For most investors, a passive index approach is the easiest way to invest for the long-term but if you’re willing to do the research, individual stocks offer a lot of potential. The challenge is knowing what fundamentals to look for, especially in today’s turbulent markets. Braden Dennis is my guest this week. He’s the founder of Stratosphere.io, an all-in-one platform for financial data, company-specific metrics, company research for investors, and the host of the Canadian Investor Podcast. He walks us through a six-step approach for finding great individual companies. 

 

Welcome to the Maple Money Show, the podcast that helps Canadians improve their personal finances to create lasting financial freedom. Do you prefer to invest in socially responsible companies? If so, our sponsor, Wealthsimple, will help you build a portfolio that focuses on low carbon, clean tech, human rights and the environment. To get started with socially responsible investing, head over to maplemoney.com/wealthsimple today. Now, let’s chat with Braden… 

 

Tom: Hi, Braden, and welcome to the Maple Money Show. 

 

Braden: Hi, Tom. Thanks for having me. I’ve been following your stuff for years now, so it’s finally nice to see you in the flesh. 

 

Tom: Well, thank you and thanks for being on. I wanted to have you on because you do something that is a lot different than what I do. I often go with ETFs when investing, and often recommend them and even robo advisors because one, it’s a lot easier to get started and two, it’s just a lot easier. But I do see the value in individual stock picking and taking the time to really get into these, finding more than just the market. So, let’s just get right into this. Why do you believe that high quality companies are worth really delving into and finding out all the options available? 

 

Braden: First, what you do makes complete sense. A passive indexed ETF portfolio is a wonderful thing from a cost perspective, from a friction perspective, from ease-of-use and simplicity. You get all the benefits of market returns with no effort. How wonderful is that? It’s amazing. I think that makes perfect sense for most people. For someone like me, who owns individual securities as well, I am looking deep into businesses out of my own passion. It is literally a hobby of mine. I’d be doing it regardless. I’d be going through statements, looking at (and trying to understand) the business, their history, their origin, the founders. As an entrepreneur myself, this is just stuff that really excites me so I’d probably be doing that regardless if I was fully, passively, indexed. I just know for a fact I’d be so impressed by a certain company, “I need to own shares of this thing. It’s just such a wonderful company,” so I’d probably end up down that path, regardless. If you’re new to the market, a passive index ETF strategy is the best thing ever invented. And it’s fairly new for the Vanguard’s and the BlackRock’s to give that low-cost, low-friction ETF strategy for Canadians. We’re always, five,10 years behind what the U.S. has available in terms of accessibility, fee structure, and all that stuff. So it is amazing, by the way. With that out of the way, I do believe owning great companies can achieve wonderful success for investors. And I don’t mean trading in and out of individual securities. I rarely sell stocks. I have to be so wrong on my investment thesis or convince myself there’s just a better option. You have to rip these shares out of my hands because I’m not buying junk companies. For my investment thesis to be right, they have to literally strike gold like some junior mining company, right? If they don’t literally hit gold, my investment thesis is busted. That is not the style of investing I want to do. Nor do I think it’s a good way to make money over the long-term. So with that kind of out of the way, I think there’s so much bad publicity around owning individual stocks because the traders give us a bad name, versus the age-old, classic, Warren Buffett thing of, buy great businesses, do nothing, right? Try not to overpay for them. Make sure they’re a great business and then literally do nothing. But the “do nothing” part is the hardest thing for both professional investors and self-directed investors—that doing nothing is where the money’s made. But it’s actually the hardest thing, right? The art of doing absolutely nothing with your portfolio is so much easier said than done. 

 

Tom: When you say do nothing, do you mean the buy and hold part of it? That you’re putting this effort to pick an individual stock? Like you said, you’re really going into the statement seething. You’re not just sticking to one metric. You’re really diving in. Not only do you want to make sure you made a good choice, you really are planning on sticking with them for a long time. This is you don’t put in all this time because you think they’re going to do good this week. 

 

Braden: Right. Exactly. In 2022, so far, it’s been a tough year for financial markets. Pretty much every asset class across the board in real return terms (except for some commodity names) got crushed. It’s just the name of the game. And a time like today will test the conviction of all investors. It’s the basic bear market type of mentality. The market will continue to test investors conviction until it just grinds, grinds and grinds lower. At the end of that, the people who are staying the course and continuing to hold their conviction in actual fundamentals of the business, those are the ones that really make money during these times. I always say bear markets is when you actually make money. 

