Last year I co-founded Selva Ventures, a CPG-focused VC firm, as a solo GP

This week I’ve been reflecting on our first year in business and wanted to share some of the lessons learned in building a small investment firm
Thread 👇

1/ As a solo GP I wear 2 hats

Investor: Always challenging but familiar. Same thing I was doing before

Entrepreneur: Incredibly ambiguous and scary, but also the greatest source of fulfillment

2/ Early on, seemingly simple decisions took an eternity: naming the firm, designing a logo, choosing a fund admin partner to name a few

I was so scared of getting these things wrong, but it was so important to be excited about those decisions to build early momentum

3/ Fundraising could be its own thread, but in fund 1 narrow focus is everything

Build a narrative that can get people excited and DO NOT stray from it, even though it can be tempting

Anything that doesn’t fit? Use an SPV or let it go

4/ Starting out I knew nobody else doing this, but the content about this growing field of “Solo Capitalists” has been both educational and therapeutic

@nbt’s substack (below), @Samirkaji’s podcast (Venture Unlocked) and @oper8rio really stand out

Are stocks overpriced? How much growth is required to justify a P/E of 100?

In this article, we shall explore how the one- and two-stage Gordon Growth Models, and Dividend Discount Model, relate growth rates, valuations, earnings, dividends, inflation, and return on investment.

Let
E = earnings
d = dividend
P = price
r = discount rate
g = (terminal) dividend growth rate

Then
y = d/P is dividend yield
Y = E/P is earnings yield
P/E = 1/Y
p = d/E is dividend payout ratio

According to the Gordon Growth Model (GGM),

y = d/P = r - g.

Hence,

Y = y/p.

So, for example, if r = 10% is the required return, and growth rate is g = 3%, then dividend yield should be y = 7%.

If also the payout ratio is 70%, then the P/E must be 10.
If the payout ratio is p = 100%, then the P/E can be ~14.

It may appear counter-intuitive that higher retention requires a lower P/E. But remember that we are talking about dividend growth rates, g, not earnings growth rates.

So if a firm is able to grow dividends without retaining earnings, this likely means that it benefits from pricing power, protecting from inflation, or that it has conservative accounting.

However, when the dividend is zero, g cannot be measured, and the model breaks down.

1) As the miserable year of 2020 reaches its end, it's time to return to the offices of Hindsight Capital LLC.

For those unfamiliar, this great, albeit imaginary, hedge fund invests with the benefit of a style guaranteed to beat all others: hindsight

2) As such perfect vision would allow infinite returns, certain limits are imposed on Hindsight Capital’s managers:

🚫It can't trade during the year
🚫It can't use leverage
🚫It can't invest in individual stocks
✅It must make broader or sectoral

3) Hindsight can, however, make “long-short” trades.

But the hedge fund must be able to explain how someone might have made such a trade based on only what they knew at the time. Foreknowledge of earthquakes and hurricanes, for instance, is not allowed

4) As for the pandemic, Hindsight Capital’s managers were aware of the novel coronavirus in Wuhan and had little difficulty in predicting how the world would react and what its effects would be.

That was crucial, as will be seen in this thread

5) Hindsight Capital always bases itself in the country with the year’s weakest currency.

In 2020, that was Brazil, giving its managers a great excuse to live out the pandemic from an office overlooking Ipanema Beach

There's just days until the Northern Ireland protocol enters into force on 1 Jan. The Joint Committee has made it's decisions, the UK and EU have agreed an FTA (the TCA), and the UK have announced lots of new schemes, but what does this all mean for the Irish Sea Border ⛴️🚛🧵

Tariffs💵The Joint Committee already agreed that most goods moving GB-NI that are for sale or final use in NI will not be subject to tariffs. Businesses will need to register for the UK Trader Scheme to certify that their goods qualify.

Registrations for the UK trade scheme opened on 15 December so cutting it a bit fine. But the JC decision allows for any applications to the scheme to be provisionally approved for up to 4 months. The zero-tariff UK-EU deal has relieved some of the strain on the scheme because..

A lot of goods moving GB-NI will qualify for tariff-free access whether the goods are staying in NI or going to the EU, so many businesses may not bother using it. But it could still be important for goods who don't meet the Rules of Origin threshold

Customs formalities 📑 The same paperwork, including customs declarations, will be required on goods going GB-NI as going GB-EU. The UK-EU have agreed some simplifications in the TCA & UK officials applying EU law in NI will no doubt be as light touch as possible.

THREAD: Unless you think $XRP is actually going to zero (spoiler- it's not), it doesn't make much sense at all to sell here. "But Credible, I can put the money elsewhere and it will make me money! Why hold this rotten, centralized, scam coin! It's just going to go down (cont.)

forever!" Well good sir, let me put this into perspective for you. Even if you think $XRP will never see ATH, or even past $1 again, chances we see a dead-cat bounce at the bare minimum, are high. Aside from the fact that we are now in a full fledged bull market, we can (cont.)

see that sell pressure on XRP is waning at this time- not just on the BTC pairing, but also the USD pairing. Bullish divs are popping up everywhere, across all TF's. This indicates that at the very LEAST, we will likely see a dead cat bounce here shortly (if not reversal) (cont.)

