Why I created ValueMap

ValueMap is my attempt at democratizing investment knowledge so that people can protect and grow their wealth without having to rely on third parties who may not have your best interest at heart.

A bit about me

I have a degree in economics with a focus on valuation, and I worked for 2 years as a senior business analyst for an M&A firm before quitting to pursue software engineering. Since my days in finance, I’ve pursued learning how to do my own investing and have been doing so very successfully for over 7 years now.

It took me years to learn what was useful, what was useless and what was outright fraudulent in the finance business before I gained the confidence to invest large sums of my own money and weather the peaks and valleys of the market.

In this journey I benefited from mentors, industry experience, working side-by-side with various entrepreneurs and accounting firms before developing my own investing style. I’ve also read hundreds of books on the subject, sifting through junk and gold, and most important of all, I’ve been doing it successfully for the last 7 years, growing my wealth while sleeping soundly at night.

Why then, did I decide to do this?

Well, people have been asking me to teach them how to do it. Which is not that easy.

The problems are the scope and depth of what needs to be transmitted in a short amount of time. I’ve sat down with people for over 4 hours, only to broadly touch the main ideas behind investing. We would often talk in theoretical terms with no immediate application. Even when the person could follow along for the whole time and understand the concepts, they would forget most of it after a couple of weeks. They knew enough to get started but the confidence would diminish by the day, and we would be back at square one.

How to fix this?

That’s when I thought about writing those ideas down and sharing them. This way they could always review what they learned at any point, and delve deeper into other topics at their own speed!

At the same time, talking about things in an abstract manner does not translate to direct application. You may know what a Discounted Cash Flow model is, but how do you apply this knowledge? Do you have to also learn how to build an excel model from scratch?

Hell! I still struggle with application to this day.

In my investing journey, I used multiple websites to collect data and analyze Balance Sheets. I’ve paid for multiple subscriptions and was still unsatisfied with what I was getting.

So I decided to solve that problem too. What if I built the investing tool that I always wanted?

That’s how I started working on ValueMap. This is my best attempt at consolidating everything I know into a curated list of tools. As a curator does to a museum, making sure only quality art gets put on the walls, that’s what I want to do with ValueMap. If a tool is not useful, it doesn’t get added. No distractions, no fluff. It may displease some people, but I want to take a stance.

At the same time, I have built custom tools that I have not seen anywhere else on the web, or improved on other tools that I’ve used before.

Everything on the website is thought-out to make the experience the most valuable to a prospecting investor. For example, it is important to know what is happening with a company, but it is equally important to not blindly follow the crowd. That is why we put the news section on a company all the way at the end of a valuation page, not at the top! It is a conscious decision to prevent our analysis from being biased before even starting.

These are professional tools for individual investors –– made easy to digest –– so that even beginners can learn to use them.

How does it work?

The knowledge part of the website is the accompanying blog. In it, I will lay down everything I know about investing. My hope is that it will help people on their investing journey.

I want people to learn how to manage their own wealth! Not because someone told them exactly what company to buy. But learn how to find a good and cheap company themselves!

This part of the website is free, and I intend on keeping it free forever. I’m not trying to sell you a course here. This is my best attempt at spreading the wealth. You should refer back to the explanations at your leisure. And please, if you have any doubts, shoot me a message, maybe it is a question other people also have, and I can improve the website further.

Then we got the website itself. That’s where I provide you with the best tools and experience for analyzing stocks. I’ve put a lot of effort into these tools, and I’m constantly working to improve them. You want some tool I don’t provide (yet), then shoot me a message and we’ll discuss the addition.

This part of the service is paid. Never mind that I do have to pay for the infrastructure to keep all of this running, and I’m personally building every aspect of this website. But even so, this is hard work that I want to keep doing. If you find the tool useful, then please subscribe, and I’ll do my best to give you the best tool in the market for analyzing stocks.

Don’t worry, you can always just stick to the blog and use some other tool.

I do make my best attempt at documenting the tools offered, showing how I use them. This makes it easy for a reader to apply their gained knowledge.

What this is NOT

It is important to lay out what we are NOT trying to achieve here.

1. This is not a course. I’m not trying to sell you (or up-sell you) in any course. I’m no guru, and I don’t intend to become one.
2. There are not stock recommendations. If I cite a stock in a blog post, it doesn’t mean anyone should by it. I’ll be doing that for illustration purposes only. I’ll show you my decisions and my rationale, I’ll also try to show you my mistakes, so that you can find your own rationale and risk tolerance.
3. The tools are not gonna do the work for you. I have seen tools in the market that try to give you rankings of stocks, or give you checkmark or a point system. This tool will do no such thing. Heuristics are often useful, but a great investment may look like a bad company in the short term, and a great company depending on the price. If the computer could make those decisions for us, Warren Buffet would be out of a job. The tools are just that, tools. You need the knowledge to use them

Some people have asked me to manage their money, and that is not something that has ever appealed to me. I’ve done it successfully for a brief period in the past, and I felt a much greater responsibility then when managing my own wealth. Specially because the market is often crazy:

The market can remain irrational for far longer than you can remain solvent ~ Keynes

I can deal with the adversity, but having to deal with uncertainty by managing other people’s savings was excruciating. I knew exactly what risks I was taking, and I accepted them. But making risk decisions for other people is a recipe for poor sleep at night.

All courses of action are risky, so prudence is not in avoiding danger (it’s impossible), but calculating risk and acting decisively. Make mistakes of ambition and not mistakes of sloth. Develop the strength to do bold things, not the strength to suffer. ~ Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince

More to come?

I’ve been hard at work in this project for a while now, and I intend to keep on improving it. I’m actively adding tools to make the experience even better. There is a lot more to come, and I’d love your feedback to help me improve it.

In the meantime, this is already something I personally use every day. And I’ve already built some of the most useful tools in my flow. It is already something I can’t live without.

I’ll keep you posted on what is to come.

If you want to be an early adopter, shoot me a message and I can give your early access.

Let’s put together the best collection of investing tools in the market!!