 

Tom: Yeah, I agree. I don’t really recommend trying to time the market, but I have taken extra money and invested when the markets are down. That’s somewhat easy to do in big companies, certainly in ETFs where you can assume that they’re down because everybody’s down. But in the end, one month, six months from now, a year from now, it’s going to return and be better. 

 

Braden: This is the main draw, I think actually to passive index ETF investing. The decision making is quite simple. Your conviction doesn’t have to be completely strong in some company that’s down 30 percent and adding more to it. The entire Nasdaq’s down 30 percent so I think is pretty good idea for me to get more aggressive here and throw more in this basket. You can’t do market timing, but if you can buy assets at better prices, then go for it. 

 

Tom: Yeah. And similarly, you like we’re still too young to really worry about the selling phase, especially with ETFs. In my case, I don’t have to worry about where a top is or anything like that. I’m just say, “Oh, there’s bad news. I can invest a little extra.” Maybe it’s 30 percent down, maybe it’ll still go to 50 percent down. But in the end, I’m not trying to pick the absolute bottom. It’s just trying to get a bit of a discount. 

 

Braden: No, that makes complete sense. 

 

Tom: With your style, though, when a market drops like this, do you have to put in a lot more work? I know you’re not really trying to sell too often, but does it start to become tracking these individual companies you own? And within this entire market drop, there’s got to be certain companies that have just really gone sideways. There’s something wrong in their industry or the way they’re running their business that maybe sort of multiplies things even worse?

 

Braden: Yeah, for sure. If you look at a recessionary environment or increased interest rates is the reason that equities fall during that time period because many businesses just struggle from that, and not many companies are immune from it. There are a few, but we don’t need to go there. Now, when you look at maintaining your investment thesis that you have in an individual company, what we have found (with my team and at my company) is, even if a company meets expectations, drives revenue growth, drives earnings growth, some of this gap accounting type metrics, the real business fundamentals are actually in a few key performance indicators for the company. For perfect example, Spotify—the actual people that are subscribed to Spotify. You might be listening to this podcast on Spotify. Maybe you’re a subscriber. You’re either a paid one or free one. That number matters for the company. It’s on the front of their press release, right at the top—before revenue, before anything. This is the number of subscribers. Netflix, same kind of thing. With Amazon—no one cares about the retail business. It’s how did Amazon Web Services perform? Are they maintaining that 50 percent year-over-year growth in the run rate? If yes, good. If not, bad. Those are the types of things that really matter. Netflix is a perfect example. The stock was down more than 30 percent and it’s a mega-cap company. Hundreds of billions in market cap, tens and tens of billions market cap erased in just a few minutes on the open, after they released the results because subscribers (for the first time) was actually down quarter over quarter. And so those types of metrics matter for each company. I have a company called Stratosphere.io. It’s a data analytics company that focuses on tracking those types of metrics along with every other financial metric you can get. But 10 years and 10 quarters of those numbers that matter to the company can help people get some real clarity on what’s happening with the fundamentals. Each company I own—17 securities today, fairly concentrated. The top five names make up over 75 percent of the portfolio. So it’s very concentrated and not for everyone, but that’s what I do. I track just two or three metrics for them. So for Visa, it’s total transaction volume. It’s cross-border transaction volume. These things matter for the company, right? If that starts going down, we have to rethink how we’re approaching digital payments, from an investor standpoint. That’s where I think people get real clarity, just focusing on the real fundamentals. They get updated for each business every quarter. You don’t have to look every week. You don’t have look every day. These things just don’t change that rapidly. Investors in the stock market have been tricked into thinking that there are real changes that happen day-to-day with these public companies when it’s just really not true. They’ve been tricked into thinking that because they see a ticker and the price floating around these imaginary numbers. It’s really just not that relevant on a long view. What is relevant in the long view is that the company compounds their actual fundamentals. They grow their earnings over time. They grow their sales. They’ve grow their free cash flow, per share, over time. They get more customers. They have a better moat, more defensible. These things really matter. Everything else in the long view just really doesn’t matter that much. 

 

Tom: So with these fundamentals, they’re all very different per company. You really have to get into these quarterly reports because this isn’t a ratio that you can just apply to the entire market and find the stocks you want to buy. How many Netflix subscribers is not something that’s going to show up in a regular stock chart. 

 

Braden: Yeah, exactly. 

 

Tom: To find these companies in the first place, though, you must look at certain metrics to narrow it down. With the TSX and all the options there, you’re obviously not looking at every single statement. Where do you start? What are the sort of high-level metrics you start to even narrow this down? 

