I've been on equity research on Wall Street for a little over 20 years just in the Internet sector. I went to Wharton business school. I went to Johns Hopkins for international relations graduate school prior to that and went to Amherst College prior to that. I didn't have from early on, a strong interest in working on Wall Street but I was very interested in the Internet. The Internet was just starting to become popular when I was in grad school the second time. And so I thought it'd be interesting to do some work around the Internet. I was in management consulting for almost two years, worked with Sprint under Internet strategy, and I thought it'd be more interesting for me anyway to work on Wall Street. I read "Internet Report" by this woman named Mary Meeker, who was kind of the groundbreaking Internet analyst at Morgan Stanley. And I applied for an opportunity to work with her as an associate, and six months later I got that opportunity and worked with her for five years. So that's how it kind of how we got to where I am. I just started on the Internet cause I was interested in it as a new growth area and the analogy I used as if it had been maybe you have it in 40 years earlier, I would have been interested in the television industry, 100 years prior to that or maybe further, I would be interested in the radio industry. It just seemed like a brand new medium, media medium. And it was something I wanted to do a lot of work on and so that's what got me started.

So as a sell-side equity analyst, my job is to provide research, ideas, and analysis to institutional investors and also to private Networth wealth management clients here at RBC Royal Bank of Canada. We're headquartered in Toronto. We have US headquarters in New York. I'm based out of the San Francisco office, and so a part of my job is straightforward. Their earnings come up. I write reports predicting whether the earnings will be better or worse than expected, whether fundamentals are improving or not improving, whether these are good stocks to buy. I generally take a pretty long term view on picking stocks. I've had a buy rating on Amazon, for example, for over 10 years straight. I've never I didn't have a cell on at one time about 15 years ago. It was a bad cal at the time. There were times when the seller on Amazon would have been a good call, but anyway, I generally have a pretty long term calls on stocks. I try to be a pretty patient with our calls. So I write a lot of research reports. I I should say we do. I've got a team of six working with me, and we kind of divide up almost 40 names into e-commerce names, online travel names, online advertising names, subscription names. And then there's always a bunch of new models that come up like uber and yift, where there aren't any other companies that we cover that are like them, and that makes the job really interesting in my mind. So we write a lot of research reports were on hand to talk with any clients that want to go through questions as a near term as what our market expectations for the Google print to long term oriented questions like what kind of operating margins could Google Cloud really attain? How successful could Amazon be in the business supplies segment, are virtual reality device is a material reason to be buying Facebook's shares? Well, Netflix end up being crushed by competition from Disney plus and Apple plus, what are the earnings powers of each of these companies, what kind of multiple should we put on that? So we range from long term questions to short term questions, depending on the client base. We have long term oriented clients. We also have very near term oriented clients, and we try to provide information and ideas to all of those. And also we host a lot of bus tours to visit these companies, host conference calls with the companies. We host conferences once a year. We have a major tech conference in New York so that's what we do. Anything that we can help investing clients better. Really, we're trying to help them make money in with Internet stocks. It doesn't mean just buy them, buy some, sell some and hold others. That's what the day job is. I call the working hours as Wall Street Fisherman's hours, West Coast, Wall Street. Fisherman's hours. So the markets will open up at 9:30 East Coast time. So that's 6:30 Pacific time, where we are in San Francisco and then will have calls. Our first call of the day with our sales forces at 7:15 East Coast time. That's 4:15 our time. Sometimes I'm in the office doing that calls. Sometimes I do it from home, and then I hurry into the office afterward. We have a trader call. So we talk with our sales force at 7:15 and we talk with our traders at 8 30. All those are East Coast time. So it's early mornings and then the days it depends on whether there are earnings or not. If there are no earnings, it's usually something like I'd say it's something like a 5 to 4 day, in at five and out at four something like that. If its earnings it could be a little later than that and then I end up traveling quite a bit to talk with clients. So I probably travel 90 days a year, too, to meet with institutional investors, whether it's in New York or Boston or Baltimore or San Francisco L. A, Chicago, in Europe and in Asia as well.

The core part of the job I sometimes simplified is this. I looked for four Ms. I'm trying to assess the quality of the management team, try to quantify the size and and the market opportunity. I look at competitive moats around businesses, and then I look at the the attractiveness of the business model itself. So I called the four M framework. Somebody had already taken three M so I went for four. And again it's management, moats, market, and model. And so we do a lot of work around that. We try to spend as much time with the companies as we can to try to understand them and fully cognizant that the job of management's at these companies to make sure that we know what they want us to know. We try to be reasonably appropriately skeptical but open-minded when we talk with these companies. We develop financial models based on excel for all of these companies, we go out multiple years and try to develop revenue, gross profit but operating income earnings and free cash flow estimates. And then we look at comps, comparables what other companies are like them in the marketplace, that help us figure out what multiple the market may be willing to pay or should be willing to pay for this asset. What's the range? I spend a lot of time go on fundamental trends. I found that to be the most useful way to really pick stocks. I do think that the markets do follow fundamentals if the companies grow then usually the market caps grow, too. I deal with a lot of growth stocks, and so, almost always, I find the multiples overtime come down unless you have a positive inflection and fundamentals. In which case multiples can go up. But it's that I wanna spend most. If I just think analytically about companies and understanding companies and stocks, it's I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what's happening to the business fundamentally. How fast can revenue grow our margins gonna expand or decline? I'm gonna use share repurchases to bring down share counts or offset dilution. I'm trying to come up with a sense of how quickly the top line can grow, and how quickly the bottom line can grow. And given that, what sort of multiple I can put against that stock? And how much risk is there implied in the company's current valuation, which is another way of asking, what is the risk that the multiple is gonna come down from where the company is today. That's a good question way. We probably don't put enough into it because we don't do it. There's probably a good way to do that. I do try to get a sense of most of the companies I look at Netflix, Amazon, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, Zillow or we looked at blue apron in the past. Most of them are consumer-facing, so it's very helpful if we can figure out whether something is becoming more or less popular with consumers. It's really simple sometimes. It's becoming more popular, and that means there's probably gonna be able to generate good revenue growth, which means that's probably gonna lead to profit growth. That doesn't always happen, but there's usually a pattern like that. And so we do try that. We do look at the Web traffic data. We look at the app download data, and then there's the basic stuff you could do with Google trends. You can check and see how well an asset is doing, and Google Trends is a free tool anybody can use. I look at a series of things like that. I don't necessarily try to track social media mentions. I don't have a good tool for doing that. I know there are tools like that in the market. I would probably put those into it as well. I'll look at anything that that helps me get a better sense of whether something is becoming more or less popular with consumers. So social media tools could be more helpful. I don't have a great solution yet.