This Is Our Biggest Launch Ever!
Capitalist-Letters is stepping up the game. We are launching our own, best in class research tool. It's another level.
Let me ask you something—What is a brand?
When you say “brand”, most people visualize a fancy logo, catchy name, or commercials featuring famous people.
None of these tells about the essence of the brand. So, what is a brand?
Brand is a promise.
It’s a pact between the business and customers, current and prospective.
A brand grows more powerful to the extent that it keeps those promises and weakens when it fails to deliver. A powerful brand is one that delivers on the promises over and over again.
Think about Apple.
What does it promise? If you have ever used an Apple product, you know that it doesn’t promise the latest technology. Most of the time, it doesn’t bother with catching the trends.
What it promises is simpler but more effective—it promises beautiful and useful products.
“Useful” is a very important term, and most people often confuse it with “usable.” Most products and their features are usable, but not all of them are useful.
Think about it.
Apple didn’t invent the touchscreen phones. We have had touchscreen technology since the 1990s, but the products weren’t useful. They were big and clunky, and you needed an ugly stylus to use them—eek:
It was usable, but not useful. Apple took this and made it into one of the most useful products of human history. The tech was already there, but others didn’t bother to make it useful. For them, “usable” was enough, but it’s not enough for the users.
Apple didn’t just make it useful; it also made it beautiful.
It didn’t put its product in a clunky, grey case like the standard of the industry at the time. Instead, it took years of effort to design what we know as the first iPhone.
And god.. It was beautiful..
Look at how different and elegant it looks at hand and compare it to the picture above:
Why? Because beauty matters.
I think it has something to do with self-respect. The definition of beauty may change for everybody. Somebody finds Apple products beautiful, somebody thinks Samsung products are more beautiful. However, everybody is attracted to what they find beautiful. There is no exception there.
And it is very human. It has something to do with being self-aware. Humans are the only species in the world that would prefer a nicely presented plate of beef to a poorly served one, all else being equal.
Take a nice, rarely cooked Dallas steak, chop it into two, and put one slice into a nice-looking plate, and the other slice into a shady-looking plate. Put the nice plate 20 steps further. Humans will always take the extra 20 steps to take the nice-looking one, but a tiger would just eat the closer one.
It has something to do with being human.
We, humans, have protected things for centuries just because they are beautiful. The only reason the Pantheon of Rome has stood for over 2,000 years is that we find it beautiful enough to be worth protection. Nothing else. It’s something human.
I had those thoughts in mind when I first started this publication.
The promise of the “Capitalist-Letters” brand wouldn’t just be the best stock picks with the best in class research; our writings would also be beautifully written, concise, and to the point, easy to understand for everybody. It wouldn’t just be throwing a bunch of numbers and jargon at the readers.
No.. On top of being effective, it would also have to be beautiful and useful.
And I think we have delivered on this promise.
Our portfolio delivered 50% last year and is currently up around 78% in the last twelve months, exhibiting our effectiveness. Plus, all our readers know that when we drop a research, it’ll be well-written, filled with lateral thinking, going beyond a bunch of numbers.
We have kept these promises so consistently that delivering on the promise itself has also become one of the core promises of our brand.
Today, we are going to make you another promise.
It’s about the tools we are using as investors.
Just as the write-ups about investing or stocks, the applications that investors are deemed worthy are clunky, not easy to use, and ugly, with very high entry prices.
This was another thing that bothered me for so long as an investor, after the write-up quality of investment research. We have addressed the latter with the Capitalist-Letters brand; now we are addressing the former.
Because of my work, I have had access to S&P Capital IQ Pro for years now, and let me tell you this—I have never finished a research on the platform.
It’s so ugly, clunky, and glitchy that I constantly find myself going back to Google or the company's financials directly. When you try to compare two companies on a chart, everything gets into each other:
This is a $166 billion company.. They can fix this, but they don’t. They simply don’t care. They see investors as an insensitive breed that only cares about numbers. Like number-crunching animals.
Their message is like—here take this data, you number crunching animal, you don’t need a beautifully made app that flows seamlessly, just keep crunching.
And this platform costs above $12,000 per seat a year…
Everything it has is usable, but they aren’t useful, especially for retail investors.
We decided to change this with two of my friends in December 2024.
We didn’t want to just build a product; we wanted to start a just cause. Our cause is to put retail investors on the same footing as the professionals.
We would do this through:
Data accessibility
Tools tailored for the retail.
Making the best use of LLMs.
This is the first layer.
The second layer is bringing all these together as usefully as possible in a seamless research flow. Because the product capabilities mean nothing if the users aren’t able to use them to the fullest extent possible.
It shouldn’t just be usable, it should be useful and beautiful. Because they matter.
We have been working non-stop since then, and we are now finally ready to launch V.0 of our AI-powered, fundamental research app.
It’s called “The Biggr”: https://thebiggr.com
Why? Because we wanted to provide a bigger research experience where users start and finish the research without having to leave the platform.
