Introduction
Welcome to Buyside Value!
You may be asking yourself what exactly “Buyside Value” is. Let me explain the origin of this project and where I want to take it from here.
I started Buyside Value to use my knowledge of the markets, technology, finance, economics, and business to provide value to everyone who is – and wants to be – on the buy side.
In the world of investing, it is common to split the various professionals and companies into the sell side and the buy side.
The sell side is comprised of institutions that “sell” investment services to the buy side. These institutions include investment banks, brokerage firms, market makers, and research analysts.
The buy side is comprised of institutions that purchase investment services and make investment decisions. These institutions include hedge funds, mutual funds, pension funds, private equity firms, insurance companies, and venture capital firms.
As you may have guessed by now, “Buyside Value” has the aim of providing value to the buyside and everyone who wants to break into the buyside. Buyside Value is for investors who want to look beyond the headlines and follow analyses, deep dives, strategies, backtests, educational content, and news.
I just mentioned six content categories. I call these six content categories the “six content pillars of Buyside Value”. Let me explain these in more detail.
The Six Content Pillars of Buyside Value
1. Analysis
The first content pillar is analysis. This content pillar encompasses a wide range of articles but let me give you a cross-section of content that awaits you within this pillar:
- Analysis of recent earnings reports of major companies
- Post-mortem analysis of successful or failed investments and companies
- Discounted cash flow analysis of businesses
- Sum of parts analysis of businesses
- Comparable analysis of businesses
- Pair trade theses (arguments for long / short positions within the same industry)
- Analysis of special situations (mergers, spinoffs, etc.)
- Emerging technologies and their potential market impact
- Breakdown of business models of startups and established companies
- Comprehensive industry overview of competitive landscape
2. Deep Dives
The second content pillar is called deep dives. Within this content pillar, I will go deep into detail about one specific company, industry, or general investment concept.
These deep dives are meant to give you all the necessary context to deeply understand a specific company or industry. These deep dives can, of course, never be fully exhaustive but they can be a great starting point for further research. I hope to provide value with these deep dives, given my admittedly limited knowledge within any certain company or industry.
Remember, all of my blog posts contain a comment section and I highly encourage the use of these to spur discussions. I hope to eventually have a diverse audience with any one of my readers being an industry expert and providing the other readers and myself with valuable knowledge within the comment section. Discussions are highly encourage on Buyside Value because they will widen our perspective and improve our collective knowledge.
3. Strategies
The third content pillar is about strategies. This will include breakdowns of some of the most popular investment strategies out there as well as some new quantitative composite investment strategies. We will cover all kinds of strategies, both qualitative and quantitative ones.
I believe that the best approach to investing is a holistic approach that takes bits and pieces from various mental frameworks and strategies. That is why these strategies are not templates to blindly follow but rather content to develop an intuitive sense of the investment landscape as well as to incorporate bits and pieces into your own holistic investment strategy.
4. Backtests
The fourth content pillar “backtests” is tightly coupled to the third pillar, where we cover investment strategies. Nevertheless, this type of content deserves its own pillar since I do not consider backtests to be part of an investment strategy. Backtests should not influence in any way your perception of a strategy because they only give you one statistical glimpse into the strategy’s historical performance. A good historical performance, as we all know, is by no means any indication of good future performance.
Still, I consider backtests to be interesting pieces of information and these historical tests do give you some perspective on investment history as well as the pitfalls of trying to extrapolate past success into the future.
For newcomers to the investment worlds, a backtest is basically a historical performance test of any given investment strategy. For a backtest you gather past stock data and apply the given investment strategy to a past investment universe.
Obviously, these kind of backtests are mainly used for testing the historic performance of quantitative strategies. Since a qualitative strategy heavily relies on the individual investor’s opinion and internal weights towards qualities, it is difficult to realize an accurate backtest without letting cognitive biases of the person conducting the backtest influence the results.
5. Education
The fifth content pillar is about education. Education is a theme that runs across all of Buyside Value’s content since that is the overarching goal of this project. I started this website with the purpose of educating newcomers and experienced investors, and hopefully helping them break into the buyside or improve their investment capabilities if they are already working in the investment industry.
This content pillar will have quite some breadth and cover various financial educational content such as mental frameworks, cognitive biases, quantitative approaches, personal finance, and fundamental concepts within mathematics, economics, finance, and the interdisciplinary world of investing.
As I said before, every single piece of content on this website, when taken in as an isolated piece, will provide value but the true value is unlocked once you take out bits and pieces to form your own holistic investment approach and mentality.
The breadth of Buyside Value is structured for exactly this purpose. Furthermore, I do not want you to take everything written here by face value without asking questions and judging the content. I am not and cannot be an expert in everything I write about, so be prepared to disagree and form your own opinion.
My job is not to push a doctrine and tell you how to deal with investments. That is neither my job nor my purpose with Buyside Value. The true purpose of Buyside Value is to provide you with perspectives, interesting takes, and examples of how an analysis can be conducted. Remember, investing is more art than science.
6. News
The sixth and last content pillar is about news. You may have already noticed the tagline on our website: “For investors who look beyond the headlines”. And, now, I am telling you that I will provide you with headlines? Hold on.
In this pillar, I am not talking about writing short pieces about the latest stock market crash or earnings report. Instead, I will reference news and unusual activity in the world of investing and subsequently analyze or describe the situation in my own words of what I think has happened.
To give you a better idea, let me state some examples of what would be a potential blog post within this content pillar:
- Opinion about unusual activity of institutional investors
- Interesting bits and pieces in recent 13F filings of prominent investors
- Recent economic or political actions that will move the markets