Podcast #43 – Dear diary

Just over a year ago, when the coronavirus pandemic was beginning, we both started investing journals, to capture our thoughts about life, and the investment opportunities presented by the rapidly changing environment.

Initially, our diaries were intended to stop us from making rash investment decisions during a time of mass panic and high uncertainty, but these personal reflections have since evolved into the Telescope Investing podcast!

In this week’s pod, we revisit some of our journal entries from that period of wild volatility and uncertainty. We saw early signs of the types of businesses that would benefit from stay-at-home orders, and we make some predictions and some investments based on our forecasts of how the business landscape would be impacted. It’s now one year later, so how did we do?

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Transcript

Albert: Hi, this is Albert.  

Luke: And this is Luke.  

Albert: Today is Sunday the 13th of June.  

Luke: Welcome to the Telescope Investing podcast 

Intro

Luke: This week, we thought we’d take a look back at our investing diary entries from a year ago to see how some of the predictions we made played out. Alb, you and I also took a couple of actions at the time and we used our diaries to explain our rationale. We thought it might be interesting today to see if these proved to be beneficial or if those actions actually damaged our long-term results. 

Albert: You know, Luke, I started the investing journal as something to do while we were in the coronavirus lockdowns in Hong Kong. We couldn’t go out so I had a lot of time to spend a home, so I thought I’d just start writing down my thoughts about investing, and it turned out that these thoughts turned into this podcast.  

Luke: It was your innovation. You started writing your diary around March 2020, and you showed it to me after you had a month or two of entries, and I thought what a great idea. So I started my own around June or July time.  

Albert: I can’t take credit for this, Luke. I think I got the idea from Morgan Housel. I think in one of his articles, he suggested or recommended writing an investing journal to improve your investing process.  

Luke: And it’s definitely improved mine. Makes me much more objective about my decision making if I have to write stuff down, almost justify it to myself.  

Albert: And I’ve continued using the investing journal even though we are no longer in lockdown. I find it quite useful. When I was reading back the entries for this podcast, I kind of realized that the journal helped to clarify my thoughts about investing. It made me think and try to explain why I want to buy or sell a certain stock. I think if you can’t explain it in words, you probably don’t have a good reason for buying or selling that stock.  

Luke: And if nothing else, it just slows you down a bit from stabbing that buy or sell button. And that’s quite important, I think, because it stops you from reacting and forces you to be a bit more objective with your decisions. May mitigate it a little bit, the gamification of trading apps that’s starting to happen.  

Albert: And I think we know which app you’re referring to, Luke.  

Luke: But Albert, he steals from the rich and gives to the poor.  

Albert: Yeah, and we consume so much information these days that it can be overwhelming sometimes. And I think writing it down helps you digest the information and make use of it when making investing decisions. 

Luke: So, you know what? I think is going to be really fascinating, particularly, to go back to broadly this time last year, March, April, May 2020 were really, really crazy times in the world and in our portfolios, being really the start of the pandemic.  

Albert: Yeah, when I read those journal entries now, kind of reminded me that 2020 was not a normal year and that the stock market returns that we experienced probably won’t happen again soon or ever.  

May 2020: the start of the pandemic

Luke: So let’s kick it off. We’ve picked out really one or two diary entries each, and you’re going to start us off with the 9th of March, 2020, which was your start of the pandemic entry.  

Albert: Yes, this is actually my first entry in my investing journal. I just got stuck into it. This was about two weeks into the lockdowns in Hong Kong and I’ll just read the beginning of this entry: “As of this morning, the S&P 500 index stands at 2,972, about 12.4% down from its all-time high of 3,393 just two weeks ago.” It’s shocking how fast the market dropped back then. I think by the time it reached the bottom, the S&P had dropped 32% in one month. That must’ve been extremely scary for a lot of investors and I’m not surprised that people were just rushing to get out.  

