About TechBreakdowns
TechBreakdowns is for investors who want to understand the business behind a tech stock before deciding whether to own it.
I bring my product and engineering experience to the research: why customers buy, what makes them stay, how the economics work, and what could change.
The free breakdowns explain the business. Paid research goes further into valuation, the assumptions behind my decision, and what happens to the thesis afterward.
First and foremost, we want to avoid losing money. Just like Buffett, I enjoy sound sleep, and strive to find investments that help me sleep sound, but that beat the market over the long term.
We build the book around three sleeves, targeting 40 / 40 / 20:
40% Tech Cannibals. The mature, dominant, high-margin names that gush cash and quietly buy back their own stock, so my slice of the business gets a little bigger every year. Boring, and that’s exactly the point. This is the part of the book that lets me sleep.
40% Tech Reinvestors. The high-growth compounders that take every dollar they make and plow it straight back into the machine. This is the growth engine, and the biggest sleeve on purpose. The big winners hide here, and since you can’t pick the one in advance, we own a basket of them instead of betting the house on one.
20% Moonshots. The smaller, spicier corner. Hypergrowth and frontier names with a runway a mile long, plus the occasional activist situation, a great business run by people leaving money on the table who just need a nudge. Kept small and held as a basket, because a couple of these carry the rest.
That 40 / 40 / 20 is a target we grow into over time, not a straitjacket. When a winner runs and its sleeve gets heavy, we don’t trim it to hit a number. We deposit into the lighter sleeves and let the winner ride. Selling the flowers to water the weeds is how you end up with a garden full of weeds.
So how do we actually pick?
Every name starts with a screen. We built two of them, one to find the Cannibals and one to find the Reinvestors, and we backtested them both the whole way back to 2006. We did it without cheating, too, meaning the companies that went to zero are still sitting in the data, so nothing you read here is flattered by only counting the survivors. The screen has one job. It takes a thousand plus tech names and hands back the couple dozen that are actually worth a look.
Then the real work starts. A screen can’t tell you if the price is fair, if the moat holds, or if the people running the place are any good. So we break these companies down by hand, one at a time. We charge the stock based comp as the real cost it is, we ask what kind of growth the price is already assuming, and we land on an answer: buy, or pass. Both are worth writing about, and both go on the record.
The record is the whole thing
We log every call. The date, the price, the thesis. Then we score it forward out in the open, and yes, that includes the ones we get wrong. No quiet edits after the fact, no pretending the losers never happened. If a name we liked goes nowhere, you’ll see it sitting right there. That honesty is the entire point. It’s the difference between “trust me” and “go check the tape.”
You’ll also see the whole portfolio, not just the framework’s picks. Names I’ve held and championed for years sit right next to the new calls, because hiding them would be stranger than showing them. But everything is labelled for what it is. A long-held conviction is marked as exactly that, and only the dated, thesis-backed calls count toward the scored record. What I hold is everything. What the framework called is the part you can grade.
What you get
Reading for free gets you the frameworks, the thinking, and the honest lessons, which is plenty to make you a sharper investor on your own. Going premium gets you the rest: the names, the valuations, the live portfolio, and the tools we use to build the whole thing.
About the author
My name is Ash Anderson, and I’ve been writing and talking about finance for a very long time. I started on MotleyFool.com before it was even Fool.com, and later wrote on Seeking Alpha, where my ratings can still be verified on TipRanks. I’m a software engineer by day and a markets enthusiast by night, and TechBreakdowns is basically my journal on that journey. I love this stuff. Come find some quality with me, and let’s sleep well doing it.
Everything here is research and a model portfolio we track out in the open. It’s not personalized investment advice. I’m showing you how I think and what I’m doing, I’m not telling you what to do with your money. Do your own homework before you act.
