2025 Year-end Review: Charging Ahead
An Update on the Speedwell Research Business
Welcome to Speedwell Research’s Newsletter. We write about business and investing. Our paid research product can be found at SpeedwellResearch.com. You can learn more about us here.
This is our end of the year memo on the Speedwell Research business.
Year in Review.
Quite often people will reach out to us for advice on how to write or sell research online. I don’t think my advice is anything special, but I do tell them one thing that shakes a lot of them—if you can’t commit to doing it for at least a year with zero traction, then don’t even bother starting.
The most common reception you get creating content is no reception.
And unfortunately, in the past couple years it has only become more competitive getting investors attentions. I am very happy to say that we have moved well past that phase of writing into the void.
It is wild to say, but this marks the 3rd full year of Speedwell Research. In our last year’s review we detailed a lot of the struggles of running an independent research firm with a relatively small social media presence that focuses on the most in-depth research, instead of the most viral. I am very happy to say that sticking with it is paying off.
While there are still many writers with a far larger reach than us, I am deeply humbled by the quality of readers and subscribers we have. It is a truly bizarre experience to have investors that have created or manage billions of dollars describe our research as their favorite. We’ve had executives at the companies we’ve written about tell us we were more knowledgeable about the business than most that work there—perhaps not always the most confidence instilling thought haha… but we do try very hard to produce the best research!
With Speedwell Research coming into its own, I started to at the same time. I was very uncomfortable putting anything on social media at the outset. I would “protect” myself by only writing things that were extremely well researched to avoid saying anything that could be wrong. This certainly had a positive outcome as our research reports are (we think) the single best piece of research you can read for a given company—provided you are interested in investing for the long term and not short-term catalysts.
But it also means that I feel very restricted when I am writing through Speedwell because I want to maintain that hard-earned reputation for researched opinions, instead of off-the-cuff takes.
While I do really enjoy the opportunity to go deep on a business and learn an industry thoroughly, I also missed looking at a business for a few hours and then talking about it—with a pretty fair chance I missed something important. This sort of thing though is the opposite of Speedwell Research’s highly produced reports.
I’ve actually struggled with this for a little bit of time now as to how to best solve that. We tried the “Investor Briefing”s under Speedwell for a while, but that content honestly just didn’t suite our brand. It did give me the opportunity to make a few points I didn’t really have a place to otherwise, but overall, it was the wrong product for us.
Expanding.
You may have noticed a few weeks ago I launched a new newsletter called Five Minute Money. This is the place where I will write more freely on all sorts of business and finance topics.
It is designed to be sort of the opposite of Speedwell Research. Whereas Speedwell’s writings are long, I wanted this to be short. I will sometimes only spend a handful of hours researching something before writing about it.
The newsletter is also going to be a bit broader than just stocks, as I eventually want to get to other important concepts in finance I don’t usually see covered well. (A lot of investors are focused on making money through investing stocks, but there might be a lot of other “easier fruit” in their life to maximize their wealth).
The benefit of this newsletter for Speedwell readers/ subscribers is twofold: 1) learning about more businesses will help us draw more connections that we may have missed otherwise when we do research for Speedwell, and 2) it gives us more fun topics for the podcast.
More Podcast Content.
One of the issues I’ve been running into with the podcast is that since we really only cover our stocks, we don’t always have topics to talk about. This is in part because we don’t just want to talk about short-term news that won’t matter for the business in the long-term. (We did experiment with this with the Investor Briefing and didn’t love it.)
Even us deciding to do quarterly earnings was a bit of a compromise because most things that happen in a given quarter are easily forgotten a year later. Now though The Synopsis will be able to cover more businesses, which I think our listeners will enjoy. These won’t all be as well researched as our Speedwell covered stocks, but I still think they will be better covered than 95% of what you can get out there.