Luke: I think most investors, especially the ones who hung on though, were surprised at the speed and the extent of the recovery. I remember back in March last year expecting doomsday, but honestly, the right thing was just to stay invested and continue my strategy of buy-and-hold. Diamond hands as Reddit would say and those diamond hands paid off because the market came back and it came back fast.  

Albert: Yeah, it came back really fast. I had a look at the chart and the S&P 500 had recovered by the beginning of August, and it just kept going up. And from the 1st of January, 2020, to the end of the year, the S&P had gained 16%, which is a really good year for the stock market. 

Luke: So go on, take us deeper into your diary entry. Let’s explore your thoughts.  

Albert: I continued later on in the journal entry about my own situation, and I write: “However, I do not have any cash reserves to invest during this market correction. It does not make sense to sell after the correction but when the market recovers, a priority must be to build a cash position.” 

Yeah, when I read this, it was striking to see how keen I was to invest despite the pessimism over the coronavirus. I think it helps when you’ve been through a number of market crashes like we have, and you realize that the stock markets tend to recover, but you just don’t know how long it will take, but they do recover.  

Luke: I guess maybe one day it really will be the end of the world and you and I will be gleefully buying up stocks at discounts as things go down and down and they never do recover, and the world truly does end. But if the world is actually going to end, does it really matter that you ploughed your money in? You’re dead anyway!  

Albert: Yeah, this reminds me of a story that I heard in another podcast. I think it was the 7investing podcast where they said a trader named Art Cashin once said that if the market crashes because there are rumours of a nuclear attack, you should probably buy the dip because if the rumours are true, it’s not going to matter because the world is ending anyway, but if the rumours are false, the markets will rebound and you will be richer.  

Luke: Well, I guess coronavirus wasn’t nuclear war, but one thing I did note, an interesting stat. Apparently, the US sadly has more nuclear warheads than it has hospitals. I’m sure the UK’s defence budget is similarly biased towards nonsense like that.  

Albert: I guess it’s the nuclear deterrent, right? Once one country has nuclear weapons, the other country must have it as well.  

Luke: Well, we don’t invest in military tech. Now, mind you, I sound a bit wistful as I say that because perhaps we do. If we’re invested in companies like Google and DeepMind, maybe we are supporting the military-industrial complex after all.  

Albert: Well, I don’t think it’s a big part of our portfolios. We definitely don’t consider that sector when considering companies to invest in. Well, looking back, I did build that cash position and when growth stocks crashed earlier this year, I did have cash on the sidelines and I gradually invested into the growth stocks that had dropped significantly since the start of the year. 

One funny thing I saw is that a wrote a line in this entry a bit further down that said: “I must resist the urge to invest my current cash reserves as I will need it for living expenses.” And it’s funny that I had to remind myself of this. I guess the temptation to invest will be really high and I had to hold myself back and keep that money for food, for rent, for bills and not risk it in the stock market. 

Obviously, in hindsight, it would’ve been good to invest that cash. I could have doubled or tripled my money, but I think Morgan Housel talked about this and his book, The Psychology of Money, and he said the room for error, or what some people call margin of safety, is one of the most underappreciated forces in business. And I think this applies to personal finances as well.  

Luke: Yeah, I guess the marginal benefit of having that extra cash in play is massively outweighed by the risk and the impact to your lifestyle if you don’t have the cash when you need it and you can’t make rent. Your life could effectively be over.  

Albert: Yeah, I think the stress of not having any money and not knowing when the stock market will recover would probably outweigh any gains you would get from that investment.  

Luke: Towards the end of this diary entry, you set yourself a bunch of objectives, so why don’t you take us through those and let us know how you’re doing against them.  

Albert: So the first thing I said to myself is that I should build a cash position of 10% of the portfolio value, and I did this. By the end of the year, I did have around 10% in cash, but when the growth stocks crashed earlier this year, I decided to deploy that cash gradually as these growth stocks started to go down.  

Luke: But that’s the right play, right? You got the money out when stocks were high, and then you started to re-invest it gradually when valuations were lower, so I guess that’s why you built the cash position in the first place. Well played.  

Albert: Isn’t that what they say, Luke? Buy low, sell high. 

