Jake Taylor, how good is Journalytic for investors?

Jake Taylor of Farnam Street Investments has spent a lot of time building Journalytic. Journalytic is a journaling tool for investors. In this podcast, we discussed Jake’s background and what he has built with Journalytic.

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Introducing Jake Taylor

[00:00:40] Tilman Versch: Dear audience of Good Investing Talks, it’s great to have you back. Today, I’m having Jake Taylor on, you know him from some other podcast we will go into later, but today, it’s mostly we want to discuss two things. One is this new baby, Journalytic. We also do a walkthrough for this, so if you just want to see Journalytic jump to the temp stamp where we start with the walkthrough, but first of all, I want to use the chance to get a bit more knowledge about Jake and how he thinks and would also influence his production of Journalytic and his investing style. So let us start with this. Jake, it’s morning in California.

[00:01:22] Jake Taylor: Thanks for having me on. Yeah, a little bit early, but that’s okay. I appreciate having me on, Tilman. I was trying to remember back when I first heard about you and your show, and I think it was probably the Dennis Hong interview, a couple of them that you did, and I was really impressed with it and so this is a real treat.

Changing careers to investing

[00:01:41] Tilman Versch: Thank you, thank you for the nice words and I hope we will also do a good interview. I hope with you as a guest it just flows. When I looked into what is public about you, I think I got the feeling that you have a kind of entrepreneurial spirit. But you started your career in a different setup. You were, let me get it right, power systems operator. You’re working at a power systems operator running for the grid of California. I have friends also doing work for button file, which is the German power operator, and it sounds like this is the perfect bureaucracy. So why and when did you decide to quit this for a more entrepreneurial endeavour?

[00:02:26] Jake Taylor: I did start my career off in the energy industry and it was a fantastic place to work. I mean, I loved all the people. It was an awesome career, but it wasn’t my calling, and I didn’t realise that until a chance, accidental lunch with Warren Buffett. The back story of that is that while I was working at the power place, I went to go get my MBA by doing schooling on nights and weekends, so it’s like a working professional’s program. And my first year in that programme, I won a lottery to go back to Omaha and have that Buffett student experience that he’s done with a lot of schools over the years.

I did start my career off in the energy industry and it was a fantastic place to work. I mean, I loved all the people. It was an awesome career, but it wasn’t my calling, and I didn’t realise that until a chance, accidental lunch with Warren Buffett. The back story of that is that while I was working at the power place, I went to go get my MBA by doing schooling on nights and weekends, so it’s like a working professional’s program. And my first year in that programme, I won a lottery to go back to Omaha and have that Buffett student experience that he’s done with a lot of schools over the years.

So that was a huge nudge for me in changing my career path because I realised, I was so impressed with Buffett and when I got to learn more about him, I saw that, Oh, my gosh, this style of investing, he just wants to get a good deal on something. That’s all that is what’s happening. And I had always had that same mentality, never wanting to go pay retail for something, always buying second-hand on eBay or in the United States we have Craigslist. So it made perfect sense to me that buying partial ownership of businesses using that same mentality just happened to go under this name called value investing.

So that was a huge nudge for me in changing my career path because I realised, I was so impressed with Buffett and when I got to learn more about him, I saw that, Oh, my gosh, this style of investing, he just wants to get a good deal on something. That’s all that is what’s happening. And I had always had that same mentality, never wanting to go pay retail for something, always buying second-hand on eBay or in the United States we have Craigslist. So it made perfect sense to me that buying partial ownership of businesses using that same mentality just happened to go under this name called value investing.

I just didn’t know there was a name for it until I met Buffett. And so it took me a number of years to transition from one career, which was running the power grid, into professionally managing money, but eventually, I made the leap and haven’t looked back since.

Jake’s podcasts: “5GQ – 5 Good Questions” and “The Hikecast”

[00:03:57] Tilman Versch: I think there’s already a bit of content out there and I just want to focus on the bit of underfollowed topic in this episode and add to these stories about you out there. One thing that I would perceive as a bit underfollowed is your private podcasts. You’re part of the value after hours. A great format. It gets a lot of you with good reasons and you have done two kinds of private podcasts, I would call them. It’s 5GQ – Five Good questions and the Hikecast, what kind of podcasts are they?

[00:04:33] Jake Taylor: Well, so to back the story up on that one. I had this 2013 timeframe and I had this idea for a podcast where I wanted to interview authors about their books and it stemmed from watching an author would go on CNBC or one of these kinds of talking head shows and they would just get talked over. Just when they were about to explain the interesting part they’d cut to a commercial. It would drive me crazy. I was like, would you just shut up and let the person talk like they’re about to say something really interesting?

And so I thought, well, rather than just complain about it, why don’t I give them a format for that? But at the time I thought, Oh my God, I’m so late to this podcasting thing already. There’s already every podcast topic that could have been imaged and this was in 2013. So I decided, well, what the heck, I’ll do a couple of episodes and see if anybody likes it. And so I started interviewing some authors and publishing them and it was just really fun to do. It was great to talk to the authors. It forced me to read books that I maybe wouldn’t have read otherwise. And to get a chance to then ask them a couple of follow-up questions about their book was like a really interesting intellectual exercise.

And so I started interviewing some authors and publishing them and it was just really fun to do. It was great to talk to the authors. It forced me to read books that I maybe wouldn’t have read otherwise. And to get a chance to then ask them a couple of follow-up questions about their book was like a really interesting intellectual exercise.

I read with a much greater urgency of trying to understand because I knew I was going to have to ask some good questions, whereas it turned what was a very passive thing of reading a book into a more active endeavour which is, okay, you’re going to have some homework at the end of this. You better come up with some good questions. So that forcing function, this kind of a common theme throughout all of my projects is how can I use a forcing function to make myself improve on a particular topic?

[00:06:14] Tilman Versch: This 5 Good Questions you’re describing right now, and the Hikecast, what kind of format was this or is this?

[00:06:24] Jake Taylor: So the Hikecast was another little side project spin-off of 5 Good Questions where I noticed that when I’d go on a hike with a friend, I felt we would get into these deeper topics faster. It would be a very interesting conversation and I thought, God, this is the real stuff. This is what people would want to hear, and I don’t know if the vulnerability comes out because maybe you’re in nature or I think part of it is that you’re standing next to each other and not facing each other. And facing each other is kind of confrontational just like layout, and whereas if we’re walking next to each other, you have a common goal, there’s this bonding experience.