The other new content that we will bring to the podcast will be some content inspired by my YouTube channel. Since The Synopsis listeners are mostly serious and sophisticated investors, not all topics I cover on my YouTube channel will be appropriate for them—some are far too simple! However, there are some videos like 8 of the Biggest Investing Mistakes I’ve Seen and Common DCF mistakes that I think most listeners will find value in.
We also have a couple of our biggest interviews yet scheduled for 2026 and hope to keep up that momentum!
(If there is an investment manager you think we should interview, feel free to reach out at info@speedwellresearch.com)
Speedwell Research Coverage.
Of course, though, research remains our primary focus with Speedwell and we want to clarify how we are thinking about what to write and who to cover going forward.
Our core product is “Extensive Research Reports” that average 80 pages in length (and have been as long as double that at >160 pages). We will write an Extensive Report when 1) a business has a lot of complexity (like Shift4 or CoStar), or 2) an interesting history that has a lot of business lessons and could help an investor understand the entrepreneur’s mindset more (like Axon or Coupang).
We have a second category of reports called “Exploratory Reports”. We rolled this category out for businesses that we decided we didn’t want to write a longer report on. This can either be because 1) they are newer public businesses with more limited info, 2) are a very simple business that didn’t require a longer report to understand, or 3) the business wasn’t as exciting as we initially thought.
Most companies we write on, we intend to actively cover. If a business doesn’t have much interest from our paying subscribers though, we will put it in the “irregular coverage bucket” (sorry Walker & Dunlop and Casey’s). The only company we dropped from our Active coverage was Etsy and that was because we changed our mind on the business quality and no longer wanted to regularly write about a “meh” company. We will explain our reasoning if we ever do move a company to irregular coverage.
It is getting harder each quarter to write updates on all of our active coverage, so if you do appreciate us writing about a name, hitting like or commenting on some piece of content helps us know who to continue to actively cover. (For paying members, we can monitor what pieces get the most downloads). For the stocks in irregular coverage, we will basically only write on them when something very material or interesting happens with them.
We get a lot of requests for businesses to cover, but if there are some high quality businesses you think warrant Speedwell Coverage, feel free to share some names with us.
There are a ton of businesses we still want to cover. Here are some in no particular order: Mercardo Libre, Pool Corp, Old Dominion, Sea Limited, Cintas, Sherwin Williams, CrowdStrike, Brown and Brown, KKR, MSCI, Watsco, Booking.com, Progressive, TransDigm, TSMC, Applied Materials, Visa, Cava, Circle Internet Group, AutoZone, Chipotle, Heico, ASML, Novo Nordisk, Intuitive Surgical, and many, many more.
Even though we have a long list of businesses we want to cover, more often than not something else pops up and grabs our interest…
Speaking of which, our next company wasn’t actually on our list... but nevertheless, we are happy to announce our next report will be on Ferrari! We expect to release it by the end of January.
Gratitude.
As this year comes to a close, I want to take a moment to express my extreme gratitude for all of our readers, listeners, and subscribers that allow us to write and invest independently. I feel truly blessed that this is my job and I get to interact with so many fascinating people on a regular basis.
Thank you.
If you haven’t already though, you can sign up for the Five Minute Money newsletter and our YouTube channel below!
Thank you for all of your support and have a happy and healthy New Year! We are very excited for everything we plan on bringing you in 2026!
The Synopsis Podcast.
Follow our Podcast below. We have four episode formats: “company” episodes that breakdown in-depth each business we write a report on, “dialogue” episodes that cover various business and investing topics, “article” episodes where we read our weekly memos, and “interviews”.
We have a lot planned for the podcast in 2025 so be sure to follow us below!
Speedwell Research Reports.
Become a Speedwell Research Member to receive all of our in-depth research reports, shorter exploratory reports, updates, and Members Plus also receive Excels.
(Many members have gotten their memberships expensed. If you need us to talk with your compliance department to become an approved vendor, please reach out at info@speedwellresearch.com).
Happy new year! 💚 🥃
"I am very happy to say that sticking with it is paying off."
Glad to hear it, and well deserved - keep up the great work!
- Alex