The Benefits of Writing; Base Hit Investing Comeback

One of my goals for 2023 was to write more. Writing is a big part of my daily process, which I touch on in this post. I decided to restart a blog I used to write called Base Hit Investing.

For many years I wrote a blog called Base Hit Investing. It stems from my general love of baseball but more specifically, my continuous goal of making steady improvements over long periods of time. The “base hit” metaphor also captures my risk-averse nature and general investment preference for certainty (base hits) over uncertain long shots that might have more upside but with the (often expensive) tradeoff of higher risk.

A few years ago I folded the blog into Saber Capital’s website (the investment firm I manage). For no real reason, the cadence and frequency of my writing decreased, which is something I decided to correct in 2023. I still write a lot. I write on a daily basis as part of my investment process. My internal writing has increased significantly in the last year, thanks to Journalytic (my Journalytic dashboard tells me I’ve published 679 posts in the last year, with 188 so far in 2023). On balance I probably write around 1500-2000 words a day. There should be no special goodwill earned for volume here. Everyone has their own way of optimizing their investment process in a manner that suits their personality and skillset. My process just happens to involve a lot of writing. It’s how I think. Alice Schroeder once said that Buffett doesn’t really take notes. He just absorbs and subsumes information from hundreds of sources and his brain can process things that mere mortals can’t. My brain informed me long ago that writing would really help with the processing.

Writing is a practice that I recommend to anyone who wants to improve as an investor. One of the first things I tell people when they ask about investing is: write 500 words a day. Every day. Keep a calendar like Jerry Seinfeld did (writing at least one joke per day) and “don't break the chain”. A simple way to do this is to write down what you learned at the end of each day. What did you work on and what were your main takeaways? I am certain that doing this exercise will improve your skill as a business analyst and investor.

Much of my own writing is designed for my own internal use only. I write to clarify my thinking. I believe there are four main ways to learn:

• Reading

• Listening

• Speaking

• Writing

I try to incorporate all four into my investment process and writing has been a big part.

That said, I haven’t written as much publicly in recent years, and that’s an aspect of my process that I miss. Writing publicly has a lot of benefits (see the idea of “learning in public”). I recently gave a guest lecture at NC State University and my one piece of advice was to start writing publicly because it’s a free call option. Only good things can happen. But writing publicly can also be daunting. My Journalytic posts are rough drafts. I often write 500 words in a short period of time — maybe 10 minutes or so — then tag them accordingly and publish them to my internal journal where they’ll live in rough draft form forever in whatever company file I’ve sent them to. Writing internally can be easy and frictionless, especially when you’re in the habit of doing it. But writing in public takes extra effort. However, this extra effort comes with a huge benefit: other smart people are reading what you’re writing and can offer you feedback.

Continuous Improvement

One of the founding principles of Saber Capital is a focus on continuous improvement. Getting better as an investor is something I’ll always be pursuing with the single-minded goal of reaching my potential as an investor. What I’ve been recently thinking about is how writing publicly and the engagement that comes with it is a significant tailwind in achieving this goal.

So I wanted to write a short post to get back into the habit of publishing some thoughts. One of my Journalytic tags is “ugly first drafts”, a term that comes from the book Bird by Bird (see my post on this book here). The idea with ugly first drafts is that you should just focus on getting something down on paper (or its digital equivalent). I love this concept. Done is better than perfect. You should strive to produce ugly first drafts as opposed to not writing at all. Because the ugly first drafts move the ball forward. From a writer’s perspective, they are the raw material that can eventually be turned into final drafts. But from our perspective as investors, these ugly first drafts are really all that matter. Explaining something to yourself is a forcing mechanism that helps clarify thinking and quickly identifies any weak links in your understanding. So the goal is to just write down ideas. Write down what you’ve been working on, what companies you’ve studied, what investments you’ve made and why. And ignore the conventional wisdom that quality is better than quantity. If your goal is to improve as an investor, quantity of writing is far more important than quality. To borrow from Seinfeld again: “This is a game of tonnage”.

In this spirit, I decided I should perhaps post more of my “ugly first drafts”. I might do some light editing, but there is a lot of content that I write that never gets beyond my own brain, and I realized that I’m handcuffing the potential of my own learning by not getting more brains involved. Independent thinking is vital to investment success (see another old post of mine on the Risk of Outsourced Thinking). But, I’ve found that independent thinking doesn’t mean avoiding collaboration. In fact, the exchange of ideas often sows the seeds of new thoughts that wouldn’t have occurred without the input of others. So it’s a win win.

So my plan going forward is to write more. Actually, it won’t even be writing more; it will really just be publishing more. But the tradeoff is I am going to lean more on the idea of “ugly first drafts”. My goal is not to publish perfected writing. My goal is investment results. And so I think the result here might be shorter and less-polished posts, but hopefully more frequent posts.

Hopefully publishing these ugly first drafts will be as useful to my readers as it is for me.

Going forward, I decided to create a new blog using my old name: Base Hit Investing. My old posts will continue to live on Saber Capital’s site, but going forward I’ll be posting new writing to this blog.

As always, thanks for reading and feel free to connect with me on any comments or feedback on future ideas.

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John Huber is the founder of Saber Capital Management, LLC. Saber is the general partner and manager of an investment fund modeled after the original Buffett partnerships. Saber’s strategy is to make very carefully selected investments in undervalued stocks of great businesses. 

John can be reached at john@sabercapitalmgt.com.