 

Braden: Yeah, a good question. And back to your previous point, yes, it doesn’t exist. And I had that problem, so I started inventing it on stratoshere.io. If you look at idea generation or early screening for individual companies to own them, I have six main criteria I just think of as like a must. I want to own it for many reasons, but I just have to be convinced that these things are true. Many people use like screeners to try to figure it out from a client perspective. You can start there and use screeners. They’re very useful. I’ve used them a ton. But the problem with that is, you first have to recognize the business. Perfect example, Tom, is your neighbor. He is selling his auto garage. He’s retiring. You know, he’s a baby boomer and his kids don’t want to take on the auto shop. They’re both Google engineers and don’t know how to fix a car. Perfect example. There’s all these types of small businesses popping up everywhere. And he says, “Tom, you’re an investor and own a collection of small businesses. Do you want to buy my auto shop?” Before even thinking about the margins, the revenue growth? How’s profit trended over time? You’d be thinking about the fundamentals of owning that business. You’d be thinking about the fundamentals of owning an auto shop before you think about any of those metrics. That’s really why I like to think about these six things. Number one, is I have to see that there’s a recognizable moat and it is obviously durable. Google Search is obviously great and obviously durable. It’s so entrenched, right? It’s unbelievably entrenched. It’s probably (from a margin perspective) one of the greatest businesses of all time. It just gushes cash. It’s crazy. Alphabet owns Google Search and YouTube. YouTube is just like obviously defensible. It has this huge network effect. If you’re trying to create content online, you’ve got to create content for where people’s eyeballs are. And that’s obviously durable. Visa and MasterCard are just obviously durable. So that’s one. And they have to have growing sales. The company has to have growing sales. I see a lot of Canadians invest in commodity businesses because our index is banking materials, commodities, energy, utilities and Shopify. That’s the index, right? So much of those companies have no growth in their top line. Or they made more in sales in 2007 than they did in 2021. Those things are working right now because we have this commodity super cycle but you still haven’t made money from 2007. You’ve been holding a dud all this time. And they don’t have growing cash flows or top line growth in nature. Do you know what they also don’t have? They also don’t have any pricing power. I own companies that set their own prices. It’s as simple as that. If you’re a business owner and you own a company where your pricing system is entirely dictated by the market, that’s not as good a business as Apple, who gets to decide how much the iPhone costs. These are just very structurally different businesses. Three more I’ll rifle off here—the management team—I’ve just got to believe in them. You can listen to conference calls. It’s easy, so easy. Listen to 20 minutes of the conference call. The first minute is the boring operator but then right away, you’re going to hear from the CEO, the founder (potentially) and the CFO, and maybe some other folks as well. They sound like they know what they’re doing. It doesn’t have to be some scientific thing. They sound like they know what they’re doing. Then, looking further, do they have higher returns on invest capital? Because that’s the most important thing at any company you can look at. And then lastly, are they underpinned by a growing secular tailwind—a secular growth trend? A perfect example is, I’m pretty sure cybersecurity is going to be bigger in 10 years than it is now. Tobacco? Probably not (if I had to guess). If you’re fighting a shrinking, total, addressable market, long-term investors have a tough go. Value investors like buying these types of things because they’re buying something they think’s worth a dollar that they’re buying for $0.80. So they’re trying to look for that kind of price arbitrage. Longer term investors, I think you’ll make more money if you buy something that is great and grows over time. Even if you get the valuation wrong a little bit, you try not to overpay, but I think you’re going have a better time than buying something, $0.20 off the dollar. 

 

Tom: Based on all those, just to use Netflix is an example since we talked about already, before, they kind of had that moat. But what happened recently then? Is it a case that there’s just all these other subscription companies coming on board or were people just unhappy with Netflix? What changed that? Because I would have considered them the same as a Google or an Apple—just being this large thing that does all these things you talked about. They had a moat. They set their prices and keep raising them honestly. But, obviously, these moats can kind of fall apart sometimes. 

 

Braden: Totally. One hundred percent, they can. 

 

Tom: So what happened with them? Not to pick on them, but just as an example of how things can change. 

