Welcome to Bottom Line Investing

Hi there.

My name is Steve Symington. Welcome to Bottom Line Investing, my new free newsletter on investing in private markets.

I’ve cut my teeth over the last 15 years researching stocks and managing real-money portfolios for some of the largest investing services in the world. I’ve written over 8,000 syndicated articles and research reports on investing, business strategy, and personal finance.

I typically don’t like to pat myself on the back. But I’m ecstatic to have gotten in on companies like Nvidia (NVDA) under $4 per share (it’s trading at $430 today) and Lululemon (LULU) at $55 (it’s $406 now). I bought my first shares of Universal Display around $15 (it’s $155 as of this writing) in 2010 – long before it started paying a dividend and well before it struck a deal to supply OLED materials for Apple’s displays.

My colleagues even teased me back in 2019 for calling Tesla (TSLA) a “value stock” at $14 per share. Even after getting nearly cut in half from its 2021 peak, shares of the EV leader are trading hands around $217 today.

I told my readers to keep buying Amazon (AMZN) around $13 (it’s $130 today), pointing to its then-tiny AWS segment as a key catalyst for the coming years. I suggested buying Netflix (NFLX) under $25 in early 2013 – even as the budding streaming video leader hit fresh highs.

I urged investors to add MAKO Surgical to their portfolios well before it was acquired by Stryker. Then I shifted my attention to Mazor Robotics before it was acquired by Medtronic in 2018. I detailed iRobot’s (IRBT) quest to dominate home robotics for a decade, even suggesting multiple times that it was a likely takeover target leading up to its (now-pending) acquisition by Amazon last year.

Enough bragging (blech). I’ll be the first to admit I’m not always right. Like any honest investor, I’ve had my fair share of duds. But I’ve also strived to learn from them and become a better investor along the way. And I’m still writing about publicly traded stocks. It’s a great feeling to get in on public companies before the rest of the world catches on.

That’s how investing works; if you aim to be right more than you’re wrong – and if you can be right in a big way from time to time – your biggest winners can generate life-changing returns.

To that end, I’ve decided to not only continue my research in publicly traded stocks, but also shift my attention to getting in even earlier. That’s why my team and I have created Bottom Line Investing.

While life-changing gains can certainly be made by investing in businesses that have already gone public, even greater wealth can be generated for those businesses’ pre-IPO (or pre-exit) shareholders.

Our team has founded multiple startups worth millions, and has even attracted funding from Fortune 500 companies.

Right now there are hundreds of private companies raising capital on online funding platforms – and we’re here to help you cut through the noise with over 40 years of combined investment experience from retail to institutional investors.

I’ve taken the criteria I’ve used to analyze publicly traded equities over the last decade and created a framework we’ve affectionately dubbed “B.L.A.S.T.” Using this framework, we’ll seek to identify the most compelling investment opportunities among both public and private companies that are best-positioned for the future.

So join us! Once you sign up, you’ll also receive one to two emails per week including tips and tricks for stocks and startup investing, company profiles, and other exclusive investing content delivered straight to your inbox.

No spam. No fluff. Just easy-to-digest research aimed at helping you better understand the investing world.

I hope you’re as excited as I am about this new adventure. Let’s do this.