So the Hikecast was another little side project spin-off of 5 Good Questions where I noticed that when I’d go on a hike with a friend, I felt we would get into these deeper topics faster. It would be a very interesting conversation and I thought, God, this is the real stuff. This is what people would want to hear, and I don’t know if the vulnerability comes out because maybe you’re in nature or I think part of it is that you’re standing next to each other and not facing each other. And facing each other is kind of confrontational just like layout, and whereas if we’re walking next to each other, you have a common goal, there’s this bonding experience.

And so I felt the depth of the conversations could go in places where it might not otherwise. And it proved true and if they weren’t such a pain in the ass to edit and create, I’d probably do a lot more of them, but I’ve just been busy with other projects and so it’s been a little bit on the back burner for a while.

[00:07:17] Tilman Versch: You did the editing yourself?

[00:07:21] Jake Taylor: I did, yeah, which was probably a mistake.

[00:07:22] Tilman Versch: Okay, it’s a pain. I should introduce you to my editor, maybe it will help you.

[00:07:28] Jake Taylor: Yeah, I mean they were very much labours of love too. I mean, I wasn’t making any money. I didn’t sell any ads, even if it was just purely something I did for fun to meet and talk with people.

Getting information through books

[00:07:40] Tilman Versch: With 5 Good Questions, you focused on books, So what kind of role do books play for you as an investor in your investing process?

[00:07:48] Jake Taylor: Books are I think still a very underrated mechanism technology for transmitting information and we have podcasts now, we have Twitter, we have blog posts and a lot of times those feel ephemeral. Like they’re short-term in nature. They’re a bit of a sugar high often, and I feel books still represent this kind of meat and potatoes and vegetables and part of it is that I think with a book you consume the information at your own pacing, you’re reading, you stopped to pause, you contemplate a little bit before moving to the next section.

Books are I think still a very underrated mechanism technology for transmitting information and we have podcasts now, we have Twitter, we have blog posts and a lot of times those feel ephemeral. Like they’re short-term in nature. They’re a bit of a sugar high often, and I feel books still represent this kind of meat and potatoes and vegetables and part of it is that I think with a book you consume the information at your own pacing, you’re reading, you stopped to pause, you contemplate a little bit before moving to the next section. It’s an active experience.

It’s an active experience whereas podcasts, there’s a little bit of friction to pause a podcast and then go write a note, and so maybe you leave that marginal interesting thing out of your notes and off the table, and maybe that extra thought that you would have put in sort of skip over because the next piece of content is coming in. It’s like on this treadmill. And so I think it’s still very underrated to use books and for me, I use books to solve whatever problem it is that I’m tackling at that moment. Even for instance, when I was writing a book, I was having a hard time telling a story around that book and I realised well, who tells good stories? And I thought, well, Hollywood does.

So I went and read a couple of books about screenplay writing. And that helped me to craft a story that was hopefully better than what I could have come up with on my own. I almost view books as these things that I load into my brain to then go do the computational you know, tackle whatever it is that I’m trying to figure out.

I almost view books as these things that I load into my brain to then go do the computational you know, tackle whatever it is that I’m trying to figure out.

[00:09:30] Tilman Versch: Have you built a certain design for you or an environment to read books in a good way because, I know, the everyday life it’s hard to keep this kind of patience and also the opportunity to write things down in a good way.

[00:09:46] Jake Taylor: Yeah, I’m very much a physical book reader still, even though environmentally, I hate it. It’s sub-optimal in a tonne of ways, but I still have to write in the margin of a book when I’m taking notes. And that marginalia is very important to me. So and then I will then go back through the book after I read it and then get my notes out of it. So, it’s a much more laborious process than if you have a Kindle and you clip something and then send it to a note-taking app. That’s cool, I think it’s great but my personal processing of that information is not as in-depth as when I do it on a piece of an actual physical book and I think the medium sometimes influences how seriously you take the message. So if I’m reading it on my computer for instance, it doesn’t feel like it carries the same weight as when it’s in the actual physical book and I think I weighed it differently just because the sensory experience is different.

Jake’s book: “The Rebel Allocator”

[00:10:47] Tilman Versch: Have you ever thought of writing a book yourself?

[00:10:52] Jake Taylor: I did write a book, published it in. Yeah, 2019. I published a book that was a fictional story of then explained kappa allocation to a younger investor basically.

[00:11:13] Tilman Versch: And it’s not a world bestseller?

[00:11:16] Jake Taylor: Well, I mean to get on the long tail of world bestsellers. You know it’s incredibly difficult, but it did better than I ever would have imagined. And I received so many nice notes from people whom I really admired, investors whom I respected and admired, that somehow the book ended up on their desk and they read it and sent me something nice. All in all, it was three years of torture to write the book, but since then it has been, it’s been really pleasantly received and the feedback that I’ve gotten has been a majority of it it’s been really nice. So in the end it was a net win, but it was definitely a very arduous experience to write a book.

[00:11:55] Tilman Versch: If there is still a chance to buy it. We will put a link in the channel for people who are interested in getting the book.

[00:12:02] Jake Taylor: Yeah, it’s on Amazon in print, digital, and audiobook.

Coming up with Journalytic

[00:12:07] Tilman Versch: But recently you sided with Journalytic to some kind of go more in the note-taking shovel delivery business, so to say, maybe we can start also with screen sharing in a few minutes, but maybe you can help me understand what the kind of problem is you’re solving in Journalytic.

[00:12:28] Jake Taylor: Yeah, it was exactly that it was trying to scratch my own itch of being a professional investor and feeling there wasn’t a tool out there that was doing the things that I really wanted to do and the original idea of this, I actually just wanted to build it for my own internal use at my firm and after going through it so much and really thinking through it. I started to realise, well, shoot if I’m having these problems, chances are there might be some other people who are as well and maybe there’s even a commercial product here that could help at a scale and be really useful for people.

So, I mean, we should probably preface the whole explanation of Journalytic with a couple of things, because I don’t think it’s for everybody. Like there are some things that you have to say yes to for you to want to use the product and get usage out of it. And the first thing is that I believe that it requires a growth mindset. If you have more of a fixed mindset where you don’t think that you can improve at something, where you don’t think that if you put in the effort you can get better, then this product is kind of a waste of time for you. But if you do believe that you can get better and you want to get better, I think that there are things built into the structure of this that will help you improve in a much faster way.

