(All) My Thoughts on The Avid Hog
This post is going to be all about the new newsletter Quan and I just started. So, if a paid newsletter isn’t something you’re looking for right now – this post is going to be pretty boring for you.
It’s also going to be pretty long. I have a lot to say about The Avid Hog. I know most readers of the blog aren’t interested in ever paying $100 a month for any product. So, I don’t want to clog up the blog with a lot of little posts about the newsletter. Here’s one big one. If you’re not interested, skip it. Regularly scheduled (non-promotional) content will resume next week.
Quan and I have been working on The Avid Hog for over a year. I’m here in the United States (in Texas). Quan is back in Vietnam. He went to school in the U.S. And we started work on The Avid Hog in person while he was still living over here just after his graduation.
Quan moved back to Vietnam. But that did not end preparations for The Avid Hog. Today, we do everything by email, Skype, etc. The only difficulty is the time difference. It’s exactly 12 hours. It’s midnight in Hanoi when it’s noon in Dallas and vice versa. This make picking Skype times interesting.
The Avid Hog is an unusual newsletter for a few reasons. The biggest reason is that it’s a product of two people. All the decisions about what stocks we start research on, what stocks make the cut and get a full investigation, and what stock makes it into the next issue – these are all decisions we make together.
It’s easier than you might think. Quan and I don’t disagree on a lot about stocks. This is both a plus and a minus. The plus is that it makes it easier to produce The Avid Hog. The minus is that anything I badly misjudge is something Quan’s likely to misjudge too. We are not very good at catching each other’s mistakes. We are too similar in our thinking about stocks for that.
What is our thinking about stocks?
Officially, the label would be “value investor”. But that’s a rather wide tent. And we tend to be pretty far over on the quality side of things. If we’re going to compromise on quality or price, it’s always going to be price. I think we both tend to agree with Ben Graham. The biggest danger for investors isn’t usually paying too high a price for a high quality business. It’s paying too high a price for a second rate business.
The model business we like would be something like See’s Candies. Read Warren Buffett’s 2007 letter. There’s a section in it called “Businesses – The Great, The Good, and The Gruesome”. See’s is given as the example of a great business.
If you read that section carefully, you’ll understand what I mean when I say See’s is the kind of business Quan and I …
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