At Rask, we’re always on the lookout for investors with integrity and talent, who want to share their research and insights with a broader audience and help us embark on our mission to help others invest better.
Value Downunder (VDU), who can be found on Twitter with the handle @downundervalue, struck us as one such person. We could see he wanted to educate investors, one deep Twitter thread at a time, by encouraging honest and open debate. So, we invited him to contribute his thoughts with our audience here, at Rask Media.
We’re thrilled Value Downunder accepted our invitation to contribute well-researched, educational-focused insights. You will find his Rask articles and insights on this page (hint: bookmark it in your web browser).
Now, over to VDU.
~~
When Owen and the Rask team asked me if I would like to contribute to a new blog about value on the ASX, I have to admit, I was pretty excited. I spent the weekend going through a back catalogue of articles they had written up, stalking their authors, and trying to better understand their vision. What would be the value that I can add to an already crowded marketplace of opinions, commentary, and stock picking?
My brother used to always tell me that ‘people’s perceptions are their own reality’, and investing is a game of perceptions. We create our perceptions using mental models, stacked with assumptions, to come up with a judgement: is the price of the investment fair relative to its value? You may not be doing this overtly, but when you make an investment, implicitly you have a set of beliefs that will be tested by the market. There’s no right or wrong in this debate, just a series of judgements we all make that eventually are marked-to-market.
My earliest memories of the stock market were when I was probably 10 years old, watching my dad sink or swim on highly speculative bets. He loved to gamble, and brought that to his investing philosophy. So, when I first started investing, I had no understanding of the difference between a cyclical and a compounder. No surprise, my first lessons about investing involved blowing myself up using the usual culprits of leverage, options trading, and focusing on speculative pre-earning companies.
Since those earlier days, I have focused more on the fundamentals. I do not have a monopoly on defining what value is, and nor do I solely rely on traditional value investing approaches. However, these days I won’t make an investment without thinking about value and valuations. And that process has taken me down many pathways of thinking simply about ‘how do I value this investment’?
I want to write articles that live at the intersection between investing, education and the media landscape. They’ll bridge some of the theory and practice to shed some light on the interesting debates of the day. I’ll dig into topics like valuing a hot ETF; understanding the growth rates required of a company to beat the market; taking contrarian views to market trends; and a whole lot more. First up we have a cracker of an article, looking under the hood of the ETFS Hydrogen ETF (ASX: HGEN) to review the valuations and implicit growth rates. Here’s a link to my article.
I’m really excited by this opportunity, and I hope you get something interesting out of it too. I’m always open to direct messages (DMs) on Twitter, so send through your feedback and suggestions.
