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writing52.html
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<h3 class="head">Commitment</h3>
<p><em>Feb 13, 2022</em></p>
<p>I'm making a commitment a to write every week.</p>
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<p>Mostly, I will be writing about small public companies. I intentionally do not call it “writing an investment thesis” because that would imply investing in the company I write about. What’s the purpose then? The purpose is to get into a habit of constantly looking for companies and then being able to analyze them in a rapid fashion. Writing about a company makes you a better investor because it is difficult to lie to yourself on paper. Very often in your head you think you’ve covered everything you need to know about the company. But the moment you sit down to put your thoughts in writing you quickly realize that you don’t have answers to certain questions. More importantly, you start to come up with some questions you didn’t even think of before. I think this last part is the most useful part of writing.</p>
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<p>Why once a week? It is a decent amount of time to make a first dive into the company. If you cannot figure out the landscape in which company operates within a week you shouldn't be looking at it in the first place. I'm not saying that a week is enough to make an investment decision (sometimes it is). But I do think a week is enough to more or less realize what is going on with the company - how they make money, what the main product or service is, and what needs to happen for the share price to grow (well, one or two levels deeper than “grow revenues and earnings without dilution”). This is possible because companies I’ll be looking at are microcaps – small companies with one or two main products or services that drive majority of the sales.</p>
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<p>The writeups must not include external links, graphs or tables. I think the writeups should be as simple as possible. In my experience, if someone cannot explain things in a language of a ten-year-old they either don’t know the topic themselves or are trying to trick you into giving them money. Plus, I am a big fan of Mohnish Pabrai and his “thou shall not use Excel” commandment.</p>
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<p>At this point I have a list of the companies that I think are interesting. It will be nice to learn more about them by writing about them. If at some point, I run out of the companies I will just write about something else until another interesting company enters the list. “Something else” means documenting useful findings or expressing my thoughts on certain topics. </p>
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<p>Writing consistently definitely makes you a better investor and a better writer. But there is another reason I am doing this. As it turns out, I love writing. Well, not the writing itself. Writing itself is extremely difficult for me and I don’t enjoy the process yet. What I love is the feeling of having written something. That warm sense of satisfaction visits you when you are done writing, re-writing and editing. </p>
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<p>I haven’t written anything in a long time. Recently I opened the investing guide I wrote a few years ago and it felt so great. It is really difficult to explain the feeling. The closest analogy would be a feeling when your program finally compiles after hours or even days of coding. I guess both coding and writing represent long periods of pain punctuated by occasional feeling of happiness. I think the two live in the same kingdom.</p>
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<p>As Paul Graham suggests one needs to recognize the approach of an ending. I see one now.</p>
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<p>This is my commitment to write every week for a year. That will make 52 essays. Bon voyage!</p>
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