 

Braden: Yeah, and things do change. That’s capitalism. Margins get competed away. Moats get disrupted. The top 20 companies by market cap in the early ‘80s, not one of them are in the top 20 by market cap today in the S&P 500. Perfect example, right? These things change. Technology changes. The people running the companies change. Lot of stuff changes. This is the world. And if you look at Netflix, for example, this is a company I thought was not worth nearly what it was. I’ve been wrong for a long, long time. It’s not a name that I own, but I never thought there was any real switching costs. Switching costs is one of the most important things I think of when I think of buying great businesses. Switching costs is when switching to a competitor is so painful that it makes no business sense to do so. This is really common for B2B type companies. Say you subscribe to Amazon Web Services and want to change over your back-end database of your cloud infrastructure technology, it is like trying to change an airplane engine while it’s flying—complete business interruptions. It’s a disaster. There’s no switching costs for someone to just move over to another streaming service. And when new competition comes in, they start competing on price. Netflix has flexed their pricing power over time, which has been excellent. But now they’re seeing pushback from that. I now paying for all these streaming services and they cost twice what I used to pay for cable. We were trying to get out of cable, right? Those things change and that’s why it’s important to recognize the business fundamentals over time. Now, it’s really easy to pick on Netflix, right? Investors and Netflix have done exceptionally well, unbelievably—life changing wealth-type returns, even though we’ve had this crazy drawdown. It’s not a set it and forget it. It’s a no need to act irrationally but continue to monitor. That’s the way I think about it. 

 

Tom: And that’s why, one, you’re only invested in a small amount of stocks. And two, staying on top of them because the way you’re doing it, you can’t buy 100 companies and follow all their quarterly reports and get on all those calls and everything. It would become too wild. 

 

Braden: It’s even too wild for entire large, wealth management, firms that have 30, 40 associates. It’s still too large because there’s just not enough concentration for it to be worth it. At this point, you’re just mimicking an index so generating alpha from that perspective is impossible. For people who have got over 40 stocks? What are you doing? Just go buy an S&P 500 fund for three basis points. Buy an all-world index for five basis points and go to the beach, play with the kids. Stop spending a single second on this. 

 

Tom: I agree. If you’re into too many things, then you start to just replicate your own market anyways. 

 

Braden: Exactly. 

 

Tom: With you only holding, I think it was 17 companies—

 

Braden: Seventeen, yes. 

 

Tom: Do you still go out of your way to have some diversification then? Are you hitting different markets? Do you have an energy choice and various kind of tech choices? Do you try to find some diversification that way? 

 

Braden: I think over time have become so fairly heavily weighted in tech because I don’t sell and I don’t trim. If you’ve been an investor for the last 10 years, your tech positions have gone up a lot and become more of your portfolio. My portfolio over time has concentrated itself more and more. And that’s because I don’t trim. I don’t sell winners. I let winners keep compounding as long as the business has gotten significantly better. I look at Alphabet today, which is a company that owns Google. It has more than a 10 percent position in my portfolio today. It’s the second largest holding. Today, Google trades at around 18 times free cash flow—I think it’s 18 and a half times free cash flow, which is well, well below market multiples for on a free cash flow perspective. It trades 16 times EV to EB which basically just means the enterprise value and their balance sheet divided by their operating profit. That’s basically the easiest way to think about that. For the company, the growth that it’s achieved, it’s still growing very nicely. It has maybe the most defensible business in the world, arguably. Today, it trades at a better price in my mind than it did 10 X ago in terms of valuation, because the business has gotten so much better and they just gush cash. From a multiple perspective, it trades at a better price today than it did then. If I can be proved that from the company, then I don’t trim it. There is just no reason to unless the valuation has gotten completely out of whack. I just don’t trim positions. In a roundabout way to answer your question, I’m pretty heavily in tech. I don’t own any energy because they don’t have pricing power. I don’t own any commodities because they don’t have any pricing power. I don’t really look at the pie and say, “Hmm, I need to hit all these sector things that the Internet tells me I should,” because I think that that’s a bad way to invest. 

 

Tom: One thing I wanted to hop back to is we talked about this idea of not being able to track things like subscribers and stuff. You had mentioned that that stratosphere.io is adding that in. Are there some kind of fundamental option here? And how does it even compare against multiple companies? 

 

Braden: So comparing them is tough because every company has, in terms of their granular key performance indicators, there’s no like common ground for them to compare unless they’re exact, direct, competitors. Comparing is tough. I’m trying to grasp the question. 

 

Tom: I’m just thinking if there’s subscriber information in there, is it just about seeing that that company has continued to go up or down? Can you at least compare within the time for that company? 