We should probably preface the whole explanation of Journalytic with a couple of things, because I don’t think it’s for everybody. Like there are some things that you have to say yes to for you to want to use the product and get usage out of it. And the first thing is that I believe that it requires a growth mindset. If you have more of a fixed mindset where you don’t think that you can improve at something, where you don’t think that if you put in the effort you can get better, then this product is kind of a waste of time for you. But if you do believe that you can get better and you want to get better, I think that there are things built into the structure of this that will help you improve in a much faster way.

The other thing I would is that it requires some self-honesty, so you have to be willing to hold the mirror up and be willing to recognise when you make mistakes and accept them and figure out how to fix them. If you just want to assume that everything is all good and that you know it’s not your fault, or you know your decisions, or your choices are influenced by the outside, and it’s not your fault then I would say that this may tell you things that you don’t want to hear, and so if unless you are open to that kind of self-criticality I think it’s probably lost on you, and it’s not going to be a good fit.

But if you are self-interested or you are interested in learning about yourself and you are interested in getting better then I think what we’ve built is I think it really works and I could say that after using it a rudimentary version of this now for more than 18 months, and I think it’s really, really helping my own investment game and the process and the speed at which I’m getting better at it.

[00:14:40] Tilman Versch: What kind of pain points did you experience with other solutions on the market that finally let you decide, oh, I want to build something on my own?

[00:14:50] Jake Taylor: You had some great note-taking apps. I mean, I used all of them at different points, trying them out and but what I always felt was this was all general-purpose software and it doesn’t know that I’m working on investment specifically. And so if they were to design something with investments in mind what would it look like? And that was where we started building how we take an investor’s mindset and the goals that they’re trying to accomplish and start from that the very beginning and build from there.

You had some great note-taking apps. I mean, I used all of them at different points, trying them out and but what I always felt was this was all general-purpose software and it doesn’t know that I’m working on investment specifically. And so if they were to design something with investments in mind what would it look like? And that was where we started building how we take an investor’s mindset and the goals that they’re trying to accomplish and start from that the very beginning and build from there.

As opposed to what we all do now is take general-purpose software like Ocean, Rome, or OneNote. There’s a bunch of them. And then how do I shoehorn my process into that so that hopefully it gives me what I want? So number one was just getting more organised, getting everything into one place. I was writing, I’d have yellow notepads, some would be at the office, some would be at home. My notes are scattered all over the place. I couldn’t search very well through them. Normal note-taking apps solve a lot of that but that was step one was, okay, you have to get digital with this if you want to have good search capabilities and tagging, back-linking between entries.

The other aha that we had was using a journaling interface as the way to get your notes in, like journaling to the next level about your own investments and your process is the interface with the brain is what we’re going for like how do we get your thoughts into here so that we can then help you to recognise where your shortcomings are and how you might be able to fix them.

Goals of Journalytic

[00:16:33] Tilman Versch: You already named them a bit, but maybe let’s call them out a bit the goals that are embedded in the software. So what are the goals that are embedded into Journalytic?

[00:16:44] Jake Taylor: The goals are to record in high fidelity what you were thinking at the moment so that you can go back later and see what was your thesis, what were you thinking, what did you get wrong. And it’s so wickedly difficult to just try to keep it all in your head. Like your brain, the way our memories work, it is we will rewrite history to protect our egos in how we remember what we thought we knew at particular times. So to move that out of your brain and into somewhere where you can go back and read it later is such an advantage in getting better and understanding the mistakes that you’re making.

The goals are to record in high fidelity what you were thinking at the moment so that you can go back later and see what was your thesis, what were you thinking, what did you get wrong. And it’s so wickedly difficult to just try to keep it all in your head. Like your brain, the way our memories work, it is we will rewrite history to protect our egos in how we remember what we thought we knew at particular times. So to move that out of your brain and into somewhere where you can go back and read it later is such an advantage in getting better and understanding the mistakes that you’re making.

So that’s number one, just let’s get a high-fidelity record of what you are thinking now. Number two, at the end of the day, what we’re trying to do is make better decisions. And much of the software is just about recording your decisions and then getting feedback on those decisions. And so we’ve built where you can input a reason code for any decision that you’re making whether it’s you’re buying, you’re selling, you’re passing, or you’re holding, and you could even include your own custom decision types, but those four are the sort of the main categories.

But putting in a reason code at the time that you make the decision will allow you to go back and look at that class of decisions as an entire bundle of decisions and how did that go on to perform and now we can start to see, oh, every time that I. Said I bought for this particular reason it ended up not working out very well, and so there’s something wrong in the logic that I’m using, some mismatch between my mental model of the world and what ends up happening. My predictions are wrong here, but I don’t know that unless I actually capture the data. So at the end of the day, a lot of this is about capturing unique data about your investment process that currently is just going unrecorded.

So at the end of the day, a lot of this is about capturing unique data about your investment process that currently is just going unrecorded.

What you can do with Journalytic

[00:18:36] Tilman Versch: Maybe it is now time to jump into the software South. So if you share your screen and show us a bit of what expect us. Your journal is already quite filled, which is quite good.

[00:18:52] Jake Taylor: So this a demo journal. My personal journal is private, but that’s okay. There’s still plenty of stuff in here that we can talk through to show what is happening. So the first thing is that this uses kind of the Twitter convention of a hashtag so you know whatever company it is that you’re looking for you can basically tie your ideas together using the cash tag. Let’s say that you know you’re researching the 10Q and you come across something, you take a bunch of notes about it, you hit post, and it’ll just create a new journal entry for that.

You can see all these different journal entries that we’ve created. You could shrink it down into just showing you the headers so that you can kind of look back and see what you were working on and this sort of just basic note-taking stuff. Now, any of these names, you can click on it and it will take you to an idea page for that, and here’s where it starts to get kind of interesting. You can start to see recorded journal entries overlaid on the price chart. So here are all the different Amazon entries that we’ve done in this particular little account, and you can also go through and look at all of the different journal entries that you’ve made for Amazon.

We could even go a little bit deeper into our process here, and we can look and see when was the last time we wrote about this, when did we create this first entry, what the price has done since we started looking at it, where is it in our process, how many journal entries have we done on this, record our decisions on different decisions that we’ve made. For this one, we haven’t actually made any tags yet, but you could see what tags have you used with this name a lot. So you could see here if you’re using a red flag or green flag you’d see, oh man, there’s been a bunch of red flags accumulating here. I should probably take a look at this again or other names that you’ve used in association with that.

So this is the first pass of looking at all of the different ideas that you’re keeping track of. Over here in the sidebar, you can look at the different tags that you want, it’s sort of a shortcut menu, with different names, and you can save individual journal entries. So where it starts to get more interesting, and here’s where we go from just a simple note-taking app into, okay, this was built for investors is we can look at the– we have this special actions here and these are all investment specific things. So recording a decision is the number one thing that people are doing right now in the app.