. So, lets take the chart below for example. If you hold here, even a dead cat bounce to .40 would increase the value of your position by near 100%. If you moved your funds elsewhere, say ETH for example, you would need to ride ETH from current prices of $750 to (cont.)

$1500 just to get the same rate of return. Or, you would need to ride BTC from $28,000 to $56,000 to get the same rate of return. Do you see what I am trying to say? The ONLY reason you would be selling here is if you think that there is actually a decent chance that $XRP (cont.)

As 2020 draws to a close, here's a few posts for my 2020 annual review! 👇

Focus is on the types of trade I made, the underlyings traded, & strategy outcomes, rather than just showing the overall % return

To kick it off, below is the 2020 equity curve of my main account 💰

So what did I trade? As you can see, Options have significantly contributed to 2020 Realized & Unrealized profits, with almost two thirds of gains coming from this asset class. Otherwise I have some net gains on short & longer term Stocks, and a loss in Futures 😊

I traded around 70 underlyings in 2020; here they are, ordered by % contribution to my annual Realized & Unrealized gains

$CRWD, $NET, $WYNN & $FSLY are my top winners! 🚀

I made a bit more than 200 opening trades in 2020. By far the most common are Long Stock and Short Put trades

Best performer = Short Puts, with an 84% win rate! Another 7% were rolled into new strikes, and only 1.43% were a loss 😮

Win rate on long stock is lowest. This is skewed as I’m only using Realized gains, and most of my profitable stock positions are still open

After trading profitably for a living every year since 2000, in late Jan of 2018 I lost 500k in an hour in the XIV blowup. It destroyed me mentally. I Couldn’t think clearly for 18 months. Couldn’t stop “trying to get my money back” which just made it worse.

Finally, I shut it all down scared shitless that I couldn’t trade any more. I had to protect what was left of what I had built over the previous years. The village of idiots in my head had somehow taken over the castle.

I had to dive deep and fully accept the financial loss and so many other life losses that I was carrying with bitterness and anger to find neutral again. My career had become my compulsion to fix the wrongs of the past, my opiate that had huge hangovers.

Thru the painful process of true awareness of what I was doing, I started day trading 100 shares of AAPL just to keep connected to my roots. Not thinking, not caring just trading my feel of the day from all that I had seen over the years.

Not caring was liberating. It felt so good to trade and simply not give a shit if I made money or not. I just flipped 100 shares around based on my feel of the tape and I did this for 3 months while I licked all my wounds trying to figure out how to let it all go. Summer 2019.

1/7: I understand that #Ripple's selling concerns many people. But the question is... how do you responsibly distribute Ripple's 50B $XRP? Ripple holding so much #XRP is one of the biggest complaints about XRP and why so many people don't like it and may also prevent ODL adoption

2/7: Escrow was introduced to help this, but that $XRP is still in Ripple's custody. They really need to distribute it. But how? Ideally, it should already have already been done years ago, but you can't go back in time to do it. @JoelKatz has talked about this challenge before.

3/7: So we're against them holding it and we're also against them selling it. So how do they distribute it? They can't give it away, who gets it, how do they choose? Giveaways this late in the game also negatively affect prices. Higher supply = lower demand = lower prices.

4/7: Ideally, they would only distribute this to Financial Institutions for use in #ODL, but unfortunately, there's not enough demand for the utility of XRP through ODL. Perhaps because Finacial Institutions don't want to hold it/use it due to regulatory uncertainty.

5/7: As I see it, there are a few options for distribution:
a) Incentivize the use of ODL despite regulatory clarity - such as giving incentives to #Moneygram,
b) Lock it back up in escrow, effectively reducing supply, but giving #Ripple custody.

A quick switch to a new currency would create a risk of capital flight with people, businesses and investors moving money, jobs and investment out Scotland.

Even proposing it during a campaign would mean people move money, jobs and investment in case there was a devaluation. Just imagine the political and economic cost that would be paid.

Furthermore uncertainty for people over what would happen to their income, pension, mortgage and savings if held cross border.

Quebec suffered this in a major way in its referendum (with a quick change currency proposal) and the jobs and investment have not fully returned.

A further issue is the cost of borrowing for public services investment. If you ask the world’s savers to fund your public borrowing at a time when you are yet to get it on a sustainable footing and then add the risk of currency changes it will be very expensive.

‘Billions will be wiped off the stock market!’

‘Project fear’

‘There will be chaos at ports!’

‘Project fear!’

‘Supermarkets and shops will struggle to get products’

‘Project fear!’

‘Medicinal supplies could dry up!’

‘Project fear!’

‘Brexit will detrimentally affect the value of the pound’

‘Project fear!’