 

Braden: Yeah, it’s also a gut check too. Like, Netflix has gone down. I’ll keep using this example. I type it in on stratosphere.io—the Netflix ticker, NFLX. Then I go to the subscriber count and they see their latest quarter. It’s all graphed out. It automatically graphs out these metrics. And you see, it used to go up and to the right but it doesn’t anymore. For all investors, it’s helpful to see the real business indicators. I’m going through a fundraising round for my company right now—from outside private venture capital. We’ve raised about half the round and we’ve got to finish the round. And more  than anything, they’re not asking about revenue and profit. They’re asking how many API calls? How many searches? How many daily active users? These are the numbers that really matter, right? We’ve kind of gotten away from that in public company research and I’m trying to bring it back in. If I can prove that this works, I’ve got myself a pretty valuable company here. 

 

Tom: Yeah, well, that sounds interesting. With your Netflix example, you can see all of that. You can tell someone just look at their quarterly report but you really need to look at all of them. 

 

Braden: Revenue went up in that quarter so you’re wondering why the stock went down 30 percent, right? I think it was up seven percent and up more than that if you back it with the Russia impact and stuff. Yeah, it’s confusing. 

 

Tom: Something like a subscriber is kind of a “forward looking” thing where it could affect future revenue. It doesn’t necessarily explain it within that quarter. Plus, to see something like subscribers, the fact that you guys graph them out is great because just to look at a quarterly report doesn’t necessarily tell you what happened before. You’d have to look at all those quarterly reports and make your own graph. 

 

Braden: Exactly. Analysts, what they’ll do is they’ll take all those metrics from the press releases (or wherever they can get the data) and put it into Excel for 10 years and 10 quarters. We’re trying to simplify that process because that’s what the pros are doing. That’s what they’re putting in their models. They’re trying to model out how many subscribers Netflix can have in 2028, 2030, that type of thing. And then what are the impacts of the business from that? What is the price going to be? So we track Netflix’s price as well, stuff like that. It’s very important for the business. We’re really just trying to serve—I’m not trying to make this like an ad for stratosphere… 

 

Tom: I brought it up. I’m interested in this. 

 

Braden: We’re just trying to make fundamental research easier because it’s not easy. All these statements come into government websites and you know how that goes, right? Have you been on CDAR, Canada’s version of finding filings? 

 

Tom: No. 

 

Braden: It is—oh, my God. I actually have to show you how bad it is. It looks like it was designed in—can I share my screen here? 

 

Tom: Yeah, I think so. 

 

Braden: Can you see that? This is CDARs website. I kid you not. 

 

Tom: It looks like it was made in the mid-90s. 

 

Braden: That’s because it was. You get governments involved in trying to aggregate all this tech and it’s very difficult so we’re just trying to make that process easier. 

 

Tom: The last thing I wanted to ask you is, when you’re looking at all these companies, does it kind of become an analysis paralysis thing where there’s so many companies to look at? Even in ETF investing, if you’re not just going all-in-one or the usual three to four ETFs—even with ETFs, I can get overwhelmed if I start looking at all these little niche things. 

 

Branden: And start tinkering. 

 

Tom: Yeah, which again defeats the point if you’re going to just rebuild your own ETF. But with stocks there is even more choices and more to look at. And as you invest now you’ve got to keep track of them as well while you’re also looking for new things. How do you avoid this? How do you keep it simple enough? I know part of it is that you’re doing it out of passion, but there’s going to be people that aren’t as passionate but still want to do this, and it could be overwhelming. 

 

Braden: I get that. It’s something that everyone struggles with, whether you’re a self-directed or professional investor. It’s just something that people deal with. And decision paralysis is probably a good way to put it because how many public equities can you buy? Thousands and thousands in just North America. And then if you look at the global equity investable universe, you’re in the tens of thousands. How do you know? How am I optimized? Self-doubt, imposter syndrome, are very, very normal type of feelings for investors to get, whether you’re a pro or self-directed investor. So if you get that imposter syndrome type feeling, don’t stress. Everyone gets it, especially when there’s such decision paralysis at play like we just mentioned. It’s really key to have your own framework. I just kind of walked you through my six-point framework and it’s going to change over time. That’s normal. It’s okay. But have a framework. Have a Google doc that writes down your framework. It can be so simple—I invest in great businesses that have these X, Y and Z. If you don’t do that, you’ll end up trading in and out of stuff. I know people say they’re long-term investors and their average holding time is six month on a position. It’s just not long-term. You’re in and out of stuff constantly. Setting that framework is really key. Just reminding yourself to buy great companies, try not to overpay and do nothing—That’s what Terry Smith, the manager of Fundsmith, always says—just really try to hone that in. And it’s not going to happen overnight. I was pure index ETF for five years before I was buying individual securities. That’s the kind of thing you have to think about. This stuff takes time. Even just to be able to deal with volatility from a mental perspective. If you’re in ETFs, you’ll see them go up and down. They’re exchange traded funds. They trade like a stock. They get daily mark-to-marks. You see it in your brokerage every day. That kind of experience, you can’t teach that. 

