Speedwell Research

Welcome to Speedwell Research

We focus on producing comprehensive research on great public companies to equip investors with a thorough understanding of the business. Our research covers individual businesses and goes into an incredible level of detail. Our investment analysis is not focused on quarterly trends, but rather distilling information down to make the big picture clear.

Speedwell is named for the ship that helped ferry passengers to the Mayflower, which is how we view our role: we want to help investors so they can take their own journeys.

Speedwell Jobs to be Done

You want to build an in-depth understanding of a company that will give you a foundational understanding of the business and industry in a couple hours.

Yes, our reports are long. However, if you are willing to give us the 2-4 hours it takes to read a report then you will have a very comprehensive understanding of the company. We have consistently heard that there is no better way to quickly understand a company.

You do not have the time to read all of the company’s documents, transcripts, and financials going back to the beginning of their founding.

We read every earnings transcript, conference transcript, and company document for you and distill down the key insights across time. Yes, it’s true that these are publicly accessible documents that anyone can freely download and read, however not all investors have the luxury of the time to do so. We read all historical documents and will write about something we think is key that may have happened 20 years ago.

You want to learn about certain elements relating to a company that are our deep research process uncovers that may not be widely known.

We not only read every company document, but also scavenge the internet and our networks for information. Our channel checks typically include current or past employees, managers, and customers. In the past we have run our own proprietary surveys when applicable. We also read deeply about not just competitors, but the history of companies in similar businesses. In the past we have been able to utilize competitors public financials to triangulate financial insights for our covered company (while the data isn’t proprietary, the amount of documents you need to go through typically means it is missed by most investors).

You want someone to point you to a quality company you hadn’t heard of or give you an understanding of a company that may allow you to change your opinion on it.

While we are not a stock picking service and do not give recommendations, we still intend to only look at high quality businesses. Our valuation analysis will help frame for the investor what the return profile could look like under varying circumstances so the investor can make their own judgement.

You want to learn in-depth about businesses.

All of our reports are written assuming zero prior knowledge of the company. Not only will you be more knowledgeable after reading each report, but you may learn business and investment lessons that you can generalize to your other investing endeavors. Many of our reports history sections are written like case studies with lessons that can be broadly applied.

You want an independent perspective.

We provide our own opinion on a company that isn’t influenced by consensus, the sell-side, or other investors. We start all of our research at the beginning of the company’s founding and come up with our own opinions from first principles. While we like to be aware of others thinking, our independent, research-oriented process helps us avoid group think.

Our Services

Extensive Research Reports

These are are main equity research product that cover everything including early history, the business, the product, financial, competition, the industry, ROIC, management, and much whatever else is necessary for a thorough understanding of the company.

Our shortest report is 44 pages and the longest is 176 pages. The complexity of the company as well as industry will dictate the report length. Shorter reports we can produce in about 4-5 weeks, whereas our longest report on Meta took about 8. We focus on report quality and comprehensiveness rather than setting an exact deadline. We will try to average over the year the number of long and short reports out.

Covered Company Updates

After we produce deep-dive on a company, we will publish at least 2 updates on it annually. These updates will assume the reader has a read the deep-dive and essentially pick off where it left of.

Exploratory Research Pieces

These will be shorter equity research pieces that are meant to be cursory writings on businesses before we decide to commit 4-8 weeks doing deep research on a company.

The early companies Speedwell chose to write about were already familiar to us and thus have effectively been “pre-vetted”. We are facing a bit of a paradox though as it is hard to decide to commit weeks to researching a company before we know that that company is worth committing weeks to it to research it. Thus we felt we needed to do research in order to see what is worth researching more. We will call this “preliminary” research on a company an “exploratory piece” and its sole intention is to see if we want to allocate more time to learning and writing about it. We will share our thinking with our subscribers on why we will either revisit it in the future or do not consider it worth further investigation at the time.

Business Concepts, Investment Philosophy and Investor Education

Short, ad-hoc pieces that cover various business or investing ideas that we had stumbled on through our research process.

Occasionally in researching or writing about a business we will create a concept to better understand that business. The Consumer’s Hierarchy of Preferences and the Value Capture Index are two such ideas, but we have several more that we intend to write about. We will periodically also write on other topics like accounting, LTV analysis, and financial modeling.

PM Summaries

Short 5-10 page summaries of our Extensive Research Reports.

Our PM Summaries are released shortly after our deep dives and our designed to give a reader a quick summary of the report. This can be useful if you do not have time to read the full report yet or if you want a reminder of key elements.