Why I Write
I had a few objectives in mind when I started writing this blog a few years ago:
- Keep track of my own ideas and evolution as an investor.
- Facilitate discussion to get feedback and sharpen investment ideas.
- Discipline. I’m a full time, individual investor. While that freedom is great, I want to have some sort of weekly deliverable to impose discipline and focus on myself. The blog is that "deliverable".
How did that work out the past few years?
This blog is only ok as a place to track my own ideas. I'd write maybe one post for every 30 ideas I explore. That’s because most ideas were filtered out pretty quickly as not worth my time. And increasingly I'm writing posts that have no definite buy or sell implications.
The "facilitating discussion" objective completely failed. I have not gained any sort of consistent readership, and that means no feedbacks for my posts. Instead I've discovered Twitter, which has served that purpose wonderfully.
The “discipline” objective sort of worked. Although I’m not posting on a weekly basis as originally intended. One reason is as mentioned above- most ideas I explore are not worth a deep dive. In any case, much of investment research revolves creating a hypothesis and disproving them. I’m not sure presenting all these failed hypothesis makes for good blog content. The other reason is I’m not a good writer, and turning my existing notes (primarily in bullet points) into paragraph format takes a lot of time. That’s time detracted from my research and investment activities.
Changes
This blog is only ok as a place to track my own ideas. I'd write maybe one post for every 30 ideas I explore. That’s because most ideas were filtered out pretty quickly as not worth my time. And increasingly I'm writing posts that have no definite buy or sell implications.
The "facilitating discussion" objective completely failed. I have not gained any sort of consistent readership, and that means no feedbacks for my posts. Instead I've discovered Twitter, which has served that purpose wonderfully.
The “discipline” objective sort of worked. Although I’m not posting on a weekly basis as originally intended. One reason is as mentioned above- most ideas I explore are not worth a deep dive. In any case, much of investment research revolves creating a hypothesis and disproving them. I’m not sure presenting all these failed hypothesis makes for good blog content. The other reason is I’m not a good writer, and turning my existing notes (primarily in bullet points) into paragraph format takes a lot of time. That’s time detracted from my research and investment activities.
Changes
I think a few changes can address these issues.
First, aim for smaller but more frequent posts.
First, aim for smaller but more frequent posts.
I’m thinking like avc.com where a post can just be a couple hundred words and a simple observation. So the blog would be more like a journal where I just record whatever I learned, instead of feeling like I have to write a complete buy/sell thesis on a specific stock.
I'm already posting on Twitter just about every day, so a lot of blog posts this will be elaborations of those same tweets.
Second, I want to try out new formats, particularly videos. I keep a ton of notes during research, but they are in bullet points and it's time consuming to turn them into paragraph/blog format. It may actually be easier to post a video where I show a couple powerpoint slides and just talk through them.
I'm already posting on Twitter just about every day, so a lot of blog posts this will be elaborations of those same tweets.
Second, I want to try out new formats, particularly videos. I keep a ton of notes during research, but they are in bullet points and it's time consuming to turn them into paragraph/blog format. It may actually be easier to post a video where I show a couple powerpoint slides and just talk through them.
Comments are welcome!
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