Titan guide · 4 min read

Sector and industry reports in Titan

A report is your analysis of a whole sector or a single industry. It is the other half of the Workshop, and it covers the environment the assets in your theses operate in.

What a report is for

The tab is called Circle of Competence, after the idea that you are better off investing inside the set of things you actually understand, and that the useful work is knowing where the limit of that set is.

A report is where you set down your understanding of a sector or an industry. Writing one forces you to say out loud what makes an industry work, what usually kills companies in it and what you would need to see before you took any of it seriously. After that you come to any company in that industry far better placed to understand it, because you already know which questions matter before you open its accounts.

The name

Sits above both tabs, same as in a thesis. If you are not sure what to call it, the name of the sector or of the industry itself is usually the best option.

General data

Sector, or sector and industry

Two fields that work together and decide the scope of the report.

For a whole sector, pick it from the dropdown. These are the eleven GICS sectors, the standard classification the market uses: technology, energy, healthcare, financials and so on.

To go one level deeper, pick the sector and then write the industry yourself in the free-text field. The industry is not a closed list, so you can define the specific industry you work on rather than something generic that does not quite fit.

That is the whole decision: a sector report gives you a broad view, an industry report lets you get specific. Most people end up with a few of each.

The summary

Same idea as the summary in a thesis: a few lines that condense what you concluded about that sector or industry.

And the same method works here. Write your hypothesis before you start, come back when the analysis is done, and rewrite it with what you actually found. This is what appears at the top of the exported PDF.

Sections

The second tab has two parts.

Best and worst performers

Here you pick the assets from that sector or industry that have done best and worst, and you get their performance over the last ten years.

The point is reference. Putting the ones that have done best side by side is how you work out what they have in common and what made them different from the rest. Running the same exercise on the worst ones tells you what tends to go wrong.

What you take away is a pattern: the characteristics worth checking for in any asset you analyse in that industry, and the specific risks worth watching for while you do it. It turns a vague sense of an industry into a list of things to look at.

The written sections

The same system as a thesis. Free text organised into sections that you can create, edit, delete and drag to reorder, according to what the sector requires and how you like to work.

One difference worth knowing: reports do not carry KPIs. Those belong to theses, because they track a specific company quarter by quarter. A report is about the environment, and the environment does not report earnings.

How it fits with your theses

The two halves of the Workshop are meant to feed each other.

A report is where the reasoning that applies to every company in an industry lives, so it does not have to be rewritten in each thesis. A thesis is where the part specific to one company lives. When you write the report first, your theses in that industry get shorter and better, and when you have written several theses in a sector, the report almost writes itself out of what they have in common.