The weekly digest — 18.12.24
A Winning Machine
What is more powerful than a 101-year-old winning machine? Since 1923, the S&P500 index has generated an annualised return of ~10.5%. For more than a century, it has:
Beaten 99.9% of professional investors, who typically underperform the index annually by ~2-3%, with the gap widening dismally over time.
Proven its stellar compounding potential; $1 invested in the index in 1923 would be worth more than $13,000 today.
Comprised of the bluest of the world’s blue-chip stocks, self-regulating and re-weighting these in line with their individual performances — eliminating user selection error.
Always regained its previous highs, surviving the Great Depression, one World War and the Covid pandemic.
Weekly Digest
On a look-through basis, we will become entitled to our dividend from Oracle next month. Oracle is one of the world’s premier software companies. How premier? For starters, it counts 97 of the Fortune 100 companies as customers and generated sales exceeding $50 billion in 2024 alone — pocketing more than $10 billion in profit. In 1977, Oracle was founded as a database management pioneer to optimise the retrieval and utilisation of stored company data. Initially, the company deliberately avoided competition with SAP, which had emerged in the years prior and targeted total solutions for giant corporations. Instead, Oracle compartmentalised its offerings, targeting smaller budgets and smaller clients. It was a fruitful strategy; the company went public in 1986 and later widened its reach via significant takeovers including PeopleSoft, Siebel and later Sun, which solidified its foothold in hardware. While Oracle established dominance in on-premise software solutions, the company lagged in its migration towards cloud architecture, though it is now rapidly becoming a force in cloud data optimisation and in the training of intelligent clouds. Since its maiden dividend in 2009, Oracle has increased its annual dividend at a strong pace for the last decade. Its future outlook — punctuated by a visible forward order book exceeding $99 billion, coupled with the addition of 10,000 new customer accounts each year — is highly promising, powering the company’s continued profitability and extension of its dividend growth.
To Have and To Hold
The greatest threat to our investment success? Us. So, how do we get ourselves from outset to outcome? Over four years, we’ve collected more than four million data points that demonstrate how a particular methodological communication keeps investors on track. This email is part of a powerful anticipatory feedback loop that works as a bad-decision buffer. With our handholding, evidence shows investors are far more likely to hold onto their investments — long enough to enjoy their wins.