A Twilio Stock Analysis: It’s Complicated

Gene editing is a great example of an extremely difficult concept that’s easy to understand. The recipe of life is DNA. Changing the recipe of life allows you to fix defects or create new and exciting things. Understanding the technical details of how that happens isn’t necessary to understand the value proposition, and screening the 27 gene-editing stocks out there seems manageable.

In the computing domain, programming software is also an exceptionally complicated domain that can be difficult to understand based on the problems it’s trying to solve. The emergence of software-as-a–service (SaaS) business models means that you can compare and contrast various businesses using common metrics without having to understand what they do. On a spectrum of understandable SaaS firms, you might put DocuSign (DOCU) on the “easier” side and Alteryx (AYX) on the “harder” side. Generally speaking, we’re trying to avoid harder-to-understand businesses because they’re less accessible for retail investors.

Whether you analyze companies for a living or you’re a weekend warrior, it shouldn’t be difficult to figure out what any given company does. Here’s what you need:

• Latest investor deck
• Latest financial filing – 10-Q or 10-