Primary sources

[John Hjorth]

Today, I've visited Ravi Nagarajans website The Rational Walk, because I do not any longer keep track of Ravis writing activities.

 

He is not as active as he has been earlier, and because he's basically folded his account on X, as so many others because of politics and all that.

 

I've also had the experience ['pleasure'] of his behavior in public when somebody [here, me] - also in public - happens to respectfully disagree with him, which in fact triggers him turning into a full blown disrespectful, patronizing, ridiculing, arrogant, self-sufficient, I-know-it-all-attitude, a**hole, when he misses arguments.

 

One time when I pointed out to him, that Warren Buffetts power over Berkshire Hathaway board members ridiculous board fees with no directors insurance [a fact that is also rewarding to me, not only Ravi] was just a no-go, because it existed because of only Warren Buffetts halo effect.

 

That does not change the fact that I've during the years gained a lot of knowledge from Ravi and I've come to appreciate tremendously Ravis writings.

 

- - - o 0 o - - -

 

Anyway, I visited The Rational Walk today, and I found this article very useful and actually worth sharing here on CofB&F : The Rational Walk [February 11^th 2025] : Primary sources.

 

Enjoy!

[DooDiligence]

I’m looking more and more to primary sources. I’ve recently started feeding multiple years of annual filings (10K, proxy and annual call transcripts) into Google LM for briefings. I’m doing this with everything I own. Each business gets its own notebook.

 

I think the next step should be to duplicate this with competitors and then start compiling briefings from industry and academic reports.

 

The next step will be verifying and editing briefings and figuring out how to combine them into different notebooks for the best qualitative results.

 

Not interested in having valuations spit out at me.

 

It’s actually a fun process.

[Fly]

5 hours ago, DooDiligence said:

I’m looking more and more to primary sources. I’ve recently started feeding multiple years of annual filings (10K, proxy and annual call transcripts) into Google LM for briefings. I’m doing this with everything I own. Each business gets its own notebook.

 

I think the next step should be to duplicate this with competitors and then start compiling briefings from industry and academic reports.

 

The next step will be verifying and editing briefings and figuring out how to combine them into different notebooks for the best qualitative results.

 

Not interested in having valuations spit out at me.

 

It’s actually a fun process.

 

Have you experienced any issues with the Google LM hallucinating or not representing the input data correctly? I like the concept

[DooDiligence]

50 minutes ago, Fly said:

 

Have you experienced any issues with the Google LM hallucinating or not representing the input data correctly? I like the concept

I’ve just started this experiment. I got filings from all 6 of my positions into workbooks today and will start going through the briefings tomorrow. I’m curious about this too.

[DooDiligence]

I expect the results to raise questions just like physically reading filings. Having multiple years smashed together should provide a different perspective.

 

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Edited September 9, 2025 by DooDiligence

[DooDiligence]

Many of you have undoubtedly tried this so the results won't be surprising. I worked on Dominos today, since I'm already very familiar with the past 5 years history. Notebook produced a pretty good summary of the business and operations. I don't find any hallucinations. There is definitely a process though, and the document(s) do require some editing due to repetition and to remove information that's not necessarily useful.

 

Combining two different types of filings together produces a virtually worthless summary. Instead, I combine multiple years of 10K's to generate a briefing doc, and then click "convert to source" to save the briefing doc as an additional source. Next, combine multiple years of proxy statements to build a separate briefing doc and save it as a second source. Then select these 2 briefing docs as sources to generate another briefing doc. Format for readability and remove unnecessary text.

 

No surprises really. You can use the best set of carpentry tools and produce a crappy structure if you don't know what you're doing.

 

I'm going to start concentrating on two more complex businesses now (Edwards Lifesciences EW and Novo Nordisk NVO). The reports from these businesses lead to more questions with regards to product(s) and operational strategies. I used it today to look into structural heart intervention (EW), beyond simply mimicking traditional surgical techniques and it's very educational.