Why Subscribe?
For you, this space can improve your investing, in two ways. Most importantly, it can help you improve your methods. Less importantly, but perhaps with more emotional appeal, it will lead you to specific investments that can fulfill your goals.
For me, this space has three purposes. First, it will give me a place to publish my research and related thinking. Long experience has taught me that writing these down clarifies thought.
Second, it will enable me to interact freely with readers. I hope to be criticized well and often. Responding to reader questions and even better to cogent criticisms further clarifies thought.
Third, I enjoy helping people “learn to fish.” It thrills me when I hear that a reader has benefited from my work and thoughts. This has happened a lot over on Seeking Alpha and also here since starting the Substack.
A reader recently commented on an article considering how to understand growth in REITs: “GOLD standard in quality ! Thank you for such an insightful article. So much better than fist pounding buy, the more it drops the more I buy type articles. Just this article is worth more than the subscription value for the year !”
Another reader had this to say recently: “I have a stack of Paul Drake articles that I read for understanding sometimes over and over. … Thank you for your hard work and making difficult concepts understandable.”
And it is too hard to resist adding this one, since my primary expertise is REITs: “I don't see the point in REIT ETF when we have access to RPD, the best REIT analyst out there.”
For reasons not worth discussing, it became time for me to start writing here and much less on Seeking Alpha. My more than 200 articles there gained me a few thousand followers; a fair number of them migrated here.
The primary goal here, for me, is to improve my own investing. The material here can help you do that too.
Who?
In brief, my first Barron’s subscription went with me to college. Since even before that, business operations, the economy, and investing have fascinated me.
My investing options were limited during my 40-year career as a scientist and professor (trained in physics). I began active investing with limited funds in 2018 and got control of all my funds upon retirement in early 2020.
My portfolio promptly dropped in market price by more than 50%. Being a value investor in the spirit of Benjamin Graham, this was acceptable but I can’t say there were no uneasy moments.
My overall total return from the start of 2020 to the end of 2024 (RPD) is compared here to those of the S&P 500 (SPY) and the equal-weight S&P 500 (RSP):
What is curious here is that my goal is not to beat the SPY. It is instead to achieve steady growth during both its hot decades and its cold ones while also paying out reasonable dividends.
My portfolio has primarily been focused on REITs and energy, and I made very few gains from the Magnificent 7 (and do not own them now). So this has gone quite well so far, and time will tell whether it was just a string of good luck.
Aspirations
This space will be a happy place for those interested in any of three things.
My deep research on various companies.
My portfolios and trades.
Exchanging views about the economy, investing, and in particular REITs and energy.
I will enforce requirements of civil discourse and minimal politics in posts. The focus here is investing and things that affect it.
We also have an active chat space, using the (alas, sub-optimum) chat feature Substack supports.
Intentions
My intentions are to provide the following.
For all subscribers paid and unpaid:
A brief “perspectives” most weeks
Some of my articles focusing on a deep examination of a specific company, in full
Articles addressing investing strategy, at irregular intervals
Articles on my investment performance, at irregular intervals
And for all paid subscribers:
Monthly portfolio updates
Notifications of my trades and why they happen
All my articles focusing on a deep examination of a specific company
And for annual paid subscribers:
Access to my actual, real-time investing portfolio and transaction history.
My opportunity and risk evaluation of many REITs and energy midstreams
All paid subscribers will be able to interact with me and each other using the comments on the article and the private Substack chat.
I do take creative breaks, almost always during weeks of major holidays. These are periods of low reader engagement anyway. They give me an opportunity to “recharge the batteries.”
I hope to hear from you!
Paul/RPD/whatever
subscribe?
Subscribe to get full access to the newsletter and publication archives.
To learn more about the tech platform that powers this publication, visit Substack.com.