And you know, let’s say we’re recording a buy decision on today’s date for Amazon and you know we can put in a reason code and we decide we a lot of downside protection on this. You throw in the price and the number of shares that we’re buying and then put in a little bit of extra reasoning. That’s kind of a clues for yourself to go back and look and read about it later. And let’s just say, love Bezos, here, right? Even though he’s not running it. And then we’ll post it. And now we can go and see on our Amazon price chart and we can even filter here by decisions, and we could see we’ve made two decisions here. We made one back here when we passed on it, and we made another one here when we decided to buy it. So you could start to see your whole life of ownership of a business.

And then on this ideas tab, you can go through and see all the different ideas that you have and organise them by where they are in your process and where they come from, so that’s another interesting thing is looking at where the source of all your investment ideas coming from like who is the friend that’s giving you the good investments and who’s giving you all the duds? It’d be kind of interesting to know that, right?

[00:22:33] Tilman Versch: I’m the one with the bad ideas.

[00:22:37] Jake Taylor: I think we’re all guilty of it at different points in time. And then we can look at all of our decisions here. This actions tab is sort of a review of all of your data that’s been structured and so we can see like, hey, we passed on Carvana in January of this year and it turned out that maybe that was a pretty good idea. So some of the other that we included in here for investors specifically, you know running a checklist is an important thing, so we actually have built-in 45 different categories of checklists in our library, and there are more than 300 different questions, and they range from different behavioural biases that you might be running into accounting red flags to different asset classes actually and or even just more general run-of-the-mill like, okay, I’m going to I’m listening to a conference call, here are the things I need to pay attention to.

And of course, you can build your own as well and create your own custom checklists. Use our items in with your own and blend them, and then when you tackle an idea, let’s say, I can insert a checklist really easily. And let’s say, I want to look at I’m going to run Warren Buffett’s checklist on this. Okay, here’s all the stuff that Warren Buffett would ask himself about an investment, and you could fill in whatever these answers and say within my circle of competence. And it will just hit post real quick. And obviously, we’re not going to have all of these different questions, but we can then have a record when we go back and look at this that shows, oh okay, I answered this particular question and here’s what it showed.

And you could actually sort of keep track over time. If you run the same checklists on the same companies to see how your thoughts are evolving over time, which is actually a pretty interesting intellectual exercise. There are some other more advanced features in here, creating a self-contract, so this is inspired by Annie Duke’s work where any time you make a decision whether it’s a buy or a sell or whatever, or a pass you should be thinking about like what would have to happen in the world for me to change my mind about this.

So let’s say that I bought something and I decided, oh boy, if management does one more bad acquisition, I will decide to sell my shares, so you would be able to structure it in a contract here for yourself where you put in the, let’s say as a kill criteria for management bad acquisition here and then the detail would be I will sell my shares. And so what you’re doing is trying to give yourself while you’re thinking so over before you’re in the middle of that bad thing happening and it’s really hard to think, you’re setting up the criteria, you’re giving yourself a plan for if these things happen, here’s the action I’m going to take and then you’d be able to go and look and see here are all my self-contracts that I have going right now and if I can execute on them.

Some of it might be evaluation. Like if Brookshire gets to a certain level, I’m going to be a willing buyer because I know Buffett’s doing buybacks at that share price. And then making probabilistic predictions. So this comes from Phil Tetlock’s work on Superforecasting, which is a fantastic book, so you can make a probabilistic prediction on, let’s say, I think there’s a 75% chance that Amazon’s revenue will grow by 10% per year, okay, and then I could just hit post.

And now I can go back and I could keep track of my different predictions and what’s really powerful about this is that when you as opposed to right now, to figure out if you have luck versus skill in the investment game, you have to almost be doing it for more than a decade to see, okay, I’ve taken enough decisions and now the price is telling me whether I was right or wrong about that. That’s a long, long time to figure out luck versus skill. But if I instead start recording things about the business fundamentals and what I think they’re going to be and assigning probabilities to that, I could start much more quickly, accumulate a data set that will tell me whether am I demonstrating luck or am I demonstrating skill here.

And if it turns out that all of my predictions are terrible. I’m way off. I’m overconfident and yet the price is going up which is telling me that I’ve just been getting really lucky and actually I’m probably about to get clobbered. And that’s a really good thing to know about yourself, right? And then the last thing which I think is really probably going to be the most powerful thing is actually capturing a feeling so you can do a feeling of whatever you want. Like you could be about a particular idea, it could be about the economy, it could be about mental or physical.

I actually think there’s a tonne of space to be figured out in this physical and one of the things that we’re building towards is we’re including biometric data from your Apple Watch, or your Oura Ring, or your Fitbit and having that pulled in here to get your physical how is your biometrics indicating that you are in your decision-making headspace and having that included to show, oh man, I got a terrible night’s sleep last night. I had an argument with my wife, and my heart rate variability is in the tank, indicating that I am not ready to be making any big high-consequence decisions and I should probably take today off and maybe come back tomorrow. And maybe I’m in a better headspace.

And we see that you know all the psychological research points to how you can go wrong in your decision-making, whether you’re hungry or you’re tired or you’re stressed out. All of those things are hugely impacting your decision-making. And then when we start getting into the metadata of what were the journal entries that you’ve been doing, like how much work have you been putting in, so in this dummy account you know there’s not as much work, but if you look at my personal one like this entire thing is dark green because this Journalytic lives on my second monitor all day long and I’m always in putting stuff in there.

But what we’re giving here is a bunch of data points on how much work have you been doing, whether have you been recording your feelings, how much time you can look and see, what did I work on last week, where is my work product, how much time have I been spending on this? It doesn’t look very impressive on this one because it’s a dummy account but mine, those green bars are really high, they’re in the 30-hours-a-week range, what ideas have been working on and does this match up with my portfolio?

So I’ve been journaling a tongue about all these different companies, but are those even the companies that I own? And am I potentially taking my eye off the ball of where my money is invested? It’s good to know these things about where you’re putting work in and then eventually when you have enough data built up to look at your different reasons that you’ve made investments, this is what I was talking about and analysing your reason codes to see what is coming out of that. So for this, let’s say, we’re looking at the buy and reversion to the mean is my thesis for this for one particular reason code. Okay. Well, I bought Exxon back in 2020 because I thought it was going to revert to the mean and that worked out really well.

