The future of Zero GCoS

End of a chapter

The substack has been without new content since end of January. Some may wonder why. In short, we have barely received any satisfactory feedback about the content shared here. Nobody has approached Name or me asking about when we will publish another post. Currently, there are 3 drafted write-ups that we will never finish.

After a surge of subscribers in January, I decided to activate the paid subscriptions. I had great plans for this substack, but I didn’t want to disclose them beforehand to avoid creating a commitment before testing the interest. In retrospective, I was naïve, the o&g investment sector is a niche and there are many existing alternatives. Nevertheless, I was expecting that at least those that had contacted me to know more about some of the companies (saving them time by using mine instead) would show their support to this substack in one way or another. The result was way below my expectations. In fact, I returned the money to those who paid it.

I don’t think the reward is worth the effort put into every article. It is not only about money. The lack of valuable support from readers is also concerning, it feels like writing in a void. Some of the posts require tens of hours that have to be taken from other duties. We were aware that long and comprehensive posts are not as attractive as very short posts with 2 or 3 ideas that aren’t supported with any evidence. Nonetheless, we still decided to do it ‘our way’, and it seems that we failed.

I’ll keep preparing my own notes and analysing companies, but I won’t share them here. I may write some occasional posts in the future, but don’t expect any periodicity. Furthermore, future content will not include educational material (despite its previous request in polls) or write-ups on companies that I may consider interesting for my portfolio in the future. If I feel the urge to write about something, it will be exclusively about companies in my portfolio.

Personally, I’m proud of the work we accomplished in these past months. In my opinion, we managed to put together some very good posts. However, not all of them performed as expected. The biggest dissapointment was Seacrest Petroleo, which was impacted by a myriad of operational mistakes and weather-related issues, gladly I never invested in it.

Since I created this substack, I think I have continued learning and improving my investment strategy. I have also learnt that other sectors are as important as energy, as well as, prudently shorting low-quality companies can generate some alpha. Since the creation of this substack in May 18th, I have managed to outperform both Nasdaq and S&P500 by almost 20 points, something that I haven’t done every year TBH and despite some errors like Jadestone.

I hope that some of you have benefited or will benefit in the future from the ideas shared in this substack. I am active on Twitter, where I comment about the o&g sector and E&P companies, in case you still want to see what catches my attention.

Thanks,