Luke: Give yourself a gold star. You had some other interesting bullets in here as well around limiting the number of positions in your US and Hong Kong portfolios. Did you manage those?  

Albert: I said to myself, I should limit the number of US positions to 30 and the number of Hong Kong positions to 20. And I did this to make sure that I don’t have too many stocks in my portfolio, that I’m not too diversified. When you have a buy-and-hold mentality, you tend to accumulate stocks because you buying and not selling. 

I haven’t quite kept these limits, Luke. Currently, I have 36 stocks in my US portfolio and 23 in my Hong Kong one, but I am actively trying to reduce that down to 30 and 20. To be honest, I’m finding it difficult as I have high conviction that most of my stocks will outperform the market. But I think this might be the endowment effect where people value the things they own. So I asked myself, would I buy the stock now if I were starting from scratch? Unfortunately, the answer was yes for most of my stocks.  

Luke: Well, only you know yourself and you know your own conviction of rationale. I know it’s less than 1% of your portfolio, but would you really buy Fastly today? 

Albert: Actually, I thought about this recently because we have both Cloudflare and Fastly in our portfolios, and Cloudflare has done a lot better than Fastly in recent months. I think if I had Cloudflare in my portfolio, I wouldn’t have bought Fastly, but since I bought Fastly first, I have both stocks now.  

Luke: Well, you saw in the news just a few days ago, Fastly had quite a famed outage and took down most of the internet, and as a result, the stock went up 10% as you might expect it to do in this crazy time. Well, I’m quite excited having a bigger Cloudflare position because just yesterday they had their own outage. Took out a whole chunk of Amazon.  

Albert: Oh, really? I didn’t see that. Hopefully, the stock markets will react favourably tomorrow. 

Luke: I hope so! Long may the madness continue.  

Albert: I’m not sure why Fastly went up. I think people on Twitter were saying it just showed how integral Fastly is to the internet and how many companies, big and small, were using it. 

Luke: Yeah, I guess so. As I say, there’s no such thing as bad news.  

Albert: But none of that was private information. All that was public information anyway, but it brought it to the attention of many investors.  

Luke: That was your March diary entry and sounds like you had a pretty solid plan for how you are going to respond to the market turmoil. It sounds like you did take advantage of that by building a big cash position. Let’s pick up another one, a few entries from April.  

April 2020: the stock market recovers

Albert: So a few months later on the 21st of April, I wrote: “The market has made an amazing recovery over the last month, especially the S&P 500 which has risen 26.2% since the bottom reached on the 23rd of March. Not quite a V recovery but it’s quicker than many expected.” And I go through some of the reasons why this might’ve been. I wrote down: “Stimulus packages being implemented in many countries. Social distancing working in flattening the curve of infections and lowering the mortality rate. More countries are talking about easing the lockdowns. I think that was naively optimistic. Potential cures being touted such as Remdesivir from Gilead Sciences,  

Luke: You mean Trump’s intravenous disinfectant and sunlight wasn’t the cure?  

Albert: It turned out that didn’t do anything except maybe kill you faster. 

And then the last point I wrote was: “Over 70 vaccines are being developed with the Gates Foundation helping to build vaccine factories for seven of the most promising ones so that massive production can be started as soon as possible.” And I don’t know if that actually happened, Luke, but at the time, this was a really good sign that once the vaccines were developed, it could be produced as quickly as possible. 

I wrote this journal entry around two or three months after the start of the pandemic and it’s really amazing how quickly a vaccine was developed. We had a vaccine literally in about six or seven months from the start of the pandemic. I often think that modern technology is amazing and it’s getting better every day, and as long as we don’t destroy ourselves or the planet in the meantime, I think the future’s bright.  

Luke: Yeah, you know and I was reading yesterday that those companies spurred by advances as a result of their COVID RNA innovations are now turning their hands to flu and HIV vaccines. I know you know this, but over the last 70 years or so since we’ve had the ability to create a flu vaccine, it’s still a pretty medieval approach. Scientists have to guess at which is going to be the dominant strain and then grow a bunch of those vaccines in chicken eggs, and then deactivate them to inject into people’s arms. That’s like one step on from leeches and blood drawing.  

