Welcome to The 10th Man
In late-2019, after nearly a decade of working in a variety of sell-side and buy-side roles, I decided to start sharing my investment research publicly under a pseudonym. As someone who publishes under a pseudonym it’s difficult to provide you with more color on who I am without the risk of doxing myself. But I’ll give it a shot.
For some ungodly reason I became a CFA Charterholder and have continued to pay the piper every year to keep those letters behind my name. I’m not sure how much real value this has added to my investing toolkit, but I suppose it didn’t hurt.
I started my career on a bond sales desk, but quickly pivoted to an equity research role at an investment bank. I covered the energy sector for a few years, and learned a lot about what can make for a bad business. I wouldn’t wish an energy specialist role on my worst enemy, but it was still a valuable experience in digging deep and grappling with unpredictable key drivers. If you become a subscriber, you’ll notice that I rarely publish on commodity businesses, and that’s largely because of the scars I wear from having a thesis blow up on the back of some unknowable macro event.
I subsequently did the tour of duty at a family office, a pension fund, and a bank-owned investment manager where I gradually morphed into a generalist. I find it to be orders of magnitude more enjoyable to hunt for ideas across sectors, market cap, and geographies without the constraints of a small sandbox. Today, I go where my curiosity takes me. I’ve published pieces on banks, homebuilders, video game publishers, vertical market software roll-ups, used-car retailers, e-commerce businesses, healthcare providers, and so on. In order for this blog to be sustainable for me, I have to continue going where my curiosity takes me, and that brings us to “what can subscribers expect from The 10th Man”?
You should expect that most of the businesses I write about will be domiciled in North America. On rare occasions I might color outside those lines. There are particularly sectors that I find to be most interesting, but I make an active effort to explore a broad range of sectors and business models. I have a growing wish list of businesses to explore, but if subscribers have suggestions for future deep dives, I’m more than happy to take a call from the audience if it’s a business or thesis that piques my interest.
At a minimum, you should expect an average of one deep dive per month. Depending on the complexity of the business the actual frequency will vary, but I promise to get out twelve deep dives per year. Industry pieces, company updates, and other musings would be in addition to that. For businesses that I go on to own personally, my aim is to publish company updates when something relevant is worth writing about. Otherwise, no sense in cluttering your inbox. The initial deep dives will be thorough pieces – and often very long – that cover topics like company history, industry dynamics, unit economics, competitive position, and any secret sauce should it exist. I always include detailed valuation work with an explanation of my thinking behind key driver forecasts, risks, and sensitivity analysis. All deep dives and company updates will come with full financial models in Excel that you can download and toy with yourself. Some components of my work will have a short shelf life (like the valuation section), but I hope the bulk of what I write can be referred back to years after I publish.
My hope is that these deep dives help subscribers in their own investing journey. Maybe you learn about a new business or industry. Maybe a deep-dive gets you to rethink an existing thesis or helps validate conclusions you’ve already reached. One thing I love about investing is that there is never a shortage of conflicting views, so maybe you disagree with something I’ve written. In that case, I love nothing more than engaging in healthy debate. From time to time, I’m bound to reach erroneous conclusions and get some theses wrong, and I make an active effort to respond to all questions and/or pushback so we can figure it out together. Whatever your level of engagement, I’m confident there is something of value in these deep dives for all investors.
For those of you that have read this far, I’d be honored to count you as a paying subscriber. You can do so by clicking on the button below.
If you’re on the fence about subscribing, every post that sits behind a paywall will give you the option to sign up for a 7-day free trial and access to the entire archive. That should be plenty of time to get a better flavor of what to expect from this publication and make a more informed decision.
If you have questions or feedback you can reach me on Substack, Twitter, or the10thmanbb@gmail.com.