And let’s say that passing on something and okay, management red flag. That was a reason to pass. Let’s see what was the name that actually led to that. Let me throw it on the cell here. Oh pass, I mean sorry. Okay, we see oh we passed on Tesla, and we could actually go to that particular decision and see what were the notes that we took to ourselves? Like what did we say here? Ohh okay, I didn’t understand the business and there were a few red flags around management. Like I have high-fidelity input into what I was thinking at that time because I recorded it.

And then just some other basic stuff about how much time you’ve been working, different decisions, sort of hit rates and how well have you been doing, how many ideas have you been looking at versus passing on. All those kinds of this metadata about your investment process that you can know about yourself. So this is why I said at the beginning that you really don’t want to tackle this unless you’re very serious about wanting to improve because it takes work to record all this stuff, but hopefully, you can see that if you put in that work on the front end that there’s going to be a bunch of goodies on the back end for you in reports and different things that you can then learn about yourself. So that’s what I built it for because I wanted to know all this stuff basically.

Sleep and the investment process

[00:31:03] Tilman Versch: So one day your journal will say that you have to go on holiday if you’re too stressed and have to relax.

[00:31:10] Jake Taylor: That’s right. So I wake up and I’ll look at my sleep score and I’ll see, oh man, that’s not very good. I feel tired this morning. I will then journal, today is a no-decision day. You can do some research, but maybe even then don’t push too hard because you might come to the wrong conclusions. Today’s not really a conclusion day. Then there are other days I wake up feeling fantastic, ready to take around the world and I’ll record that and I’ll say, Okay, today, it could be a day where if you got to something you’re maybe more insightful today because you’re in a great headspace, so I think that kind of stuff is super important, and I think it’s kind of largely ignored when we talk about the investment process.

So I wake up and I’ll look at my sleep score and I’ll see, oh man, that’s not very good. I feel tired this morning. I will then journal, today is a no-decision day. You can do some research, but maybe even then don’t push too hard because you might come to the wrong conclusions. Today’s not really a conclusion day. Then there are other days I wake up feeling fantastic, ready to take around the world and I’ll record that and I’ll say, Okay, today, it could be a day where if you got to something you’re maybe more insightful today because you’re in a great headspace, so I think that kind of stuff is super important, and I think it’s kind of largely ignored when we talk about the investment process.

Upcoming features

[00:31:51] Tilman Versch: You have shown this action triggers or these actions, are there already like if the Berkshire falls below 1.3 times book value, is there already an alert coming? Buy it! Buy it!

[00:32:04] Jake Taylor: That’s something that we’re in the process of building is the actual alert for some of these fundamental data triggers, and in fact, I would love to be able to build it such that an AI could read what you said and then if it thinks it sees something comparable to that in the 8K or, you know the 10Q or wherever the data shows up, be able to throw up the alert, hey, I think that you might have had an alert triggered based on this most recent filing. Maybe you should take a look at this section. I think we could build that eventually.

I don’t think it’s out of the realm of, you know, it’s not fully science fiction, but we just we’re very early in this so we’re still building towards those kinds of things, but hopefully, we’ll have some of the more basic valuation data. As you know a price to book on Berkshire is a triggering alert, but as it is now you can set alerts based on time like if you wanted to have a journal entry resurface, you know a week from now or a month from now, you can do that. And we also set up inactivity alerts based on an idea level.

So if I haven’t journaled about one of my companies and I have an alert, an activity alert set, it will tell me, hey, it’s been 30 days since you’ve journaled about this, do you want to make a new journal entry? Or 90 days, which is kind of nice if you’re owning businesses and a lot of times, time can go by, and you know I haven’t looked at that in a while. I probably should just be depending on my own memory to think, oh, I probably should. Instead, I set an alert, 90-day alerts at a minimum on all of my ideas, so that at least once a quarter, you’re going to come back and just kick the tyres a little bit, right?

[00:33:35] Tilman Versch: How social do you want to make the experience? Does it make sense to allow sharing function of notes or is it more that you want to have your personal diary that’s not for everyone?

[00:33:50] Jake Taylor: I think the answer is yes to both of those. You want your private journal where you put your most deep thoughts in there for later reflection, but I also think that turning it into multiple multiplayer games with shared journaling is a huge unlock and one of the issues that you have as an investor always is getting that outside view. Like being able to show you something about a particular investment that maybe you’re missing, and it is hugely important and you just didn’t know about it, how would you even know?

We all have these blind spots in various ways and sometimes the most obvious thing to someone else is missed by us and so having someone point that out is hugely valuable, however, it can also go too far and be tipped into groupthink, where then everyone is self-reinforcing. You get escalating commitments to an idea, you get social proof, and you get commitment consistency bias. All of these things are serious pitfalls for investors as well, so we have to be very, very thoughtful about how we roll out the shared journal functionality so that we don’t end up too far in either direction where you’re not getting good outside view, but you’re also not getting subjected to a whole washing over of groupthink.

We all have these blind spots in various ways and sometimes the most obvious thing to someone else is missed by us and so having someone point that out is hugely valuable, however, it can also go too far and be tipped into groupthink, where then everyone is self-reinforcing. You get escalating commitments to an idea, you get social proof, and you get commitment consistency bias. All of these things are serious pitfalls for investors as well, so we have to be very, very thoughtful about how we roll out the shared journal functionality so that we don’t end up too far in either direction where you’re not getting good outside view, but you’re also not getting subjected to a whole washing over of groupthink.

That’s where you end up with stupid decisions on both ends of those that spectrum so we’re still in the process of doing a lot of interviews with investors to figure out exactly how they want to work together, and how we can keep them in a sweet spot, but it remains to be seen. We’re working towards it and I think we’re going to get it. We have some ideas that I think I haven’t seen anywhere else that I think is going to be actually really valuable for how people work together with their investments.

Data Ownership

[00:35:35] Tilman Versch: How do you think about data ownership? Because if you set the AI function, it’s quite interesting and can be helpful, but on the other side, it’s also my secret source I want to have and I don’t want to be placed by a computer who’s reading out my information.

[00:35:49] Jake Taylor: Well, more importantly, how do you make sure that there aren’t humans reading your journal entries and front-running you or things like that, right? I mean, we’ve seen that with some of the apps with order flow where Robin Hood, for instance, but that’s hugely important to us, and one of the primary things that we had to tackle early on was how do we handle data security and the answer is that we have encryption at your browser that then happens first before it comes to the server and the in the cloud our data is encrypted at rest so it can’t be hacked basically, and so it’s usually important, we can’t read anything that anyone is writing in their journals. That’s the short answer to it.