To achieve this, we equipped the platform with:
Fundamental Data
DCF Valuation Tool
Watclists and Screener
Portfolio Tracking Tool
Charting For Visualization
Company Filings & Earnings Transcripts
And we have integrated all this with our proprietary AI model, Stanley.
We made these not just usable, but useful. Let me give you some examples.
To start with, our fundamental data display is the best in class.
You can find all the financials with built-in visualization in one place, together with estimates, transcripts, filings, and ownership data:
Second, one of the things that I observe retail investors struggle with a lot is DCF valuation. It’s actually really easy; the hard thing is coming up with the right assumptions. But it tends to get complicated, as most institutional investors make their DCF as complicated and detailed as possible as a way to make it look more convincing. That, of course, doesn’t work.
Our DCF tool doesn’t require you to crunch numbers.
You just pick one of three models, depending on the company type:
And then you just enter 5 assumptions: Terminal growth rate, terminal ROIC or sales-to-capital, marginal tax rate, terminal operating margin, and terminal cost of capital.
Other than that, there are 10 more inputs like LTM revenue, where you can get directly from the company financials, no need for assumptions.
In sum, you just need 15 inputs, it runs our DCF formulas in the background, and you get a detailed valuation like this:
You can save them within the app and revisit later, or you can export to an Excel file to store locally. However, you want.
Portfolio tracking is also one of the features that I have always thought retail investors need a lot.
Most portfolio tracking tools, especially the ones embedded in the research platforms, use basic tracking. Not The Biggr.
We offer TWR-based (Time-Weighted-Return, industry standard performance measure) portfolio tracking that includes transaction history.
You can see all the transactions you made, and how each position contributed to your performance, and you can even run back-tests by excluding a position to see how your portfolio would perform if you didn’t own that particular stock.
This way, you may also create a portfolio of the stocks you wanted to own but haven’t bought for a reason in a different portfolio and track how they would have performed in real life.
It’s the state of the art.
You can export the snapshot of your portfolio in a shareable way. Here is an example:
There are literally dozens of features like that, and I can’t describe all of them here. However, the promise of this app is that once you register, there is literally NO learning curve. Simple, beautiful, and useful.
However.. I should touch on one last thing specifically, and it’s how we integrated AI into this app in the most useful and beautiful way possible.
Our AI, Stanley (he literally answers “Stanley” when you ask his name), is very capable. You can ask about the company's fundamental data, ask him to summarize earnings calls, do a natural language screening, or ask him to bring the latest news about the stocks you have in your portfolio:
It allows you to stay on top of everything instantly.
However, even this isn’t the full promise of the Stanley. It’s integrated so seamlessly in our app that you don’t need to switch pages to interact with Stanley.
Let’s say you are a novice investor, and you are looking at Meta and wonder why Meta’s growth stalled in 2022.
You just press Control+K on Windows/Command+K on Mac or press the little AI button on the upper right corner, and Stanley opens in a right-side bar. Then you can ask him to look at the earnings call for 2022 and explain the reason for the stall without leaving the page:
As I said, it’s seamless. Not just usable, but useful and beautiful.
What’ll happen with this?
As I have said, the just cause driving the “Biggr” brand is to put retail investors on par with the institutionals and do it in a beautiful and useful way. This is already underway, and it’ll only improve leaps from here.
Yet, the last, and perhaps one of the biggest promises of this business is to make its users stakeholders, similar to what we did with Capitalist-Letters.
If you are a member of our Capitalist-Letters Discord group, you know that it’s not a one-man job; we are a community, and everybody tries to contribute. Active members know each other by name, and I try to accommodate their needs and take their suggestions into account as much as possible. This is also how we found some of our best-performing stocks. They were suggestions from the community.
The Biggr promises the same stakeholder relationship.
We are three co-founders, and as a team, we are childhood friends, known each other for 20 years. Each one of us is in the Discord group for the Biggr, where you can access within the app by clicking the Discord icon on the menu sidebar.
In the Discord channel, you can start a general discussion, report bugs, request features, or directly request support.
Because we see the members not just as customers, but also as stakeholders. This is not a music app; this is an investment research platform. The better it gets, the further improves the investment and research quality of the members.
Thus, this approach is a necessity. Every member is a stakeholder whom we try to know by name.
That’s it.
I am very excited for this, and I know this brand will become even bigger than we now expect.
Why? Because there are founders who love each other and one of the greatest investment communities on the web behind it.
So, here is my due to you for supporting this publication since the beginning.
Every Capitalist-Letters member gets a 50% discount for The Biggr special to launch, and the Plus plan will be just $10/month, everything included.
Just use the code “LAUNCH50” at checkout.
Once you register, please join the Discord group too, so we can build The Biggr community and start the stakeholder relationship as soon as possible.
If you like what you see in the app, please spread the word, tell those who could be interested. That would be an amazing contribution.
Thank you so much, thank you for being a Capitalist-Letters reader, and thank you for being in this community.
I’ll see you with another research next week.
All the best,
Oguz
It is based on Finchat?