Tracking an investment thesis in Notion or a spreadsheet

A Notion page or a spreadsheet row imposes no structure you did not choose, which matters when the thing you are recording is your own reasoning. You can write a paragraph where a paragraph is right and a number where a number is right, restructure it as your thinking changes, and keep everything in one place you already open daily. The friction is close to zero, which is why it is where most theses actually live.

They are also honest about being passive. Nobody expects a spreadsheet to have an opinion. That is not a criticism — a document that stays exactly where you left it is the correct behaviour for a document.

The gap is not storage. It is that nothing tells you when to look.

A thesis is a claim about a business, and businesses report on themselves several times a year, at times you did not choose, in documents that are long and mostly irrelevant to your particular argument. The 10-Q lands on a Tuesday. Your Notion page does not know it landed, and does not know that page nine contains the one number your second bull-case point depends on.

So the real workflow becomes: remember which companies you own, remember roughly when each reports, find the filing, read enough of it to locate the parts that touch your reasoning, re-read what you wrote eighteen months ago, and decide whether the two still agree. Per company. Every quarter. The reason almost nobody sustains this is not laziness — it is that the work scales with the number of positions and arrives with no prompt attached.

What tends to happen instead is that the document gets written once, carefully, and then read only after something has already gone wrong, at which point it functions as a record of what you used to think rather than a check on what you think now.

Pasting a filing into a chat assistant and asking what changed genuinely helps with the reading, and if that is all you want, it is a reasonable workflow and it is free.

Two things it does not do. It has no persistent memory of your thesis, so each session starts from whatever you paste, and the quality of the answer depends on you having already decided what to paste — which is the judgement you wanted help with. And it has no trigger: it answers when asked, so the filing you did not notice is still the filing you did not notice.

The gap, in both cases, is the same one: something has to be watching on the days you are not.

It is worth being concrete about what closing the gap actually takes, because if the answer were “a Zapier automation” nobody should pay for it.

You would need to watch SEC EDGAR for new filings for each company you hold, pull the document, find the parts that bear on your specific claims rather than summarising the whole thing, compare them against a stored, versioned copy of your reasoning, decide whether any pre-set kill criterion has actually been met, and record the result so the history is there next quarter. Then do it again for earnings call transcripts, which have no public URL, and filter news down to the small share that reports something that happened to the business rather than something someone said about the stock.

Each step is possible alone. The combination is a system, and systems need maintaining — which is the honest reason this is a product rather than a template.

Notion or a spreadsheet is the right answer if you hold a small number of positions, you already re-read your reasoning on a schedule you actually keep, and the tools are recording decisions you were going to make anyway.

The gap is worth closing if you hold enough positions that quarterly review has quietly stopped happening, if you have ever held something well past the point its argument broke, or if you noticed something months after it was disclosed in a document you had access to the whole time. That last one is the specific failure this category exists for.

The reasonable objection to switching is that the writing already exists and redoing it is a tax. Okidor’s thesis fields map onto what most people already keep: a summary, why you invested, the bull and bear cases, target prices, a conviction level, and the conditions that would change your mind. In practice that is a paste per field rather than a rewrite, and the thought partner can work from a document you already have and ask about the parts that are implicit in it. Importing a written thesis directly is on the roadmap, and it is open to votes.

The free plan covers three investments with no card, which is enough to move one position across and see whether the audits tell you anything your own review would not. If they do not, the spreadsheet was the right tool and you have lost an evening.

Nothing here is investment advice. See the disclaimer.