Popular functions

[00:36:38] Tilman Versch: What are the most popular functions and why are you surprised that people use it in a different way than you expected?

[00:36:47] Jake Taylor: So number one, decision recording is the number one useful feature so far. Second to that is recording the feelings, which is good. I think that’s important. I think there’s probably a lot of signal in that feeling, noise, that if you could do a better job of capturing it that you might be able to tease out. It’s quite possible that when you have that pit in your stomach and you feel sick when you’re hitting the buy button, that means that no one else would ever be buying because they feel sick too and maybe that’s the opportunity.

We actually don’t know the answer to that, and it might be idiosyncratic, but it’d be really interesting to know the answer eventually for everybody. So, yeah, decision recording and then feelings and then obviously a lot of just tagging and note taking more generally that happens in there, but some of the surprising things is you know there’s this idea of revealed preferences and economics where there’s what people say, and then there’s what they actually do and everyone loves the checklists that we’ve built. They say they love it and they look at it and they’re, Oh my God, this exactly what I need. I need to start doing this, but relatively speaking the uptake of checklists has actually been kind of smaller than we would have thought based on what they said, so the actually revealed preference of the action versus what they said has been a discrepancy, whereas the decision recording is happening all the time. So that was a bit of a surprise. I thought people would be more into running checklists based on what they asked for.

Implementing community feedback

[00:38:20] Tilman Versch: How do you decide to make progress, with you as a business builder, is it community-driven or how do you go about this?

[00:38:31] Jake Taylor: We should probably say that Journalytic is completely free right now for anyone to use, and we anticipate this particular set of features, the tools that built that you’ve seen just now would remain free forever, and we will continue to build on top of those features in a bunch of different ways that hopefully, ideally, are so cool and so good that people would be happy to pay for it and they would feel they were ripping me off because they were getting such a good value out of it and that’s why I’ll know that we’ve done well.

And I think we’ll get there because we’re already getting tonnes of great feedback from our user base. But we could definitely use more, and I’m in it every single day working as well. And so I’ve got really strong feelings about what’s it not doing for me right now. Like what part of my investment process sucks that I might be able to get better at? And so we’re always working on pushing those boundaries. And already what’s baked into this, this is a decade-plus of thinking about the investment process and how to improve it. And being pretty diligent about reading the decision, making literature, and research in psychology, and trying to bake some of those things into the structure of it so that we can identify the problems and then help you solve them.

So I think we’re going to get there, but as far as building a business, it’s still very early days and we’re still figuring out exactly who is that customer who just gets it right away and loves it and wants to do more and wants to give us that great feedback. And when we sort of have a better handle on who is that sort of avatar customer group, we’ll know more about what we need to build for them to get over that bar, where they’d be very happy to pay for it, so it kind of remains to be seen about where we end up. We have a hypothesis about what that might look like, but you always have to test that against the data of the marketplace of what people actually want.

Bias protection

[00:40:22] Tilman Versch: What kind of bias protection is baked in? Can you give some examples?

[00:40:27] Jake Taylor: Sure, I mean, running a checklist is a way to incorporate more system two thinking as opposed to hot gut reaction system one. It slows you down and makes you more methodical. Having the predictions be probabilistically based so that you can get a sense of your overconfidence or under confidence relative to your competence. So self-contracts are a way for you to express your best intentions while you’re thinking soberly and then have the plan to follow when the assets the fan and you want to be able to execute on it and have a clear mind and know what are the procedures I’m going to follow if this going to happen.

And some of that might have actually come from my energy background. The entire energy grid runs with that mentality of procedures of if this happens, we already know exactly the mitigation steps we’re going to take from an engineering basis. If this line goes out of service, here are the 10 steps we’re going to take to fix the problem. And the whole thing is built from the ground up with that mentality, and I think the investment process went well executed looks like a lot of that as well. If you pre programme like if this happens, here are the steps we’re going to take to fix the problem or to make the right decision at that moment based on what we understand today as opposed to if you wait until you’re in the middle of the firefight in the war, there’s just this fog around you. I mean, anybody, if you go back to think through March of 2020 and you know how clear was your headspace while the world was shut down, it was really hard to think clearly at that point, so I think that’s another bias that we’re trying to mitigate against.

Reflection on own habits

[00:42:13] Tilman Versch: How did it change you as an investor using Journalytic?

[00:42:18] Jake Taylor: So far, getting all my notes in one place has been huge unlock for insights. Having the decision, and reason codes, and being able to look at them to see, okay, when I’ve used this particular reason code, how did that group end up working out? It’s still a little bit early for me to say. I don’t have a big enough data set quite yet, but I’m getting there and I know I will get there eventually where I’m going to have true insights into my process. It’s just going to take a little bit more time, probably because I’m a low turnover investor so I don’t have a tonne of decisions happening all the time, so it takes a little while to accumulate the data set, but it’s starting to get there.

And one of the interesting insights so far and that has been some of them have been a little funny is that one of the reason codes that I use is asymmetric outcomes and so the idea of being, okay, chances are if I lose, I’m not going to lose very much. But if I win I might win big. And that as a category so far has done really poorly. And I wondered to myself did I have the asymmetry backwards? And if it was like if I win, I’m going to win a little. And if I lose, I’ll lose a lot. Another reason code that’s been kind of interesting to unpack has been increasing certainty, and this one typically would come from, if I own something and then I’m following the business and there’s data that comes out in the 10Q that makes me feel I understand better where this company is going like I’ve increasing certainty about the business, that one is actually done relatively poorly, surprisingly.

And what I think that speaks to a little bit is that it’s going to take some more time for some of the last three years of insane markets to wash out of some of these decisions. The timing kind of matters a lot for some of these because the tides have been so strong. I mean 2020, you had a dramatic drop, a huge recovery. 2021 you’re like into one of the all-time potential bubble eras. I think we’re going to look back at 2021 and say, yeah, that looks like ’99, that looks like 2007, that looks like 1987 or you know leading up to ’87, that looks the nifty ‘50. And then you know, 2022 itself has been everything going in the other direction, so there’s been large tides with which to evaluate the decisions individually inside of there. And so there’s a lot of timing luck that’s involved in some of this analysis early, but I think with more time eventually that washes out and you start to get at the actual luck versus skill element of each decision.

[00:44:57] Tilman Versch: It will be interesting to see you looking into the notes in 2042 and see what you’ve written down in 2022 and how this resonates.

