Happy New Year

To kick off the new year, I’m sharing my investing philosophy.  Some concepts are simple while others more complex.  They are not immutable rules or laws or instructions, just context I use for investing.  Whether I’m doing due diligence on a money manager or listening to a pundit talk his book on CNBC, it’s being processed through this filter.

Most of my philosophy is derived from the folks I work with.  There is a kind of collective gut feeling around most of these concepts that we have, but I like to put things like this in writing and keep it where I can see it.  It can act as a refresher (“oh yeah, that’s why we do that”) and as a record of how my thinking on investing has evolved.

Investing should be done in a manner that is:

•     Risk-Aware – Know yourself and prepare for what’s likely.
•     Focused – Think left of the decimal.  Remember what you’re trying to accomplish.
•     Elegant – Invest efficiently.
•     Realistic – Ignore hype, both good and bad.

I was hoping my investment philosophy would just happen to spell out something badass or sophisticated, but here we are with RFER or RAFER.  Since 50% of quality investment analysis is having a catchy acronym (everybody loved PIIGS, FAANG, and NINJA mortgages), it looks like I’m going to have to make up for this with actual content.  Let’s just never refer to it in acronym form.

The four words don’t really mean anything on their own so I’m going to make a post or two about each one with some details on how it fits with my perspective.

I’m also going to share more investing “stuff” here this year along with more timely commentary.  If there’s anything you’d like to see or if you have questions, email me – matt at matthewgarrott dot com.  I’m also on twitter which is a great site as long as you’re stingy with the follow button.  Feel free to DM me there.