Albert: Probably a bit more than one step, Luke, but I get what you’re saying.  

Luke: Yeah, well, this new technology, right? This is a completely different approach. Scientists now monitor surveillance data on the current viral strains and then use information on the genes of those strains to synthetically produced corresponding RNA. And then when you inject someone with RNA, such as anyone who’s had the Pfizer vaccine, for example, their own muscle cells start to turn into vaccine factories, creating proteins that stimulate the immune response and start expressing the flu antigen internally.  

Albert: Well, that’s how your body works, anyway. Your adaptive immune system is constantly checking for invaders and building defences against them.  

Luke: Yeah, these guys who go on about the naturalistic fallacy, you know, just go and eat herbs and plants and that’s going to protect you or wipe honey on your eyes to heal your blindness, whatever nonsense they come up with next. The real natural answer is to get your body to deal with things in the right way. mRNA, that is the real naturalistic approach.  

Albert: Yeah, you have mRNA in all your cells.  

Luke: Oh well, we’re not an anti-anti-vaxxer podcast, but if anyone is listening – science is the future.  

Albert: Well, I carry on in the journal entry, Luke, that even though the S&P had recovered 26.2% since the bottom, it was still down around 15% from its all-time high. I noticed that my own portfolio was doing significantly better. I wrote down: “My US portfolio is only down 3.6% compared to the 15.4% of the S&P 500.” And I wanted to know why that was so I looked into it. I saw that the main gainers had been Shopify, Netflix, and Amazon, which with three of my largest positions and this was the main reason for the relative outperformance. I was just lucky, in a way, that three of my largest positions were stocks that benefited from the coronavirus lockdowns and the stay-at-home orders.  

Luke: I agree but I don’t know that that’s luck. You know, you’ve invested in high-quality companies that people need more of. That thesis has played out very well. 

Albert: The stock that gained the gain the most in my portfolio was actually Zscaler. I don’t think we’ve talked about this in the podcast, Luke, but Zscaler is a cybersecurity company, and I wrote down: “I need to look into why is that Zscaler had gained so much but it was probably due to more workers working from home and accessing their corporate networks remotely.” 

When I read this, I realized that there were really early signs of which industries would benefit from the lockdowns, and if you had the funds and the nerves to invest, it was likely that you could pick a lot of winners, and not having cash for me was a real disadvantage. I remember someone saying once that many investors got hurt after the tech crash of 2000 and the financial crisis of 2008 because they didn’t have any cash to invest. 

I also had to look at some of the stocks that were the largest losers from the lockdown and the top three or four were StitchFix, Zillow, TripAdvisor, and Beyond Meat. And they were down around 40 to 50%. I look at this list of big losers at that time and many of these companies have recovered and even significantly outperformed the market since then. Companies like Zillow, Square, Disney, MercadoLibre, Tesla, have been massive winners over the last year. I think this shows that it’s often a mistake to hit that sell button too soon. 

Mid-ep promo 

Luke: You know, Albert, I think it’s time for a mid-episode promo. Whenever I get the desire to hit that buy or sell button and get twitchy to act, what I actually try and do instead is do a ton of research. Figure out why I’m holding my current stocks and whether there are small actions I can take to improve my portfolio. 

Albert and I are really optimistic that Telescope Investing will be one of your go-to sources for the companies we cover, which span a range of industries and markets and we believe all have market-beating potential. You can read more about our 2021 model portfolio at our website, telescopeinvesting.com. Or if you’ve got a question or a comment, you can message us on Twitter. I’m @LukeTelescope.  

Albert: And I’m @AlbertTelescope.  

Journal continues

Luke: Well, let’s wrap up your diary entry.  

Albert: Actually, I end this journal entry with the line: “With that in mind, it may be useful to think about how the world will change following the pandemic and which industries are likely to gain and which are likely to lose. Are the megatrends that Luke and I identified last year still valid?”  