 

Tom: That’s why I like the idea of writing down the framework, like you said. Because it’s the whole idea of, no matter what happens, would you still buy that company today? And if you have that that framework in place, you can kind of compare that company you’re currently holding. And if it still meets everything you said you would buy it for, it just takes some emotion out of it when markets go crazy and everything. 

 

Braden: Yeah, totally. And that framework I have, I buy companies that have pricing power and are not commoditized in nature. That immediately removes me from oil and gas because the market sets their prices. And here in Canada, people love their oil and gas. And my Albertans, I love you. I’m from Calgary. I live in Toronto now but I get it. I hear you. And I just look at what’s worked in 2022. It’s pretty much the only sector that’s performed well this year. It’s performed terribly over the past 10 years. We can be goldfish and have a short recency bias, but that’s just not the game I’m playing. I’m playing a longer game. So if you look at what’s done well and people pile into stuff that’s done well, they’re piling into the oil and gas names. Eventually, there will be an unfavorable market again for the price of oil. It’s already come down. I think it dropped 10 percent yesterday. And then that doesn’t work so well anymore, does it? Because they don’t set the price. Having that framework stops me from going into things that don’t make sense for me. If you don’t have that framework maybe I did pile into the stuff that’s being bid up in energy that everyone wants to own—that no one wanted to own two years ago! They couldn’t give away those shares two years ago. Now, everyone wants them. 

 

Tom: Yeah, well, I do live in Alberta, so I get constant reminders, but it’s not just about investing in these companies. It affects everything from real estate if there’s people moving in or out of the province. 

 

Braden: And you’ve seen how volatile that is from an economic perspective in where you live, right? 

 

Tom: Yah, there’s constant reminders beyond just a stock price. 

 

Braden: Yeah, exactly. It’s boom and bust. 

 

Tom: Yeah. Well, thanks for walking us through all this. Can you let people know about Stratosphere and where they can find you online? 

 

Braden: Sure thing. Yeah. And thanks for doing this. I host a podcast that comes out Mondays and Thursdays called, The Canadian Investor. It’s pretty fun. Me and Simon, we do our best to banter and try to educate at the same time. Keep it entertaining, but also educate. It’s called, the Canadian investor. You can find it anywhere. Then, stratosphere.io is the company I run. We’re a small but mighty team trying to help investors find fundamental data. I like saying it’s a Bloomberg for the price of Netflix even though most of its free. But that sounds a bit catchier and we’ve been talking about Netflix all day, so that’s a Bloomberg term for the price of Netflix on a web application. It’s called stratosphere.io. That is the URL. You can just type in it. 

 

Tom: If anyone’s interested in this, The Canadian Investor is a great podcast to check out because you are going twice a week and you’re actually talking about these companies as they happen, kind of like we did about Netflix now. You’re constantly talking about these things so if someone wants to stay on top of these, I think that’s a good place to head over to. 

 

Braden: Yeah, we do an earnings roundup once a week. There’s were no companies reporting. It was like a dead zone. It’s fun to keep on top of that and keep a pulse on it because you might even find things that are like really useful in your life, like framework when you’re keeping track of that if you have your own business ideas and stuff. And keeping on track with trends and stuff that is happening. You might spot a good little side hustle or a potential company you can start. I love entrepreneurship. I could talk about it all day and I think people who have a regular job can scratch that itch by just doing stuff on the side. I know you’re entrepreneurial yourself. I like to call it paying attention because when you’re paying attention, good ideas happen. 

 

Tom: Yeah, that’s great. Thanks for being on the show. 

 

Braden: Yeah, thank you. 

 

Thank you, Braden, for your insights into buying individual stocks and for explaining some of the analysis you undertake before deciding which companies to buy. If you enjoyed Braden’s insights and would like to learn more about these methods for finding great companies to invest in, I highly recommend you check out stratosphere.io, Braden’s research platform. You can sign up for free at maplemoney.com/stratosphere. You can find the show notes for this episode at maplemoney.com/203. Thanks, as always, for listening and I look forward to seeing you back here next week.