About the founder

I might have been right for the wrong reason. Many times, I couldn’t tell whether I was wrong or merely early, which is indistinguishable from being wrong. And for years I couldn’t tell whether my results came from skill or pure randomness. In any case, lessons paid for with hard-earned money stick.

I’m Anthony. I’ve been investing for more than 15 years and building software for more than 20. I’ve worked at startups and companies such as News Corp (NASDAQ: NWS), helping build products that reached millions of people. I’ve also worked on real-time bidding systems facing Google and Meta auctions for ads, where decisions involving money are made in milliseconds. Investing moves at a different pace -I’ve never been a trader-, but it has held my interest longer than any software project.

Learning from Buffett and Munger

As an engineer, process optimization and performance are my goals and learning from the masters is my habit. That pursuit soon led me to the legends: Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger. I read as much as I can from as many sources as I can, and their lessons, among other great sources with my own experience, started compounding in my head alongside my investments.

Along the way I tried many tools in a crowded market. Some helped me and some dragged me down—I will never know which. I ended up coding my own tools and plugins, because no product offered what I had learned from the masters. Even so, it was a scattered toolkit: inconsistent, hard to track, and you can’t improve what you can’t measure. It got me some profits and, let’s say, some experience—which, as Randy Pausch put it, is “what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

My track record

This is my rate of return on my stock long-only portfolio since the end of 2016: 17.37% a year, against 15.46% for the S&P 500.

Why so few follow a public process

I was never fully comfortable with my process, and I kept wondering: why is there no tool that follows theirs? If the Buffett and Munger process is public, why have so few emulated it over the long run? Buffett was asked that very question. His answer:

The philosophy either takes immediately or it doesn’t at all. The reason gets down to temperament. People want to make money fast, but it doesn’t happen that way. […] You don’t know when it will happen, but you just wait for the fat pitches within your circle of competence. […] Most investors in internet companies didn’t know the market cap. […] If you asked them to write “I would buy XYZ company for $6 billion because”, they wouldn’t get halfway through the sentence.

• Warren Buffett to Emory Goizueta and UT McCombs students, 2008

Simple, but not easy

The philosophy took hold with me. Following it consistently is another matter. Munger’s words complete that reasoning:

“The investment game always involves considering both quality and price, and the trick is to get more quality than you pay for in price. It’s just that simple. But not easy”

— Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway meeting, 1998

I couldn’t put these ideas better. The process is public, but knowing it doesn’t free you from your impulses when it matters most. Temperament is the hardest part.

When I drew up the requirements for a complete tool built on their lessons—one that would help me follow their process and train my temperament—I found none. So I started building one for my own use: to keep playing the investment game and make the “simple” a bit easier. No daily prices demanding my attention, no signals urging me to hurry, and no bright colours stirring up my emotions. Just room to revisit my thesis and wait.

We live in an investment world, populated not by those who must be logically persuaded to believe, but by the hopeful, credulous and greedy, grasping for an excuse to believe.

— Warren Buffett, Buffett Partnership letters, 1968

Almost 60 years later, the warning still feels current to me. That’s why FatPitches is built to make it harder to hide behind an excuse to believe. It helps you challenge your ideas, test your assumptions, look for what you might have missed, and decide what you would pay for the business.

Build it with me

I bet I’m not alone on this journey. That’s why I invite the investment community to take an active part and shape the platform together. It’s early days for FatPitches, and you can start free today. I can’t wait to get your first impressions, bug reports and feature requests.

Let’s make the simple easy.¹

Anthony · Founder · Software Architect · Investor

hello@fatpitches.com

MSc Computer Science · MBA, EAE Business School