Luke: Yeah, many of those megatrends have been accelerated by the pandemic and our positions have been validated. I think that exercise a few years ago of thinking about trends turned out to be incredibly useful. We just didn’t know it at the time.  

Albert: Well, those were my two entries, Luke. What about yours?  

July 2020: preparing for turmoil ahead

Luke: Yeah, I’ve really just got one I’ll dig into. And like you, I’ll just pick out a few excerpts from what was a fairly long diary entry. This was from 13th of July, 2020, and I titled it increasing my cash position. And I suppose, similar to you, I opened the diary saying: “With markets at an all-time high and fundamentals in serious trouble as a result of COVID-19, and in particular, Trump’s disastrous mishandling of the global pandemic in North America, I find myself drawn to the idea of building a larger cash position than the 10% I currently have.”  

Albert: The idea that the market was overvalued in July last year seems quite quaint now considering what’s happened since then. 

Luke: Can you remember the memes about finally getting out of 2019? We thought they were the bad times. Brexit, Trump’s wall and first impeachment, like the Hong Kong protests. 2020 came along and it was like, hold my beer as COVID hit the rest of the world. 

Albert: Well, I hope 2021 isn’t listening and decides to participate. 

Luke: Yeah, I guess we’ve got halfway through 2021. It’s looking pretty rosy. Who knows what the second half of the year could have in store.  

Albert: Indeed.  

Luke: I’m going to skip over some of my waffle from that time, but I’ll cut to the chase. I make some predictions and I set myself some objectives and actions. I say: “After some investments earlier this year in a few pandemic-resistant stocks, such as DocuSign, Zoom, MercadoLibre, Teladoc, and Beyond Meat, my portfolio feels somewhat resistant to a second wave of COVID-19 infections. However, no business is safe from the second-order impacts of coronavirus on the economy and on society as a whole.” Those turned out to be a pretty prescient set of investments. Maybe apart from Teladoc, all those companies have done pretty great over the last year.  

Albert: 100% or 200% returns.  

Luke: It seems like I really was giving Trump a needling in this diary entry. I say: “Trump’s relentless focus on supporting the stock market means we may be unlikely to see a significant COVID impact on markets, at least until there’s confidence he’ll not be reelected. The bookies have him as an underdog, but I would not write the guy off until the last vote has been counted. And perhaps not even then as some doomsayers conjecture.”  

Albert: I think you’ve been proven right here. The election was uncomfortably close.  

Luke: And looking back in June 2021, it’s not even over yet, right? There are still some MAGA supporters who believe Trump’s going to be re-elected into power in July.  

Albert: Yeah, I think he believes that he’ll be reinstated into the White House in August.  

Luke: Well, you know, back then I had a bet with a bunch of my friends that Trump would lose, and I say in the diary: “These are bets I very much look forward to winning, despite that they’re probably going to be disastrous for my portfolio of the next few years while Biden sorts out the shit show and helps get America back onto a strong and stable footing.” 

Albert: Well, you won those bets. Did you collect on them?  

Luke: I definitely did. Only a hundred pounds each with a couple of friends, but it was very satisfying to collect on those.  

Albert: And even better, the stock market didn’t crash. It actually went up.  

Luke: Yeah, exactly. Although in my diary last year, I do make a comment that I still kind of stand behind and could be a problem. I said: “There’s growing talk of the regulation of big tech. Governments are increasingly feeling threatened by the control of the narrative that companies like Facebook and Alphabet hold, and under a Democrat government, there’s a non-zero chance there’ll be required to break out and dispose of certain products, e.g. Facebook, WhatsApp, Instagram, Google Search and Android, Amazon having to dispose of their Marketplace and AWS.”  

Albert: Well, that’s definitely happening, Luke. There’s a lot more government oversight on these big tech companies. The case against Apple made by Epic Games over their monopoly in the App Store could be seen as a start of increased oversight.  

