The Focused Investing Substack
Why?
For you, this space can improve your investing, in two ways. Most importantly, it can help you improve your methods. Less importantly, but perhaps with more emotional appeal, it will lead you to specific investments that can fulfill your goals.
For me, this space has three purposes. First, it will give me a place to publish my research and related thinking. Long experience has taught me that writing these down clarifies thought.
Second, it will enable me to interact freely with readers. I hope to be criticized well and often. Responding to reader questions and even better to cogent criticisms further clarifies thought.
Third, I enjoy helping people “learn to fish.” It thrills me when I hear that a reader has benefited from my work and thoughts. This has happened a lot over on Seeking Alpha.
One recent and fun example: “RPD, if your ‘knowledge and methods’ improve any further they risk tearing a hole in the space-time continuum.”
For reasons not worth discussing, it seems time for me to start writing here in addition to on Seeking Alpha. My more than 200 articles there have gained me a few thousand followers; it would be great if a fair number of them migrate here.
The primary goal here, for me, is to improve my own investing. The material here can help you do that too.
Who?
In brief, my first Barron’s subscription went with me to college. Since even before that, business operations, the economy, and investing have fascinated me.
My investing options were limited during my 40-year career as a scientist and professor (trained in physics). I began active investing with limited funds in 2018 and got control of all my funds upon retirement in early 2020.
My portfolio promptly dropped in market price by more than 50%. Being a value investor in the spirit of Benjamin Graham, this was acceptable but I can’t say there were no uneasy moments.
My overall total return from the start of 2020 to the end of 2023 (RPD) is compared here to those of the S&P 500 (SPY) and the equal-weight S&P 500 (RSP):
What is curious here is that my goal is not to beat the SPY. It is instead to achieve steady growth during both its hot decades and its cold ones while also paying out reasonable dividends.
My portfolio has primarily been focused on REITs and energy, and I made very few gains from the Magnificent 7 (and do not own them now). So this has gone quite well so far, and time will tell whether it was just a string of good luck.
Aspirations
This space will be a happy place for those interested in any of three things.
My deep research on various companies.
My portfolios and trades.
Exchanging views about the economy, investing, and in particular REITs and energy.
I will enforce requirements of civil discourse and minimal politics in posts. The focus here is investing and things that affect it.
To better enable the interactions described above, paid subscriptions will include the use of a RocketChat room, because it is fully searchable. Whenever Substack implements that feature, I will move all chat activity to Substack.
Intentions
My intentions are to provide the following.
For all subscribers paid and unpaid:
A brief, weekly newsletter
Some of my articles focusing on a deep examination of a specific company (one or two monthly)
Articles addressing investing strategy, at irregular intervals
Articles on my investment performance, at irregular intervals
And for all paid subscribers:
Monthly portfolio updates
Notifications of my trades and why they happen
All my articles focusing on a deep examination of a specific company
And for annual paid subscribers:
Access to my actual, real-time investing portfolio and transaction history.
My opportunity and risk evaluation of many REITs
All readers will be able to interact with me and each other using the comments on the article and the public chat. Paid subscribers will be able to interact over the long term in the Rocket Chat.
I hope to hear from you!
Paul/RPD/whatever