Origins
The genesis of this site was three-fold.
Firstly, in 2008, I began managing a small pool of money on behalf of family. I wanted to create a website as an impetus to properly calculate, track, and showcase our investment performance. Hopefully results would be good and our investors would be happy to see this online. As a possible side benefit, it could benefit my professional prospects.
Secondly, as an investment analyst, I read a lot. I gradually found that writing down notes and thoughts helped solidify what I was reading. A digital journal helped me better retain information and was useful for building upon and connecting related ideas. Productivity gurus tell us: our brains are for having ideas, not holding them. A website would help catalogue interesting things I was reading, particularly on the web, and my own thoughts and analyses on them. As the maxim goes, “if you can’t teach it to a 10-year old, you don’t really know it”. So, writing is my discipline for better keeping, learning, and digesting what I read.
Thirdly, this site is a quasi-experiment. In the 2010s, a personal website about investments was avant-garde; I was not sure where this would go. It seemed like an exercise with little downside but possibly unlimited upside—a strong investment profile! As of the 2020s, a personal cum professional financial website is still relatively uncommon. No significant upside has materialized for me, and I still don’t know where this will end up. Regardless of where it leads, however, I would like to connect with other thinkers, investors, peers, and share, compare, and critique each others’ ideas. Like-minded peers are hard to find in the real world; I am hoping there would be some magic on the internet.
Audience
This website is principally intended for: 1) myself, 2) my investors, and 3) fellow like-minded peers.
Naming
“Second-level thinking” is a term I picked up reading Howard Marks (and he in turn credits Charlie Munger). It refers to the need, in investing, to think deeper and differently than the crowd, in order to achieve higher investment success. Since the market is, on average, intelligent, well-informed, and computerized, our edge may lie only in our mode of thinking, in our ability to recognize nuances in the market, use a framework better suited to its complexity, and act differently than the crowd.
“Second order” is also a concept from mathematics: the second derivative (in calculus) or two standard deviations (in probability). They both relate to going an extra, deeper step in a calculation.
This concept well encapsulates the raison d’être of this website—to facilitate deeper thinking on the subject of investing, and beyond that, on life.