Building for the "Weighing Machine"
As a long-term investor, I recognized that investors like myself are rational decision-makers who prioritize utility above all else when choosing investment tools. So when we first started building Vassant, we didn't just look at what features were missing from other apps. We wanted to understand the psychology of why people actually win or lose in the market and work backwards from there.
So, we did a deep dive. We talked to everyday investors, poured over market data, and spent many hours listening to the famous long-term “quality” investors who have actually done this successfully for decades, such as François Rochon and Terry Smith. We wanted to know: when someone achieves high rates of return over long time frames, what did they do differently than the average joe underperforming the market index?
It turns out, the secret isn't a secret at all. It comes down to harnessing two simple concepts that are easy to understand but difficult to implement in investing: conviction and patience.
The Main Idea: If you don't truly understand why you own a company, you will sell the second your positions dip.
But there’s one key problem with easily deploying both these concepts in everyday investing: most modern financial tools are designed to encourage short-term investing. They emphasize real-time price movements, breaking news alerts, and constant portfolio updates. While these features can be useful, they drive engagement and trading activity, which often aligns with the economic incentives of brokerages through revenue streams such as options trading, payment for order flow, and margin lending. For tools branding themselves as long-term oriented, despite the incorporation of valuable tools, feature bloat and hypercomplexity further complicates the investment process and can lead to what we call “decision paralysis”.
Further, Benjamin Graham, one of the grandfathers of modern investing, said that in the short term, the market is a voting machine, or in other words, a popularity contest driven by headlines, emotions, and price fluctuations. But over the long term, the market is a weighing machine, where prices eventually reflect fundamental performance and company quality despite the short-term noise.
So when we saw the major structural challenges stacked against everyday investors like us, we knew we had to address the problem at its source and curate our platform in a way to favor the “weighing” machine rather than the “voting” machine. At its core, we built Vassant specifically to help our customers invest with conviction and patience.
To exemplify this, take our research vault: it’s built to help you deeply understand a business's core fundamentals and streamline your long-term strategy between all your positions. Other features like percent allocations and next purchase prices are there to keep you disciplined, helping you systematically add to your positions when prices are favorable rather than reacting on a whim. Our “Model” section enables methodical upstream cash allocation, ensuring you stick to your original plan and then use that cash to take advantage of high-conviction investment ideas.
Now regarding what we DON’T include:
- We do not incorporate stock charts
- We do not incorporate performance data
- We do not incorporate news events
- We do not incorporate earnings results
We do this in a way to specifically avoid the traps competitors love to embed deep in their platforms and build a product that truly serves the investor.
That philosophy guides every feature we build and every feature we choose not to build. By removing distractions and simplifying the investing experience, we hope to help investors spend less time reacting to market noise and more time focused on what truly drives long-term wealth creation.
We're only getting started, and we're excited for what's to come.