Beat the Odds
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Put the odds on your side.

The businesses
behind the stocks.

An independent investing journal on moats, earnings, competitive battles, and big investors moves.

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The thesis

Single stocks are asymmetric bets. Understanding decideswhich way.

I own index funds and ETFs, and I think most people should. But one business, understood deeply, can return multiples of the index. The same business, understood poorly, can go to zero. What separates the two outcomes is almost always how well you understood the business before you bought it.

$10,000, left alone for 40 years
An index fund · 10% a year$3.5m
Three businesses you understand · 18% a year$150m
Three businesses you don't · the other side$0
Same money. Same 40 years.The difference is understanding the business.
“If you find three wonderful businesses in your life, you'll get very rich. And if you understand them, bad things aren't going to happen to those three.”
Charlie Munger
“Risk comes from not knowing what you're doing.”
Warren Buffett
“Few bets. Big bets. Infrequent bets. Heads I win, tails I don't lose much.”
Mohnish Pabrai
Behind the keyboard

Not a guru.
An investor with a journal.

I'm a serial entrepreneur. I love investing and building companies. The two activities feed each other in ways I'm still figuring out.

This newsletter is my investing journal. What I learn from smart money, earnings calls, and businesses behind the stocks.

My portfolio is concentrated and has beaten the S&P 500 over the last five years. But this isn't a newsletter about copying my portfolio. I don't share my portfolio. I share my insights and notes.

PA
Phil Alves
Serial entrepreneur · Investor · Writes Beat the Odds
Investing ⇄ buildingOne feeds the other
Studying businesses
→Why some moats widen and others quietly erode
→How great operators allocate capital
→What management says, and what it avoids saying
Building them
←Knowing how hard a moat is to build from the inside
←Reading an earnings call like an operator would
←Spotting which numbers a CEO actually runs on
The homework compounds on both sides