Titan guide · 7 min read

Writing an investment thesis in Titan

A thesis is where you write what you think about an asset and what you think it is worth. The prices you put here are the ones Optimization works with, so this is the screen that matters most in Titan.

The name

It sits above both tabs, and it is the only field the thesis will not save without.

If you do not know what to call it, use the ticker or the asset’s name. The point is to find it again quickly.

General information

The first tab, and the one that feeds the rest of the app.

The asset

A search box with a dropdown where you pick what you are analysing. It shows you the market each listing trades on, with its market code, so you can choose the one you actually care about.

Picking it fills in country and sector on its own, and you can override both by hand.

That override is more useful than it sounds. If you are analysing the Alibaba ADR, it is listed in the United States but the business is Chinese, and you may well want your exposure recorded against China. Same with sector: an industrial company whose fast-growing arm is technology may be one you would rather track as technology.

Target prices at 1, 3 and 5 years

Three fields, and the most consequential ones on the screen.

These are yours. They are the end result of your own valuation of the asset, and Titan does not calculate them for you: you enter the conclusion you reached. From them come the upside and downside against the current price, and the weight the asset carries when you simulate a rebalance in Optimization.

Which is also why partially filled theses give partial answers: you can only simulate the horizons you have filled in.

Two dates

End of fiscal year, so you always know when the company’s year closes, and the date of the next earnings presentation. Both can be added to your Calendar.

Outstanding shares and the buyback plan

Selecting the asset fills in the number of shares outstanding, and from there you can change it manually.

Keep it current, because it is what market capitalisation is calculated from, and market cap is what the quantitative parameters below are calculated from in turn.

Next to it there is a buyback plan selector. Turn it on when the company has an active buyback running. It is a reminder to yourself: if the company is buying back its own shares, the shares outstanding are going down, and a stale figure quietly distorts every multiple you calculate.

The summary, or the Lynch thesis

A free-text box for condensing the whole thesis into a few lines. We call it the Lynch thesis internally, after what Peter Lynch used to say: if you cannot explain your thesis understandably in two minutes, you do not understand it well enough yet.

The way to get the most out of it is to write it twice.

Before you start, write your hypothesis: what you expect to find and why the asset interests you. When the analysis is done, come back and read it. Either what you suspected held up, or it did not, and both outcomes are worth knowing. Update it to say what you actually concluded.

This is what appears at the top of the exported PDF, so it ends up being the first thing anyone reads, you included, six months from now.

Quantitative parameters

Optional fields for the multiples you consider relevant for that asset, such as Price/Earnings or EV/EBITDA, each with a reasonable range that you define.

When you select one, the market capitalisation fills in on its own: current price multiplied by the shares outstanding you have above. Then you add the variable the multiple needs. For Price/Earnings, the earnings. For EV/EBITDA, the corresponding figures.

And one that gets forgotten: every parameter with EV in it also asks for net debt. If the company holds net cash instead of debt, enter it as a negative figure.

The number in the top right shows the current multiple, and its colour places it against your range: red above it, grey inside it, green below it.

Sections: where the thesis is written

The second tab opens with the sections you defined in your Profile, under Workshop, and that is where you actually write.

You can create new sections, delete the ones you do not need and rewrite the ones you keep, according to what each asset requires and how you like to work. You can also drag sections to reorder them.

Each section has a field for adding the KPIs you consider worth monitoring for that asset. Those KPIs are what you then work through quarter by quarter on the results screen.

How to write one worth coming back to

Three things that make the difference between a thesis you use and one you wrote once.

Structure it. Not for elegance, but because you are going to come back to this document periodically and you need to find things in it.

Write it in words you actually understand. Unnecessary jargon makes a thesis look rigorous and makes it useless, because in six months you will not be able to tell whether your own argument still holds. This is a working tool, not a way to impress anyone on social media with something complicated.

Be careful with AI-written theses. It is tempting to have one drafted and paste it in as it comes. Done that way it is worth nothing: the value of a thesis is not the document, it is that you did the reasoning. Use it to draft, then take it apart and rewrite it in your terms. And if something in there is beyond you even after that, you do not have your thesis about it. You have someone else’s.