Luke: Certainly drawing attention to that part of the narrative that these companies are out of control. 

Albert: I’m not sure if he’s sincere, but I think even Mark Zuckerberg has asked for increased government regulation.  

Luke: Yeah, I saw that, interesting. Probably a wise move but whether it’s too little, too late remains to be seen.  

Albert: I saw a line that made me laugh. You said that “Amazon have infamously dodged paying their fair share of taxes for decades. Governments are beginning to crack down on this, and it’s likely that the proposed 3% EU digital tax on revenues is just the start of a new wave of taxation aimed at the world’s biggest corporations.” Well, you must have had a crystal ball, Luke, because that is happening right now.

Luke: It is. I note in Biden’s tax proposals, he’s trying to persuade the rest of the world to agree that companies will be taxed in the markets where they generate their revenues, rather than where they’re headquartered or where their IP is registered. Like so many companies have a lot of their technology registered in Ireland just because it’s such a favourable tax jurisdiction for that kind of thing. 

Albert: Well, it’s not just Amazon dodging taxes, but it’s also Jeff Bezos himself. I think there was a story last week about ProPublica finding out the billionaires have a true tax rate of around 3.4%, and that Bezos himself had increased his wealth by $99 billion in the last four years, and paid around 1% of that in tax. This is all legal, by the way. It just shows that the super-rich are getting richer from their assets increasing in value, which are not taxed, and not their income, which is. I think the takeaway from the story should be you should think about increasing your assets.  

Luke: Yeah, I agree. You need to get your money working for you rather than you working for your money. And if that means generating capital gains rather than generating income, well, there are many ways to mitigate taxes. Although I do note that the Biden government have their eye on perhaps implementing a wealth tax, and this is also being discussed in UK parliament. And I’ve seen rumours that perhaps 1% of total assets might be charged, maybe over up to five years. So that could be another headwind on anyone who’s driving a growth portfolio.  

Albert: Later in this journal entry, Luke, you write about Tesla being massively overvalued with a market capitalization of $320 billion. That seems quite funny because they are now worth around $590 billion.  

Luke: Yeah, I definitely thought that that was a crazy valuation at the time, and I set out a fairly clear rationale. I did give 100% growth a 10% chance of happening, but I definitely thought they were more likely to lose a significant chunk of value. That valuation just didn’t make sense and I’ve got to be honest, today’s valuation makes even less sense to me. So I’ve reduced my Tesla position twice now since that diary entry. But I’m never going to completely sell it. I think I’ve got around 5% of my portfolio in Tesla. I just love this company too much to completely divest.  

Albert: I think everyone knows this, Luke. You mention Tesla all the time.  

Luke: I wrap up this diary entry talking about my own cash position, and I actually set out my rationale for three trades that I did the day after the diary entry. I had around 10% cash in my portfolio at the time of writing that diary entry, and my plan was to increase that to 20%. Unlike you, I wasn’t going to take the rest of the year to get there. I just wanted to get there big bang in one go by making some adjustments that I’ve been mulling over for some time. 

The day after the diary entry, I sold my entire Facebook position realizing 4% cash. In the diary, I say: “I’ve had serious misgivings about the ethics of Facebook’s leadership for several years now. I do actually believe they have a significant upside from here, but there’s a point at which it begins to feel like profiting from others’ misery, so I think it’s time for me to get off this train.” 

The second action I set was to cut Tesla, reducing a third of my position and pulling out another 3.5% cash. I say: “I completely believe in the company and its mission, but it feels like sensible risk management to reduce my exposure back to around 6%, which I’d normally consider a full position.” 

Albert: Yeah, I think risk management is underrated, Luke. I think it goes back to the concept of room for error or margin or safety. It’s about staying in the game long enough for luck to cancel itself out.  

Luke: Yeah, exactly. And then my third action was around Alphabet. I thought I’d sell a third of my position realizing another 2% cash, and really, that was the no better reason than at the time I had two different versions of Alphabet stock in my portfolio, GOOG and GOOGL, following a stock split in 2014. So I just wanted to simplify the portfolio construction.  