[00:45:05] Jake Taylor: Oh, yeah, I can’t wait for that. I think about how much money would I pay to look at a fully filled out Journalytic profile of Warren Buffett over the last 50 years, like what has he been thinking about in real-time, what decisions, what did he pass on and what was the reason, how that does, and just be able to see the entire data set of Buffett as a decision maker for 50 years would be so fascinating. Like I’d pay an almost infinite amount of money for that. I think the insights that it would reveal would be just staggering.

And so if I want to, eventually, I’m never going to be Buffet and no one will, but if I want to understand myself better and have that long arc of seeing myself as an investor growing, I have to start recording all this stuff now so that when I get out to that future point I have the data set to work with.

And so if I want to, eventually, I’m never going to be Buffet and no one will, but if I want to understand myself better and have that long arc of seeing myself as an investor growing, I have to start recording all this stuff now so that when I get out to that future point I have the data set to work with.

Leaping into a business building

[00:45:58] Tilman Versch: The Journalytic also changed you, not only as an investor, but it also opened the dimension of the business builder to you. What was the moment when you decided to take this seriously?

[00:46:12] Jake Taylor: Well, so I’ve been super fortunate that I ended up with some two terrific co-founders in this project that when we were originally talking about all this, it was sort of, yeah, wouldn’t it be cool if XYZ and when we got serious about it and actually started building it, it took to another level of, okay, boy, we really have to think about this and then we’ve hired some employees too since then and so now it’s okay, this a very serious endeavour that we’re working on this.

So it has forced me to learn so much about software that I didn’t know about before, which has been drinking out of a fire hose in a lot of ways, but it’s been terrific. Like one of my co-founders has an incredibly strong technological background. He was one of the early employees at Microsoft and worked at Google and worked at Valve, the video game company, and so he knows how to build pretty much anything and he knows how all this stuff works and it’s almost literally having a genie for me, where I’m like, well, could we make it do this? And then he’ll say, well, yeah, we can. Of course, we can do that, but here are three different trade-offs to think about if we go in this direction versus this other direction. He’s just built so much that he just knows where all the traps are, and so to learn from someone with that level of expertise has been so cool as someone who is coming in very novice.

Learnings about software businesses

[00:47:44] Tilman Versch: So what were the learnings about software besides these genie moments you just wrapped?

[00:47:50] Jake Taylor: One of the big ones was you said early on at Microsoft when you look at any piece of code at that point had a high chance of being very valuable because it was replacing something that was typically on a pen and a paper at that point, and so the ability to manipulate the data, all the things that we sort of are line to now and take for granted in a digital world didn’t exist in the early ‘80s relatively speaking. And so, every single piece of code was very, very valuable, relative to now, there’s so many different– it branched so much, and now there are so many different ways of doing things that it’s actually pretty difficult to make something that stands out relative to before where it was just kind of diminishing returns in a way where the bigger the code base gets off the entire planet, the harder it is to write something that’s super unique that can really move the needle compared to other things.

Hiring employees

[00:48:47] Tilman Versch: How did you change as a businessman and also as an investor when you had the first employees, what impact does this give you?

[00:48:57] Jake Taylor: I mean, it’s definitely a forcing function of, boy, we better make sure that what we’re building is heading in the right direction and we’re not spending too much time messing around in the wrong places. It’s a forcing function to really focus on that road map and also actually prioritise things. You could just wander around by yourself with one developer, let’s say, and build a million things and not actually go out to the marketplace and see, well, does anyone actually even want this or is no one going to be using that feature? So you have to start getting more feedback, incorporate it sooner so that you can actually build the things that matter because it’s very expensive to build now, we have mouths to feed, we have to be going in the right direction with this boat. Otherwise, if we’re going in the wrong direction, it’s very expensive to do that. So it really makes you pay a lot more attention than when it was just sort of taking time, but now that it takes money also to explore what you really want to make sure you’re turning over the right rocks.

Appreciating businesses

[00:49:57] Tilman Versch: What kind of business have you understood better when becoming a builder yourself?

[00:50:02] Jake Taylor: I have an appreciation for how messy business can be and I kind of knew that all along that, boy, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of humans involved, and anytime there are humans involved, it’s going to be messy.

I have an appreciation for how messy business can be and I kind of knew that all along that, boy, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of humans involved, and anytime there are humans involved, it’s going to be messy.

And as outside in public equities investors, we only get a certain view of the total picture and a lot of times it’s just this little keyhole that they want us to know about, right? That management is not necessarily being nefarious about it, but they just want to put their best foot forward anybody, and they want to portray that things are smooth under the surface and you can’t blame them for that, but maybe potentially underneath there’s all this calamity that’s happening and it’s messy. Like this person doesn’t like this person.

And all of those types of things the human idea of it I have a much better appreciation for the other operators who are trying to build something that it takes way more time than you would ever expect to build something. It’s messier than you would ever expect. There’s actually a lot more thought that goes into it than probably you give appreciation to as an outside investor. I mean, when you’re watching a company and you’re like what the hell’s taking so long, aren’t they turning this around, what’s get to it? Well, it’s harder than that. Like it’s just simply harder than that to actually be the man in the arena who is doing the real work. So I have a little bit more sympathy for management when it comes to how difficult it is to run a business.

Developing software

[00:51:25] Tilman Versch: What do you think about the clock speed and software? It looks like from software you think is digital, scalable, fast, quick, whatever, and then you build it yourself. I think it’s 10 years, you start it with the first seat for what you’re building now.

[00:51:44] Jake Taylor: I think copying software is other people’s software is not difficult and but I think actually writing thoughtful, good software is incredibly difficult and the trade-offs decisions that are made, the user interface, and what’s actually not included can actually be as much of as important as what is included and not cluttering up the UX. At the end of the day, every single good or service on planet Earth is there to accomplish something for someone and really make them the hero of the story.

I think copying software is other people’s software is not difficult and but I think actually writing thoughtful, good software is incredibly difficult and the trade-offs decisions that are made, the user interface, and what’s actually not included can actually be as much of as important as what is included and not cluttering up the UX. At the end of the day, every single good or service on planet Earth is there to accomplish something for someone and really make them the hero of the story.

Like all of the users of Journalytic to me, I think about them how I make them the heroes of the story. How do I help them on their journey of getting to being the hero and what can we build that would allow them to do that? Like what jobs need to be done for them to achieve progress in their lives, in what they’re hoping to accomplish in the investment world?

