Writing an effective investment thesis is crucial for justifying and explaining your investment decisions, as well as helping others understand your logic. With GitHub being a popular platform for sharing code and documents, it can be useful for hosting and collaborating on investment thesis PDFs. This article provides key steps and practical advice on writing, formatting, and sharing great investment thesis documents on GitHub. Proper investment thesis writing principles, like having a clear thesis statement, evidence-based analysis, visualizations, version control with Git, and LaTeX typesetting, can lead to more robust and convincing arguments. Whether writing theses for public companies, private assets, or crypto projects, applying these best practices will improve your writing quality and ability to share ideas with the community.
Craft a Clear, Focused Thesis Statement Outlining Your Key Arguments
The most crucial component of any investment thesis is a precise, unambiguous thesis statement. This 1-2 sentence summary should clearly state your main investment recommendation, rationale, timeline, and projected return. A strong statement might be: “Company XYZ is an attractive long-term buy with 25%+ upside over 2 years due to its dominant position in EV batteries, rapidly growing top-line revenue from electric vehicle partnerships, and improving unit economics.” Use direct language in your statement, avoid vagueness or unnecessary verbosity, and ensure all subsequent analysis directly supports this central point.
Conduct Detailed Evidence-Based Analysis Supporting All Aspects of Your Thesis
The body of your investment thesis must provide thorough, evidence-based analysis into every claim made in your thesis statement. For a long thesis on a public company, this would likely entail sections analyzing the industry outlook, competition, management, historical financials, valuation, risks, and more using data from 10Ks, calls, market research reports, DCF models, etc. For a shorter private asset thesis, focus analysis on addressable market sizing, product-market fit evidence, traction vs. peers, projections. For crypto, cover tokenomics, on-chain analytics, community adoption metrics. Avoid speculation and ensure you have robust data and logic to back up any assertion. Proper evidence-based analysis is what separates an opinion piece from an investment research document.
Use Visualizations and Financial Models to Strengthen Arguments and Demonstrate Rigor
Raw data analysis can be boring or confusing. Using visualizations can make your arguments more intuitive and strengthen your evidence base. For companies, include historical charts of revenue, margins, valuation multiples, etc along with a DCF model and sensitivity tables. For assets, present addressable market maps, product screenshots and capability analyses. For crypto, blockchain graphs and token distribution charts. Advanced calculations, scenario modeling, and clear data visuals demonstrate the depth of your analysis better than walls of text. But focus visuals on emphasizing key datapoints instead of flashy graphs – substance over style.
Leverage Git Version Control for Collaboration and Preserving Histories
Git version control brings powerful benefits for managing investment thesis writing on GitHub over time. First, it enables seamless collaboration on docs, with multiple analysts able to concurrently edit while merging changes with complete histories. Second, it preserves histories of all previous versions so you can track how arguments evolve. As new data emerges, you append to the thesis vs. overwriting. This way if your original investment case proves incorrect, postmortems have reference points. Using Markdown files with Git facilitates these workflows vs. non-plaintext formats like PDF or Word.
Format with LaTeX and Pandoc for Typesetting Quality and Multiple Outputs
LaTeX is the gold standard for technical and scientific formatting quality – it produces beautiful rendered PDFs perfect for presenting detailed analyses with complex math, data tables, and financial models. Pandoc enables converting Markdown files into LaTeX then PDF, facilitating Git version control and collaboration. An investment thesis generated via Pandoc+LaTeX then shared as a PDF on GitHub provides the best of all worlds – plaintext source files with typesetting beyond Word’s capabilities. Consider an online LaTeX editor like Overleaf if LaTeX programming seems intimdating. The superior typographic quality is worth the formatting effort.
In summary, to produce excellent investment thesis documents hosted publicly on GitHub, craft a clear thesis statement and conduct rigorous evidence-based analysis to support it. Use visuals and Git version control for collaboration, then finalize via LaTeX typesetting into shareable PDF versions, preserving edit histories. Applying these best practices will enhance investment writing prowess.