Blake at Vassant

Many decades ago, technology was limited, and information asymmetry could be more effectively arbitraged to achieve outperformance.

Let’s imagine a relatively unknown company whose market capitalization was trading below book value. Their financial data was shoved toward the back of a Moody’s Manual in the days before the internet. Only those who would be willing to put in the work could find these hidden gems and take advantage of these relatively unknown opportunities.

But today, things are different.

The Battle of Stocks vs. ETFs.​

When we think about the rationale for developing a platform for conviction-building in investments, it is important to understand the motivating factors driving why one might invest in individual stocks, or at least a mix of stocks in a larger fund of equities, funds, and maybe even bonds.

Some of the highest-performing (long-term) fund managers of all time include Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway, Chuck Akre of Akre Capital Management, and Li Lu of Himalaya Capital, and they all have something in common. Each own fundamentally sound businesses that comprise carefully curated portfolios, not ETFs. What does this tell us? (Spoiler: It's not just about wanting to flex your stock picks at family dinner).

To answer, let's examine the inverse question: what does an ETF offer?

We are now approaching our official launch on the App Store and Google Play, where Vassant will be available on iOS and Android. Even though the launch itself is our biggest milestone yet, the journey has been just as exciting. We felt it would be fitting to pair this launch with a recap of how we got here and share some cool stuff we learned along the way.

In investing, it is said that the ones who turn over the most rocks make the most money. This is often true. Warren Buffett famously scoured the Moody’s manual for years on end, which was a publication comprised of hundreds of stocks and their histories, management, valuations, and more.

While he didn’t find a new investment opportunity on every page, he turned over a vast number of rocks, and his track record is proof that the process works.

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.