Albert: I know the answer, Luke, but what happened to these companies since then?  

Luke: Yeah, so I did a bit of analysis yesterday. It is quite interesting. I sold all of my Facebook stock and from the day of sale, which is the 14th of July, to Friday’s close, they’re up 38%. I sold a third of my Tesla position and they’re up 100%.  

Albert: Ouch!  

Luke: And I cut a third out of my Alphabet position and they’re up 65%.  

Albert: So you made the first decision then? 

Luke: Well, clearly I didn’t, right? Clearly, I’ve lost a ton of money by selling those very profitable positions. So I took a look yesterday with a bit of a spreadsheet and tried to trace how I reinvested that money. It’s quite complex because it’s hard to sort of work out the flow of cash from those sales into corresponding buys, but the way I’ve done it, I think I pretty much reinvested that money in Fastly, Fiverr, SolarEdge, Teladoc, and Disney. On the whole, they’re kind of level, but two of them are in the hole pretty badly, particularly Fastly and Teladoc, and at the time that Teladoc buy was my largest stock buy to date. 

So, I’m showing a net loss on those positions. I guess the main takeaway is I should have left everything alone. In retrospect, I did buy something for that money. I bought the ethical satisfaction of dumping Facebook, and I bought the de-risking of the portfolio, dumping Tesla, and a little bit of Google. 

Albert: And I don’t think you can really measure whether this is a failure or success from just six months after the sale, Luke. These are multi-year plays and it’s possible that in five years’ time, many of the stocks that you bought are going to outperform Tesla and Facebook.  

Luke: Yeah, you’re right. Investing is a 5, 10, 20-year journey. I’m happy with these decisions even though they’ve cost me money.  

Key takeaways

Albert: Well, thanks for sharing your journal entries with us, Luke. Let’s move into takeaways and I would say that while clearly, it is not for everyone, keeping an investing journal has helped us with our investing process.  

Luke: Are you still journaling now?  

Albert: I don’t update it as often as I did last year because we’re no longer in lockdown, but I do update it about once a month, which is about as often as I trade. And hopefully, by doing this consistently, by writing down my thoughts, I will continue to learn from successes and mistakes, and improve as an investor.  

Luke: It was interesting to go back and remind ourselves how we were thinking about our investments. You know, I’ve probably abandoned my investment journal because that’s become Telescope Investing, but the thing I’m looking forward to going back and revisiting are these one-pager stock reviews that we’ve been publishing on the website and on Twitter. We’ve used those to be really clear about our thoughts on the key positive and negative points of our investments. And it’s going to make it real easy to do a one-year retrospective and see if things played out as we expected.  

Albert: Yeah, I think we can revisit these one-pagers next year and see if the predictions that we made about these companies actually played out.  

Luke: Yeah, we’re building a nice library and listeners can find all of that on the Telescope Investing website. I think if you just search for the tag one-pager, you’ll find the lot. Maybe we’ve done six or seven of our model portfolio stocks now, and there’s another three or four miscellaneous ones for some of the hyper-growth stocks.  

Albert: Yeah, it was really interesting to read our journal entries from last year, but there’s still six months of this year to go, so who knows what’s going to happen.  

Luke: I’m fingers crossed that this is a positive year and we fully exited the gloom of the pandemic.  

Albert: Fingers crossed! 

Wrap

Albert: Well, that’s all for this week. Thanks for listening.  

Luke: If there’s a future topic you’d like us to cover, you can message us on Twitter. I’m @LukeTelescope. 

Albert: And I’m @AlbertTelescope, or you can email us at feedback@telescopeinvesting.com. 

Luke: If you enjoyed today’s episode, you can find more content at our website, telescopeinvesting.com, where you can leave us a comment or a review.  

Albert: And if this is your first time tuning in, perhaps consider subscribing to the website so that you’re the first to hear about new articles and episodes as they drop. 

Luke: Thanks, Albert.  

Albert: Thanks, Luke.

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