So when I strip it back to that level of sort of human wants and needs you build differently than purely just, oh hey, that’s a cool feature, let’s throw that in. It really has to be more thoughtful than that, and more holistically thought about what are they really trying to accomplish. And I think that’s how you end up with good software there’s an elegance to it that requires pruning of what is good, it only leaves the great.

When we think about software, well, why don’t you just include everything? It’s like the shelf can be as big as we want like put all the items in it. That is true. There’s not that physical constraint, but there’s a mental constraint of how many things we can keep in our heads at one time and still execute a process. And so if you’re giving them everything, it can start to clutter it up to where then they do a bad job with it, and now they’re not accomplishing what they want to accomplish. And so there’s much more work that goes into it than I ever fully appreciate it and now, when I see good software, I’m, oh boy, somebody really thought about this a lot.

[00:53:49] Tilman Versch: It’s an interesting question I had with thinking about software. I met two companies recently that tried to get into the insurance market in Germany. The one I interviewed has bought 13 software companies, and now combining this to build a new infrastructure. The other one just might have not invested that much into software, but is more on the sales side, getting customers on, getting traction and stuff like this. And it’s quite interesting how these concepts differ and it’s quite interesting to see who’s, in the end, winning with the software because I think it’s more about making customers as useful than building just the perfect software offer.

[00:54:30] Jake Taylor: Well, what’s difficult about it is that you have these different sorts of ropes that need to be braided together. You have the users’ feedback is sort of what they tell you that they want. You have the users’ actual feedback of what are they doing like there are the revealed preferences and that speaks to our difference between checklist usage and what they say they want. And then you have also what would the research say in psychology about what should we be doing to be the best decision-makers that we can be?

And then we have sort of my vision. What I see that I would want to use, and we have all these different sorts of channels of information that we need to incorporate together. This is like a deck of cards that has to be shuffled. And the problem is that a lot of times, if the customer will say, well, I want a faster horse and I will say I’m on the other end, what if I wanted to build you a car what would you think about that? And so, having a different vision along with the feedback and blending those all together actually require some art to it and you have to have the data to support it in a scientific way. But there is some art as well in knowing how to weigh those different factors as you then move forward in exploring, what jobs can be done by the software.

Data sufficiency

[00:55:50] Tilman Versch: Especially, if it’s such a niche project product, how do you think about the sufficiency of data? So if you have just potentially a few 10,000 users, it may maybe more, but this and then you only have a small sample. What do you think about this art of weighing data?

[00:56:11] Jake Taylor: Yeah, I mean, we’ve tried to take a crawl, walk, run mentality to that. So we were in a closed beta, where it was just invited only for almost a year while we built out what we thought looked like a minimum viable product. And then that just launched two weeks ago that minimum viable product. So that was a whole year’s worth of, call it maybe 500ish users, where we’re getting their feedback, we’re talking to them, we’re interviewing them, we’re onboarding them and seeing how’s their process work and how can we incorporate things.

And that was what led to this first pass of here’s the feature set for a minimum viable product. Well, now we’ve turned up the user base a bunch, and we’ve turned up the feedback as well. And so now we’re on the next phase which is let’s build for product market fit. We have a minimum viable product where I think we’ve demonstrated that what we’ve built is useful to people. How do we take it to the next level of being useful, and how do we identify who is that user that really just absolutely loves this? And how do we find more of them?

So that is this next phase that we’re working on. Then after that, it’s about scaling, finding those people and then really building from there in a much faster direction, but at all times along that process you’re trying to make sure you’re not moving in the wrong direction ever. Like that’s what you always worried about is I’m wandering through this wilderness. No one has a map and I want to make sure you don’t want to be sprinting if you’re going in completely the wrong direction, so try to walk first before you realise, okay, kike I’m heading north, that’s the right direction to be heading. Maybe let’s start jogging now that we know that North is the right place. I don’t know the exact city that we’re heading to in the north, but I know it’s one of them is probably the right place. So and once we know that, okay, here’s where we’re actually going, then we can start to sprint towards it a little bit faster.

[00:58:01] Tilman Versch: So we get back again at the Hikecast.

[00:58:06] Jake Taylor: That’s right, that was all preparation for running Journalytic. Yeah.

Closing thoughts

[00:58:11] Tilman Versch: Yeah, I thought this when I designed the questions, but not that cleverly. And do you have anything to add because we’ve already talked for one hour here, it might not be a full hour because we cut some out, but do you have anything to add for the end of the interview?

[00:58:30] Jake Taylor: As a call to action for the users, if they feel they want to get on this investment process improvement journey with us, go to Journalytic.com. Get an account, it’s free, and then go and whatever business that you’ve been thinking about the investment. Go in and create a feeling entry for that company and maybe write a couple of sentences about it. There has to be some company that you have a feeling about right now. Record it and then go into that dashboard that I showed you where you could see that entry overlaid on the price chart and then just imagine if you kept recording for a while like how would that start to build and what that might tell you about yourself and how your feelings are driving your investment process.

And if that feels a worthy investment of your time, see if you can kind of keep going and if you can eventually it builds up into a habit and then you actually start to look forward to it every day. Like I can’t wait to get in the morning and start journaling about what I’m thinking and feeling and start to get my notes going in there and knowing that I am taking steps towards becoming a better investor every single day and maybe everyday progress is small, maybe immeasurable, but I know that eventually they start to compound and add up and eventually at some point I’m going to be in such a better investor because I put in this little bit of extra work every day than if I had wasn’t doing something this.

[00:59:58] Tilman Versch: That sounds like a good plan, so just follow his call to action and thank you very much Jake for coming on. And it was a pleasure talking to you, and I hope we can have an update in one or two years to keep my journal up to date with interesting investing tools.

[01:00:15] Jake Taylor: Yeah, I want to see what you were thinking in 2022. And what decisions you made and what were the impacts? And I think it’d be a really fun conversation to compare notes in a little bit of time to see what were we thinking how bad were we, how dumb were we back then and hopefully we’re smarter in the future.

[01:00:35] Tilman Versch: For sure. We hope to be smarter, but sometimes we aren’t. Sometimes I’m also not. Maybe it works for you. Thank you. Before I start talking too much let’s end this here. Thank you very much for coming on and thank you for listening to all. Thank you. Bye-bye.

[01:00:50] Jake Taylor: Thanks, Tilman.

Disclaimer

[01:00:53] Tilman Versch: As in every video, also here is the disclaimer. You can find the link to the disclaimer below in the show notes. The disclaimer says, always do your own work. What we’re doing here is no recommendation and no word of advice. So please, always do your own work. Thank you very much.