Paste your holdings however they're shaped

Nobody keeps their watchlist in a tidy spreadsheet with one clean column of names.

The real thing is a mess. It's half-remembered from a notes app, part company names and part the websites you looked them up on, a couple of "Inc." suffixes you pasted from a filing, a ticker or two you happen to know by heart. When you finally go to hand that list to something, you brace for the part where you have to clean it all up first.

Here's the good news: with Marvin you don't. Paste the mess. He untangles it.

The messy list, and what happens to it

Say you're setting up and you drop in exactly the jumble you actually have:

To: marvin@ccmarvin.com

Hi Marvin,

here's what I'm keeping an eye on. Set up a daily brief on anything material.

Anthropic, anthropic.com, Figma, Ramp Inc., Vanta

Read that the way a lot of tools do and you get a small disaster. A comma is treated as a hard divider, so "Anthropic, anthropic.com" becomes two entries: one company called Anthropic, and a second company literally named "anthropic.com." "Ramp Inc." splits into "Ramp" and a company named "Inc." You asked for a clean watchlist and got a pile of junk rows, some of which will never match any real news because they aren't real companies.

Marvin reads the same line differently, because he looks at what follows each comma instead of treating every comma as a wall:

• A website right after a company name is that company's website, not a new company. Anthropic, anthropic.com is one company with its site attached.
• A corporate suffix folds back into the name before it. Ramp Inc. is one company, "Ramp Inc.", not two.
• Everything else after a comma is genuinely a new company. Figma, Vanta is two.

So that pasted line comes out as four companies (Anthropic with its website, Figma, Ramp Inc., and Vanta), and Marvin tells you exactly what he made of it:

From: Marvin marvin@ccmarvin.com

Hi Sam,

Got it. I read that as four companies to watch: Anthropic (with anthropic.com as its site), Figma, Ramp Inc., and Vanta. If I split or combined any of those wrong, just tell me and I'll fix it.

Your first brief lands tomorrow morning.

Sincerely, Marvin

No cleanup pass, no reformatting into columns, no re-sending. You pasted what you had and got back a watchlist that matches what you meant.

Why the first step matters this much

The very first thing anyone does with Marvin is hand him a list. If that step turns a company into two junk rows, the whole rest of the experience is built on a bad foundation: briefs that mention companies that don't exist, a real holding that never shows up because it got mangled on the way in, and a nagging sense that you can't trust the list.

Getting the paste right is unglamorous and it's exactly where trust is won or lost. A watchlist you can assemble by pasting the mess in your head, and have come out clean, is a watchlist you'll actually keep current.

Honest limits

A couple of things to know.

A bare ticker keeps its own lane. If you paste NVDA on its own, Marvin treats it as a ticker to resolve to the right public company, not as a plain name, so it doesn't get folded into the company next to it. That's deliberate: a name and a ticker look the same at a glance, and attaching tickers to their neighbors would quietly cut comma-separated lists in half.

And a website has to actually look like one to attach. "Inc." and "St. Jude" and a stray version number won't be mistaken for domains. When something ambiguous comes in, Marvin errs toward asking rather than guessing, so you confirm rather than discover a wrong entry later.

How to try

Take whatever list you already have, in whatever state it's in, and paste it into an email to marvin@ccmarvin.com. Ask for a daily brief. Marvin reads it into a clean watchlist, tells you what he made of it, and sends the first brief the next morning.

Want the full set of formats Marvin accepts, from a pasted line to a CSV to a screenshot of your positions? The complete portfolio tracking guide has it.