// the honest comparison
Most strategies live in a spreadsheet. Some live nowhere.
Monsa is not competing with a terminal on a trading floor. It is competing with the tab you keep meaning to update, and with the perfectly good sheet you built and then stopped opening in March.
What the sheet cannot do
| The job | A spreadsheet | Monsa |
|---|---|---|
| Hold the rules in writing | Yes - that is what a sheet is for. | Thresholds, weights and hard lines, in a form that can be checked. |
| Re-check every position, every night | Only when you sit down and do it. | Fundamentals, prices and FX refresh overnight and the whole book is re-scored before you wake up. |
| Judge something that is not a number | A cell can hold your opinion. It cannot form one. | Qualitative criteria - moat durability, a credible turnaround plan - get judged and the reasoning is shown next to the verdict. |
| Tell missing data from bad data | An empty cell and a zero look identical in a formula. | Every metric is flagged reported, derived, or missing. A rule can require the number, exclude it, or fail the position outright. |
| Keep working when you lose interest | It stops the week you stop. | The scoring runs whether or not you opened it. The verdict is waiting the next time you do. |
| Say the same thing twice about the same stock | Depends which tab, and when you last touched it. | One scoring engine, one set of rules per portfolio, the same arithmetic every night. |
None of this is a claim about what your book will do. Monsa does not say these rules make money, and it never says which of them to run - it says whether what you hold still matches the ones you set.
What the sheet does better
Any column you can imagine
A sheet has no schema. If you want a column for how the CEO answered one question on one call, you add it in four seconds. Monsa scores against metrics it can source and verify, which is a smaller set by design.
No subscription
A sheet costs nothing and will still open in ten years. Monsa is paid from day one and there is no free tier - that is a real trade, not a footnote.
It is already yours
Your sheet already has your positions in it and already matches how you think. Anything new has to earn the switch, and a page like this one is not what earns it.
It goes anywhere
Sheets export, embed, and get pasted into a message. Monsa is a place you open.
So which problem do you have?
If your sheet is current, if you open it after every earnings season, and if it tells you when a position stopped qualifying - keep it. It is doing the job and Monsa would be a worse version of something you already run well.
The other case is the common one. The rules exist, they were good when you wrote them, and the checking is the part that quietly stopped. That is not a discipline failure so much as a scheduling one: the work arrives at the worst possible time, in ones and twos, months apart, and always when something else is louder.
That is the gap Monsa is built for. See what a rule-set looks like written down as numbers, or read why it is paid rather than free.
A sheet checks your book when you remember. The point of the nightly run is that remembering stops being part of it.