Suggestions for your End of Month Summary

Investment Analysis Clubs Saul’s Investing Discussions
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Making your end of month summary more useful.

We are coming up to another end-of-the-month this coming weekend. A lot of people who have never posted end-of-month summaries before are now posting them, and I thought I’d make some suggestions 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.

What is NOT useful is just a list of companies with this one up 5% and the next one 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’s better to give the NAMES of your companies, especially if some of them are not widely held on the board.

It’s unfortunately less useful to give a LIST of stock SYMBOLS (one year-end poster listed 83 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), 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, not 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 more useful than lists, and names are more useful than stock symbols.

I hope that this was helpful.

Best,

Saul

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2

Actually I find it most useful to have both, if there are no objections.

Sorry, that was a bit abrupt, didn’t mean it to be so.

I keep a several-page spreadsheet on various aspects of a company, and it’s arranged by ticker. So I do find the ticker symbol useful. But I also find the company name useful, for reasons Saul mentioned. If there could be both, that would be the best of both worlds.

Thanks…

Eric

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3

Re: Names >> Stock symbols

In trying to keep a loose handle on various companies that are bandied about here, I’ve often referred to this spreadsheet which was posted on the Board in January

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15WYEG7cX2mdErck42Im4…

Obviously I am permitted ‘view only’. Could someone with editing consider adding a column to pull the company names either beside the ticker or perhaps at the far end if one feels it clutters the data? I believe the formula would be:

=GOOGLEFINANCE(A3,“name”)

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If you make a copy of this spreadsheet, then you “own” it, and you can make the changes. But then it is yours and not the one from the “community”?

best wishes
J.

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I agree with the idea that companies should be named and more generally that communication should be
as clear as possible. Hence - minimize jargon, slang and communicate in plain language
whenever feasible. Specialized language belongs to rare,specialized interactions.

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