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then… think about it?
OK hot take:
People are really into the internet.
(Pretty smart, right?)
But as far as the MFA portfolio goes, there are too many tech companies that are, for our purposes, uninvestable: straight outta Tech Bro Central Casting, with startuppy names like Spotnana, Bluevine, Clumio, and the like. (Those are all real companies. I can’t make this stuff up.)
I don’t know anything about something called Spotnana in specific, but you know what I mean: these are echt “growth” companies — the growth vs. value binary is largely a red herring, for reasons we can get into some other time, but it sure applies here — meaning they don’t actually make money, but are valued on, e.g., sales (which, hint: is not the same thing as profits), and are launched on rafts of cash from Silicon Valley venture capitalists and “angel investors,” who operate on a model of sprinkling hundreds of millions of dollars into goofy and/or slick ideas, comfortable with the fact that some will go bust, some will go nowhere, a couple will do okay, but they just need one in ten to hit it big in order for them to get a huge payout that makes all the failures worthwhile. Le crazy, non?
Needless to say, it is not what we do. We like things that are boring, and durable, and profitable, and in which we can entrust our modest retirement sums well away from oil, missiles, assault rifles, opioids, or other sleaze. But there are actually pockets of tech where that can be found, pockets that, while not exactly imbued with holiness, are nevertheless kinda sorta morally… maybe just okay? This month, we are investing in a super-solid, often-overlooked internet company that doesn’t get a lot of airplay, but which checks all the boxes for the MFA portfolio.
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