Guide to posting month-end summaries.
We are coming up to another end-of-the-month in the next few days. I thought I’d give some guidance about how to make them more useful.
A - What is useful is some discussion, telling us about your companies: what they do (if it’s not a widely held company on the board), what kind of results they have had, and why you decided to invest in them. Our board is about discussing individual high-growth companies, after all.
What is NOT useful is just a list of companies with “this one” up 5% and “that one” down 7%, or this one with X% of your portfolio and that one with Y% of your portfolio, with little or no explanation. That tells us nothing!
B - It is more useful to give the actual NAMES of your companies, especially if some of them are not widely held on the board.
Unfortunately it’s less useful to just give a LIST of stock SYMBOLS. (One year-end poster a list of 83 stock symbols in his portfolio and their position size, with no mention of why he picked any of them, I kid you not!.. and eleven were 0.01% positions).
Lists of symbols will be just a hodgepodge of letters to most people (like me), who won’t bother looking them up to figure out what companies you are talking about. This is especially important if a number of your companies are not widely held on the board. (Even if you list CRWD, NET, TTD, ZM, DDOG, DOCU, etc, and yes, I and some others will recognize the symbols, but there are many on the board who may not recognize all of them.)
Look, five out of these six were long double-word company names (Crowdstrike, Cloudflare, DataDog, DocuSign, Trade Desk, etc), but it took me only about 36 seconds (stopwatch) to type the six of them, and it took 22 seconds to type the symbols. That’s a saving of… (drumroll)… 14 seconds. Please consider typing the names of the companies, not just the symbols. It helps you to be understood.
C - What is useful, if you are giving the position sizes, is discussing WHY you gave this one such a larger position than that one. What about it gave you so much more confidence? Discuss!
D – To summarize, discussion is what it’s all about, and much more useful than lists, and company names are easier to recognize, and thus more useful, than stock symbols.
I hope that this was helpful.
Best,
Saul