I'm tired.

A post about why you probably shouldn't be a paid subscriber and why I'll eventually be shutting this blog down.

This isn’t a pitch, nor is it a post waxing philosophical. You will likely learn nothing useful from reading this post. There’s a remote possibility it may even make you upset. If Substack lets me, I’m going to be posting this without sending an email. If not, well, you’ll be receiving an odd notification. What I’m going to be writing about here is a fair bit more personal than any content you’ll see out of this blog going forward.

I’ll start with what I think is a primary source of my trouble — a partial identity mismatch for the activity that’s “investing,” if you will.

This week I turn 27. If I’m lucky, I’ll live for another 60 years. Although I’ll likely die much sooner than this as I have an extremely high systolic blood pressure for my age that probably warrants medication. But assuming I don’t keel over before the average male, I’ve got about 46 years left in me. And I’ve almost no desire to live any of these years as a rich man.

The only thing that’s ever driven any fire into my belly has come from reading about information I find interesting, people, and the occasional hobby. At times these cross over into obsession— e.g., when I first began to learn to juggle 5 balls, I learned to do so in about 14 days. I primarily stood under a pavilion in a small town outside of a donut shop and practiced for about 12 hours a day. By the time I was done all of my knuckles were badly bruised from the repetitive impact and plausibly a few locals came to the conclusion that I was insane. I vividly recall practicing into nighttime one night outside of a pizza joint, largely with intent to entertain the guests. But I guess I must have looked so disheveled and homeless from ~100 hours of juggling practice that a 30 something year old woman took pity on my and bought me a pizza which she gave to me with tears in her eyes. This experience, pointless and trivial as it may seem, gave me a sense of purpose.

Becoming ‘rich’, on the other hand, isn’t something that’s ever felt like a purpose or goal. And if you want to spend over half of your life ‘flipping rocks,’ the desire to be rich kind of has to be a primary motivation. Perhaps being intensely curious is enough, but I suspect that this is a bit of a copout used by people who don’t want to seem shallow by making ‘getting rich’ as a primary life goal. My rationalization for this is that if your curiosity was really so great as to motivate everything you read about and do, you’re probably not spending all that time actively investing— you’d be a scientist or an educator of sorts.

But whatever it is that possesses some people to want to spend their entire life reading proxy statements and quarterly financials, I’m clearly missing it. Staring down the barrel of the next 25-30 years and potentially dedicating 20-30% of my time awake reading about businesses to actively invest in fills my stomach with nausea. This is not to say I don’t enjoy the activity. I can and do enjoy the process at times. But it’s not something I live for. And if I currently had sums that were sufficient to meet my own needs and those who depend on me, I’d currently own a boat load of US treasuries without a second thought.

What I do know I want out of life is to do something meaningful.

I want a family. I want to do work that’s important for a local community. I want to make a few pieces of art that I can admire.

All of these require some amount of money, but none of them actually require being particularly rich.

Ironically, this is a complete and total mismatch with my current activity. I run a very concentrated portfolio and I primarily own companies valued between ~$5M USD & $300M USD (nanocaps & microcaps), which generally requires higher amounts of turnover than any other type of equity. And this has been in the pursuit of higher returns via capturing a combination of discrepancy in price to intrinsic value (driven by flows & who buyers/sellers are) and developing an informational edge (again something driven primarily by who my counterparties are).

Since late 2022 I have been aware of the scale of the catalyst Moberg’s product represented for Cipher Pharmaceuticals and I acted accordingly. If I was trading against more highly informed counterparties, they probably wouldn’t have been selling me shares at ~$3.30-3.60 CAD which at the time represented something like a trailing 40% EV/FCF yield, largely on cash flows that could reasonably be expected to be flat going forward and where sales could be liable to grow between 200-400% in the next 5-6 years from separate products.

I’ve been attempting to run to my ‘finish line’ as fast as I can. Does this make me a hypocrite? Only if I never stop, I suppose. But I will. Because I’m tired. And I can already feel myself being pulled towards the compounders™ and indexing. There’s something very appealing about owning a handful of things where you’re never left constantly ruminating over a position— which is a primary reason I own things like Constellation Software, Terravest Industries, Sygnity SA, Evolution Gaming & the S&P500.

There’s another side to this post as well. My desire in maintaining a paid version of this blog is not something that’s particularly long lived. In essence the paid content is me selling information dressed up as I stock pitch. I put disclaimers saying stuff like “this isn’t investment advice, please do your own research, I own a position” just like every other yahoo, but if we’re being honest here, largely, paid readers are in search of just that — somewhere to park money in. And me being wrong, if only temporarily, is a great source of personal anxiety. Especially when there are now more than 100 of you, paying a not small amount of money for the scant research of a 26-year-old know-nothing that’s currently working 50 hours/week building data centers. I tolerate this feeling for now because I can use the money, but frankly I do not expect to maintain this blog for more than the next 36 months.

This is probably a good place to end the post. I thank you for your support. This blog currently represents a material % of my current earned income (something like 35% if the churn doesn’t increase much further and subscribers end the year marginally higher). And at the same time this blog is about 50-75% of my personal anxiety. Tradeoffs with everything, I suppose.

Until next time,

-Left