Last Updated on: 22nd November 2023, 12:44 am
We are thrilled to bring you an exclusive interview with Kevan Matheson, the dynamic CEO and Founder of @edge.investments. As the leader of this innovative investment platform, Kevan has dedicated himself to simplifying complex investment concepts, providing cutting-edge analysis on growth stocks, cryptocurrencies, and venture capital, and guiding a community of investors towards financial freedom. His unique approach, grounded in the principles of legendary investors but with his own unique twist, has been a game-changer in the field. His wealth of knowledge, hands-on experience, and forward-thinking strategies have positioned him as a thought leader in the investment landscape. Today, we’ll delve into Kevan’s vision for Edge Investments, his investment strategies, and the journey that has led him to where he is now.
In this interview, we’ll be exploring the vision behind EdgeInvestments.org, the unique investment strategies they employ, the challenges Kevan has faced on his journey, and the exciting future he envisions for the platform. We believe his insights will be incredibly valuable for both seasoned investors and those just starting their investment journey.
Can you share the vision that led to the creation of EdgeInvestments.org? What problem did you see in the market that you wanted to address?
With experience in institutional investing we came to the realization just how much opportunity and education was not available to the everyday retail investor. We strive to close this gap through investment education. We arm modern retail investors with the latest knowledge and with authentic analysis of “the company’s behind the stock”. By meeting with CEOs and filming our interviews, we bring our community into the boardrooms that may be hard to access otherwise.
Our vision is to build a community of ambitious retail investors ready to take on their financial freedom. We’re on a mission to become the #1 trusted source of small-cap insight in North America.
How would you describe your investment strategy in simple terms to someone new to investing?
Edge approaches our investment strategy from a methodical and analytical approach. We believe that the core characteristics of a successful growth investor are as follows:
- Long term horizon but very active (don’t just set and forget)
- Does their own research, and doesn’t just chase trends
- Only invests what they can afford to lose (in the case of any individual high risk stock)
- Diversifies across multiple sectors
- Dollar cost averages monthly to not try and time the market
- Understands the companies they invest in
We educate our audience to empower them to make decisions based on their risk levels, knowledge of the companies and industries combined with general market commentary.
How does EdgeInvestments.org differentiate itself from other investment platforms?
Through a methodical and data driven process, Edge introduces ambitious investors with ambitious companies. We differentiate ourselves through our financial analyst driven research that goes into our content.
We know the importance of looking past the headlines and general media to make informed positioning statements on market trends. We also look to educate rather than just give stock picks and recommendations for people to jump on blindly.
Can you walk us through your process of conducting fundamental research on companies? How do you choose which sectors to focus on each month?
We focus on growth stocks of all valuations, from nano caps to large caps, but our investment criteria remains very similar regardless:
- Large and growing TAM (Is the Market right? right time and place, not too early)
- Experienced team (successful exits and/or hardcore subject expertise)
- Unique competitive advantage vs peers
- Strong cash flow management
- Consistent revenue growth
- EBITDA and/or net income positive
- Profitable (or a clear path to get there)
- Healthy balance sheet (well funded to survive the downturn with minimal or no debt, depending on business)
- High insider ownership (bonus points for insider buying)
- Executive salaries aren’t egregious and additional compensation is performance based
Our analysts follow market sentiment and industry trends and identify companies that we see as important to industry growth and demonstrate a healthy company baseline to scale and be a true growth stock.
How do you balance providing specific investment education while encouraging your community to do their own research?
Great question and as you can see from our values above this is essential in our brand. Education over simply directing our users. We do understand that our audience looks to us as specialists in the space with access to public market companies and first hand experience with the company’s we learn about. However we balance this by ensuring we always go back to our fundamentals and have our fundamental research process engrained in any recommendations. We put our “money” and time where our mouth is and stand behind our choices.
What’s your process for creating educational content? How do you ensure that the information is digestible and useful for your audience?
We look to see what our audience is asking about and what they find useful. We help answer these questions and provide our fundamentals within this content to bring them back to the educational side from their questions and curiosity. We also place high importance on making content for modern platforms where retail investors currently spend their time, namely Instagram.
What have been some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced since launching EdgeInvestments.org, and how have you overcome them?
Our two biggest challenges are real market challenges that have arisen in the past year.
- Navigating a volatile Bear market in 2022-2023. At the end of the day there are macro level changes that are difficult to predict. We work to overcome this challenge by sticking to our fundamentals and our tested process of company and stock evaluation ingrained into our company culture.
- Navigating a revolutionized content creation industry with the advancements in AI. There is an information overload and we arise to this challenge by staying true to our experience focused content writing from the real voices of our analysts.
Can you share a time when you were wrong about an investment prediction? How did you handle it and what did you learn from it?
Failure is the foundation of learning from experience. We have had stocks that we stood behind go the wrong way. At the end of the day there are always market conditions and internal company problems that can arise. We learned to stay true to our core fundamentals of our investment research into the company’s we review and not to be swayed by shortcuts or market trends out of the company’s control. We have also learned to be highly active on monitoring companies, and recognize that initial due diligence is only the beginning. Management decisions and macro economic trends can drastically change the destiny of a company in an instant, so it’s critical to be watching closely. Due diligence is an ongoing process.
What are your plans for EdgeInvestments.org over the next few years? Are there any new features or offerings we can look forward to?
We’re beyond excited about the future of edge.
We’re bringing on new contributors with diverse experiences in the space and new takes that we can grow on as a company.
Upfront we’ve been establishing our foundations over the past year. However we’re excited to be expanding our Email Newsletter campaigns in the future with exclusive and even more in-depth reader content for our community. We’re also going into product testing to review tools for our audience that will help them manage their portfolios more effectively. Finally we’re expanding our media division by focusing on a scalable way to produce accurate and useful market commentary that can expand our reach to new investors!
How do you plan to grow your community of investors?
By investing into our media division to get our educational content out to a wider audience and then offering further in-depth exclusive content to our community.
