Growth Investors. A strong record earns our attention, but continued ownership requires continued scrutiny.
Since our founding in 1978, businesses have emerged, industries have been transformed, and the sources of opportunity and risk have shifted. Our principles have held. The price we pay matters, financial strength matters, and a dividend must be supported by the business that pays it. Applying those principles is quiet work: reading, questioning assumptions, comparing competing explanations. It rarely makes headlines. It is what lets us tell a disappointing result that warrants patience from new evidence that warrants a different course.
Boyd is remembered for forty seconds. His real work filled the better part of forty years, most of it unseen and much of it spent arguing with himself. We honor that example by taking the work seriously, including the work of reconsideration. In stewarding client capital, our obligation is to bring conviction strong enough to withstand disagreement, and curiosity strong enough to recognize when our understanding must change. John Boyd asked his young officers to choose: to be, or to do. We made our choice in 1978.
Michael P. Moeller, CIMA®
Portfolio Manager & Director of Research
