Getting Started With Taufolio: Ask Before You Spend

Getting started with Taufolio works best in this order: take a company you already own, write one sentence about what you want to learn from it, and only then order a report. The Free plan grants a monthly credit allowance, and it covers exactly one Full report. Which means a free month is one proper analysis. It would be a shame to spend it on an excellent answer to a question nobody asked.

Getting started: pick a company you already own#

The first instinct is always the same, and it is reasonable: you type AAPL. You know the product and what it sells, so you will read the report with understanding and judge straight away whether the tool is worth anything.

Except that everything worth knowing about Apple is already free in ten other places, while nobody is reading anything on your behalf about the company you actually hold.

A report is worth as much as the question you order it against. "Is this a good company" is a real question with no answer, because it never says what you are looking for. A business question sounds different. Where does the money come from. Is the margin theirs, or borrowed from a cycle. How many customers account for half the revenue.

Write that sentence down before you click. Thirty seconds of typing changes what you read over the next forty to sixty minutes, the length of a Full report. And if you do not own anything yet, your step is one earlier: how to buy stocks.

My sentence on the last company I looked at ran like this: I want to check whether the double-digit margin holds because of the price list or because of one commodity. The report answered that in two paragraphs, and I read the rest more calmly, because I already knew what I was looking for.

A ticker is not a company name#

Alphabet trades under two symbols: GOOGL is the Class A stock with votes, GOOG is the Class C stock without them, which the company sets out plainly on its own investor relations page. One business, two tickers, two different things to hold. So which one is sitting in your account?

A ticker is an address, not a surname.

That is the mildest version of the problem. It gets worse with similar company names, the same brand listed in two countries, and smaller firms search knows less about than you do.

A report can be flawless and be about a company you did not mean. Nothing in it needs fixing, because everything is consistent, just not with you. Checking the exchange and the share class on the company page takes half a minute and costs zero credits.

Non-US exchanges are a switch#

Search shows US exchanges by default. The rest live in Settings, under Exchanges, and only once you switch them on do non-US tickers start appearing in the suggestions.

An empty result reads as "this company is not here" when it usually means "that exchange is not switched on". The difference matters: in the first case you close the tab, in the second you flip one toggle. A ticker outside the US carries a dot and an exchange suffix, so while that exchange is off, typing the whole symbol returns nothing. Reports also run on ETFs and on crypto, at the same price as a company report.

Which report answers your question#

The exact rates are in the price list.

With the question already written down, the choice turns mechanical: which of these three answers it? Whether a shorter write-up is enough or you want the whole map of the business is settled right here.

A Full report builds the picture of a business from nothing, and that part does not compress: the full rate and a few minutes of generation rather than a few seconds. A Monthly summary costs markedly less, because it answers a question three times narrower, namely what changed since last time.

You pay that rate only when you order the Monthly summary yourself, from the Library, for any company in the database. A company you put into Monitoring gets a Monthly summary every month with no input from you and no credits. Alongside it come the thesis check after results, The gist of the news beside the stream, Breakthrough news when an event could change the business, and a Pre-earnings brief before each quarter. The Free plan holds one Monitoring place and the paid ones ten and up, so at the start you pick a single company and its reports stop touching the counter. Every other company goes back to the prices in the price list.

Then there are the pro versions. Both cost markedly more, the Full report pro most of all, because it is produced by three models and a judge: three write the same analysis independently, and a fourth compares the versions and keeps what a source can carry. The Free plan may order them, but a month's credit allowance will not cover either. The price list sets it out report by report: what a Full report costs against a Monthly summary.

Read the withheld points, not the score#

A Full report opens with The gist of the report, every finding that matters collected in one place, and right behind it the Investment thesis broken into assumptions with a measurable condition each. Read both before the table of contents, which tempts you to jump to the section that will agree with you anyway.

After that comes the thesis laid out across 25 checks. Say your company scores 22 out of 25. That number tells you almost nothing, because 22 and 25 both read as good news. The content sits in the three withheld points and the reasoning attached to each, which is usually where the sentence you were not expecting lives.

You read a report on screen or as a PDF. The on-screen version keeps the source inside the sentence making the claim, so you click a strong sentence and land in the document. The PDF gathers the same report into a single file, and it is the one you want on a train.

That is the limit worth knowing on day one. The US regulator explains how to read a 10-K, and the risk section runs as long as it does for a reason. I think two clicks into the sources under the strongest sentence do more for your confidence than the whole score. They cost a minute, and they either close the question or show that the claim rests on one line of a press release. What the 25 checks measure is set out as a list giving each one a position in the filing, a threshold and a trap.

A month later, start with the date#

In a month you will open that report again, and the first thing to look at is the date. Every report is evidence from one particular day, and it knows nothing about what happened after it. The same business described before a large acquisition and after it makes two different texts, and only the date at the top separates them.

After a month one thing usually changed, not ten: a quarter, an announcement, a ruling, a contract price. The rest of the report stayed as it was, so a second reading can be selective, even though a first reading should not be. Your job is to name that one thing before you start scrolling.

So you pick one claim, the one your thesis rests on, and click the source under it. If the document says today what it said a month ago, the assumption holds and you can close the tab without spending a credit. If it says something else, you have just been handed the answer you came back for.

Only when something is genuinely missing do you go to the chat attached to the report, and there the precision of the question decides: not "tell me about this company", but "what did management say about pricing pressure this quarter". A broad question earns a broad answer, which you already have higher up the page.

That leaves the last decision, and it separates one-off curiosity from research that works for you. Nothing in Monitoring costs credits on any plan, so the only thing you spend is the choice of which company gets your Monitoring place. On Free you move it by switching Monitoring off on the previous company, and on the paid plans there are ten such places or more.

I do not know whether you will still be opening every notification three months from now, and I doubt it. What I do know is that a report ordered without a question does not survive the evening, while an Investment thesis with a measurable condition survives until the next results, because that is when it either holds or breaks. Write the sentence, spend that first month's credits on it, and see what Monitoring looks like day to day.