[00:02:59] Stig Brodersen: So it seemed timely in any case to review my track record and share with the audience and so this is from January 1st, 2014, and then up till February 29 this year. And so we’re recording on March 8th in case you were like, this is a super weird time to like to make a cutoff. That’s because it’s the most recent number by the end of the last month.

[00:03:20] Stig Brodersen: And I think it’s with some hesitation that I wanted to review the track record in public. And I wanted to mention why, because let’s say that I was outperforming the market. And at that case, of course, it’s nice. There’s probably an element of magnitude in case you would then disclose your track record.

[00:03:37] Stig Brodersen: But I think that you also run the risk, especially if you have a bit of a public persona to people following you into trades. And it’s not like I have so much money that it completely destroys the market or anything like that. It’s not like would be the case for Warren Buffett, but just more like a lot of people would perhaps follow you into different positions, especially if it’s smaller positions and they might clone you and they might get upset if something goes wrong.

[00:04:02] Stig Brodersen: It could also be that you would have all kinds of biases by doing so and wouldn’t be able to sell it because you felt you let other people into the trade, even though, you know, with all these disclaimers, don’t invest in the same thing as me. And I just remember like back in the day I was following so much what Warren Buffett was doing and I was doing many of the same trades. And I just, I wouldn’t want others to feel the same way about stocks that I invested in.

[00:04:23] Stig Brodersen: In this situation where I would potentially be outperforming the market. And then if we turn the tables and said, well, what if I didn’t outperform the market and I still disclosed my track record, what would then happen?

[00:04:33] Stig Brodersen: Well, in that case, your listeners might say, why am I listening to this podcast? Why don’t they just buy an ETF and not listen to Stig? And who do you think he is? And really the point of The Investor’s Podcast has always been to interview the best investors to give and empower our audience. To give them the tools to make their own decisions, not to mimic what the hosts are doing, but also, you know, come up with the right process, not necessarily more than, you know, what happened over the past 12 months.

[00:05:05] Stig Brodersen: And I think that’s very important. And so, I wanted to just use that as a disclaimer going into it. But anyways, my returns from January 1st, 2014, to 29th of February 2024 is 21% CAGR, Compound Annual Growth Rate, and this is dollar weighted, I should say. And so in comparison, just to give you like a benchmark, I chose the MSCI All Countries World Index.

[00:05:30] Stig Brodersen: And in the same time period, it has returned 8.9% CAGR. Whenever I say it’s the All Countries World Index, it’s very much market capped. So for example, the US is 63.8% and I used a tool called ShareSight where you can import your trades into and sort of like it spits out a report for you. I think we’re going to talk a bit more about some of the methodology later.

[00:05:50] Stig Brodersen: If some of the listeners want to like figure out what’s their own track record, and perhaps they have different asset classes that’s not being disclosed in there, in the brokerage account. And I should also mention, and I don’t know how nerdy everyone is about like track records, but it’s the compounded method.

[00:06:03] Stig Brodersen: So that’s the most conservative one. And we’re going to go through quite a few numbers in this episode. So. What I’ve also done, and I’ll make sure to talk about this at the very end here. I also wrote like a blog post. It’s probably my first post in five years, something like that. And so I outlined like my portfolio, my track record per year, and then, you know, a total of that, and I’m just going to make sure to link to that in the show notes, and then everyone can just go in and read it or not read it.

[00:06:29] Clay Finck: So first of all, I’ll say congratulations on such a wonderful result to date 21.4% over 10 years It’s definitely not easy to do and it reminds me in the community, one of our members commented on your result and they pulled this excerpt from Fred Martin’s book it talks about Benjamin Graham’s investment approach and Buffett and Graham have both said that it’s relatively easy to achieve reasonable returns from stocks but it’s very difficult to achieve returns that exceed some sort of benchmark like the MSCI World Index or the S&P 500.

[00:07:06] Clay Finck: He also stated that 10% of all fund managers are able to beat the market average in any given year. And when you extend it out over a 10 year time period, only 2% of fund managers are able to outperform the market. So I also appreciate that your approach has changed over the years. So I think when you were closer to my age and where I’m at in my journey, you were more focused on capital growth.

[00:07:31] Clay Finck: And you’ve talked a lot about how now you’re more focused on capital preservation. You know, many people can look at what’s in someone’s portfolio or they hear the returns you get and they look at, okay, what does he own in his portfolio? But I think to sort of put things in perspective, I think it’s also to consider the price someone pays for a position.

[00:07:52] Clay Finck: So you can look at a lot of super investors today that have massive stakes in Apple or Microsoft or whatever else. They might’ve added to those positions five or 10 years ago when the valuation in their view is much more attractive and they’re hanging onto it from here and maybe not even adding it to it at today’s prices.

[00:08:08] Clay Finck: So holding a position and buying a position is two very different things. And I mentioned the capital preservation piece, you know, knowing your investment objective is also important. So your investment objective is likely different than a lot of people in the audience. And it’s just two things that really matter a lot.

[00:08:27] Clay Finck: So I think it’s also important that you mentioned that we’re learning alongside the audience. I think if people looked at, you know, my day as a podcast host, it’s very different from that of an equity analyst or portfolio manager. A lot of my days preparing for interviews, editing audio, reading books, and spending a lot of time with our mastermind community.

