Monthly Update - 02

February has been an interesting month for our project, as things got closer to what we expect being our regular month. Someone may have noticed that in “The YAIN Chronicles” we had promised to our readers to begin each month of the first year with a story of an amazing investor that is inspiring us. However, we realised when sending out the Monthly Update - 01 that it seems that when sending two posts in the same week our open rates and click ratios perform slightly worse. Probably it should not be surprising, as we guess most of you are already overwhelmed with content. This made us decide that rather than sending an extra newsletter on bios that are mostly available online, we should focus on our original mission, which is financial education and training. We may write about these super investors in the future, after we have covered the basics of personal finance and investing. 

Another important realization was that we needed to remove inactive readers from our list. It may sound counterintuitive, as number of followers is the supreme vanity metric nowadays, but we were never after vanity. We care that our content reaches as many people as possible, and then that these individuals enjoy it and get as much value as possible out of it. However, if someone never opens one of our emails, chances are that it ended up in their spam folder, and unless something changes, new emails will end up there as well. The reason why this is bad is twofold. On the one hand, it deteriorates our domain reputation, which is basically a way that email providers have to assess whether your email is spam or not: the more an email from that domain was flagged as spam the likelier is that any email from that domain is spam. On the other hand, it drags our open-rate and click rate (as these people will likely never open or click on something in the spam folder), which in turn affects our capability to attract reputable sponsors to keep YAIN’s educational part always free.

We removed roughly 25 inactive subscribers, making our end-of-the-month statistics look like this:

We added a new partner, Money.com, which decided to sponsor our article Profitability (Part I). Furthermore, we’re now recommending to new subscribers, an Italian newsletter focused on teaching Python: https://www.analiticas.co/. As per the referral link below, it is important that when subscribing the email is confirmed, so don’t forget to remind that to whoever you’d like to introduce to the YAIN community.

Finally, before moving on to our monthly trades, the S&P 500 delivered since the beginning of year a performance of 1.46%, while the MSCI World of 2.63%. We’re not big believers of short-term performance tracking, as we invest for the long-run and we believe our success should be measured in years not months. Nonetheless, for accountability purposes, we report our YTD performance, which in the case of Antonio has been 1.84%, whilst for Attilio it was 7.66%. If you want to understand how we achieve these performances, feel free to refer our newsletter to your network and recruit new YAINers or to subscribe by clicking below.

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