New Experiment on Documenting Learning about Company Finances

I’ve long been a fan of value investing, and learning about company building. I work in startups, and I constantly see building, scaling, and incentivizing teams at a small scale. I try to private carry those learnings over to when investing in companies with my personal money.

I’m going to be more public about my learnings on this blog. Too often - my research is shallow, based on some conviction I have, but with no actual price analysis. I’m trying to get more comfortable with succeeding or failing in public.

What you can expect

I’m going to focus on both offence and defence. Writing around offence will mostly be about investing, projects and investing in levelling up my career. Defence will be a focus on managing a budget, tracking net worth, and eliminating useless spending.

Up to this point

Twice a month with my pay cheque, I’m depositing a small portion into my RRSP (I’m Canadian - think 401k for US). This helps reduce my overall tax burden at the end of the year. It also allows me to begin the compounding machine. I also have a TFSA with some money in it.

I’m going to keep numbers private, but use percentages to provide some substance. You can assume it’s around average for a Canadian in their 30’s.

First observation is my largest holdings are where I have the most conviction and tend to map to my largest purchase - as you would expect. Other smaller ones is buying fractional shares every two weeks. I don’t think this is a bad thing, but I do think I’m diversifying to avoid doing due diligence.

Private Companies
I don’t invest private companies because level of effort, deal flow, and not enough capital. I do track predictions as I come across private companies here. There’s a date and simple reason (Again - no due diligence). It’s often because I’ve used the product as a customer and understand the problem.

Resources

I’ll finish this off with recent books I’ve read related to the topic. You can find my full bookshelf here.

• Black Edge <– It was a decent read and good to understand who you are going up in the short term.
• The Fund <– Dalio’s been calling disaster every year for 40 years. It gets air time, and more money into the fund. His innovation was the company as a system.
• Genius Makers <– Big ideas form in small communities. I remember experimenting with Tensorflow in 2017. I knew it would be something, but it didn’t click. That’s fine, but 8 years later it’s the backbone of the biggest trend. The community was tiny originally. It also went through 3 AI winters, so expect another one.
• The Psychology of Money <– I tend to have a negative emotional reaction to debt. Then my logic brain tries to convince me otherwise. It’s okay to avoid debt to have a clearer mind and sleep at night.
• Super Founders <– A lot of the books have examples of first principles thinking and avoiding the herd. I mean… just be mindful of bias, trust data, and use first principles.
• The Algebra of Wealth <– Be ready if wrong. Invert, always invert.
• The Joy of Compounding <– Lots, I need to re-read it.

That’s just some. Clearly I have a favourite topic.