Taking Our Substack to the Next Level
Becoming a full-time equity analyst on Substack
Weekly News Digest
We’re thrilled to announce a new feature on our Substack: a weekly news digest which will highlight corporate news and relevant events that (may) impact our portfolio strategy. And while we focus primarily on earnings releases, investor days, the macroeconomic backdrop does have an influence on our company’s profitability and prospects. Keeping you updated on relevant long-term macroeconomic trends should help new members better understand our investment philosophy and portfolio strategy going forward. You’ll find the first weekly new digest at the end of this post.
Becoming a Full-Time Substack Writer/Investment Analyst
Recently, we started to seriously consider becoming a full-time Substack writer. Going ahead with that decision would depend on overall reader engagement, premium membership trends, the growth in total subscribers and how much we would enjoy writing this Substack. We simply didn’t know what to expect at the beginning of the year.
In April 2024, I left my role as a senior finance professional at a small-to-medium-sized company that I had acquired with my former business partner. My journey began in management consulting, focusing on financial analysis, before transitioning to helping clients - primarily entrepreneurial families - identify M&A targets. Unlike private equity, which operates on structured frameworks and institutional mandates, working directly with individual business owners provided a unique perspective. These discussions taught me that, at the end of the day, everything comes down to people. No matter how strong the financials look on paper, long-term success is impossible without the right team - executives, middle managers, and employees all playing their part. That realization gave me a deep respect for the best serial acquirers, those who understand that sustainable value creation is about more than just numbers.
Ultimately, I started writing on Substack to gain more freedom outside the traditional corporate structure. Initially, we had no idea what to expect, but after four months, we’ve decided to go all in. Our goal is to share entrepreneurial experiences, provide educational content on fundamental analysis, and expand our deep-dive database - all while staying true to our investment philosophy. We won’t chase hype or shift toward active trading. Instead, we’ll continue focusing on what truly drives long-term compounding: great businesses, strong leadership, and smart capital allocation.
On this Substack, we’ll provide you with the following information:
educational articles about fundamental analysis and general posts (>1 per week)
bi-weekly webinars to address key concepts on fundamental analysis, shareholder value creation, M&A et cetera
quarterly letters on our portfolio strategy, holdings, performance
deep dives, follow-ups, earnings analyses and real-life stock portfolio (allocations, performance, targeted IRRs)
weekly news digest
bonus: thoroughly analyzing a company which our premium members believe is flying under the radar
What we have noticed is the tremendous interest in serial acquirers (whether it’s Lifco, Topicus). And we have several attractive smaller-sized players in mind on which we’ll start coverage very soon. Also, we’re planning to create a separate serial acquirer (M&A) monitor report.
Our commitment has always been clear: keeping the daily cost for an annual premium member well below the symbolic 1 EUR threshold. And let’s be clear: we will never hike our annual prices. Rather, we believe very much in economies of scale as growing our community leads to many more benefits:
we’ll get the opportunity to talk exclusively to management teams of smaller-sized companies since we’re then represented by hundreds (and hopefully even thousands) of premium members.
in order to knowledge-share, we’ll be able to host an annual event exclusive to our Partners, thereby creating lifelong friendships.
We’ll do everything we can to grow our Substack as fast as humanly possible by maintaining our focus on high-quality in-depth research, extending our serial acquirer coverage and much more.
We would summarize the membership plan as a focused, no-nonsense source of information to help you make smarter investment decisions in the quality growth space. It also presents a great opportunity for you to network and share thoughts with same-minded Tortoises. As we continue to grow the CT family, we’ll be looking for interactive communication tools outside of Substack (e.g. Slack, we’ll see if we can try out Substack’s premium chat feature). Again, all while keeping the prices unchanged.
Onboard now via the below button (note: you’ll have to become a regular/free subscriber first).
To sum it all up, we’re thrilled to share this update with you and hope to enhance our premium member satisfaction to even higher levels.
Without further ado, let’s jump into this first weekly news digest.