[00:08:49] Clay Finck: And you could argue like a lot of that does help me develop as an investor, but there’s a lot of things I’m doing that I wouldn’t be doing if I were an equity analyst or portfolio manager. And all that time, you know, really adds up that you’re not spent analyzing companies, researching industries. And I’m here to learn just like a lot of people in the audience and trying to empower people rather than try and achieve the best returns possible.

[00:09:12] Clay Finck: Although I really wouldn’t complain if that ends up happening during my tenure here. And one thing I’ve also learned as a host is that high returns don’t necessarily make a good investor. There’s, I believe is Michael Mauboussin’s very well known for distinguishing skill versus luck and it’s very difficult to do with investing.

[00:09:30] Clay Finck: So if you look at investors that got the best returns in 2021 alone in that year alone, you know, they were probably taking excess risk and investing in companies that got ahead of themselves, over invested in future growth, and many of those investors were actually pretty lucky during that time, many could argue, and had their luck eventually turn the other direction. So, when you zoom out over 10 years, how do you think about this dilemma between skill versus luck?

[00:09:59] Stig Brodersen: I definitely think that it’s mainly luck. You know, my, my lovely wife said to me the other day that no one can be lucky for 10 years, but I think I might be the exception to the rule. I certainly attribute most of my track record to luck.

[00:10:13] Stig Brodersen: Whenever I think back on some of the decisions that I took, like some of them felt pretty marginal and your hindsight’s always 20, 20. And I think we have a tendency to think that whenever we have something in our portfolio that works well, it’s because we’re really smart. And if something goes bad, it’s because we’re very unlucky.

[00:10:28] Stig Brodersen: And I’m very cognizant of that potential bias to have. I certainly remember that back from my day playing poker, where if I won a pot, it’s because I was brilliant. I was out thinking my opponent. If I lost, it was a bad beat and you know, the other guy was just super lucky and it’s not a good way of living your life.

[00:10:47] Stig Brodersen: So I do think that 10 years is relatively short period of time in the grand scheme of things. And with a high level of certainty, I expect to achieve a significantly. less impressive track record over the next 10 years. I think if you put me on the spot on whether or not I could sustain like a 20% plus CAGR, I mean, those are the type of track records for the likes of Warren Buffett.

[00:11:08] Stig Brodersen: That’s everyone who knows me certainly knows that I’m the very opposite of him whenever it comes to, to skillset. So a probability would probably be like low single digits or anything like that. Like, I’m not saying it’s zero, but I just don’t think it would be possible for me. And I should also say on that note, speaking about billionaires, I highly recommend Jeff Bezos wonderful book, Invent and Wander.

[00:11:27] Stig Brodersen: And so it’s a compilation of the shareholder letters and a few other things and I’m going to paraphrase here, but he talks about how this is a letter he sends to, to the team and shareholders, but how the Amazon team are not necessarily super smart because the stock is going up, but they’re also not the opposite of the stock is going down.

[00:11:45] Stig Brodersen: And so I think that’s so important for us to remember as a stock investors. And of course our track record is to some extent a scorecard, but it’s just, it’s so volatile and there’s just so many things that’s outside of our control. And you know, just one element of luck, if I can just include that. So I’ve been lucky to contribute more money to my portfolio in more bullish years and contribute less to other years.

[00:12:09] Stig Brodersen: And so I generally like to be fully invested whenever I can. And so there is an element of lock in whenever I was going into say private investments and whenever I was going into public investments. And then also to your point about what the financial goals are. So to my financial goal have for a long time been financial independence.

[00:12:30] Stig Brodersen: And now my goal is very much to preserve wealth. As much as I would like to grow wealth, I would like to preserve wealth. And so today, like, for example, I, you know, starting out reading all of Buffett’s letters, I would never invest in gold and now I have a, I think it’s like a 7% ish investment in gold, in physical gold.

[00:12:50] Stig Brodersen: Because, you know, there’s a war going on a thousand kilometers away from where I’m recording. And I never thought that would be an issue. And all of a sudden, I see good argument for holding gold. Not because I think gold is going to outperform That’s not why I’m holding it, but I hold it as an insurance.

[00:13:06] Stig Brodersen: I also have two ETFs in my portfolio, and I don’t think those ETFs can generate 20 plus % CAGR. There’s no way, but that’s also not the strategy right now for me. It’s very much like how I can preserve the purchasing power that I have now, and I’m I like to think that it’s a feature, not a bug, that my risk profile has changed to become more conservative.

[00:13:30] Stig Brodersen: And so for all of those reasons, I would imagine that my track record is going to be significantly worse the next 10 years than the past 10 years. And then you know, I can draw on about what I, some of the expectations I have to the interest rate environment, but it’s sort of like a different discussion, perhaps not what you talked about.

[00:13:47] Clay Finck: Inherently, when we’re investing, we’re thinking about what’s the potential upside, what’s the potential downside. And when you’re trying to achieve financial independence, you probably care about a lot more about, you know, asymmetric plays, high upside potential, but, you know, when you’re focusing more on capital preservation, a lot of focus is really put on that downside protection, which naturally limits the upside potential.

[00:14:09] Clay Finck: Gold is a fantastic example where, you know, maybe just thrown out numbers, 90 or 95 % of cases, it probably underperforms the S&P 500. But you know, in those five or 10 % of cases, it might do really well. And it looks, you look like a genius for owning gold because it just does way better.

[00:14:26] Clay Finck: Maybe it stays flat while the S& P drops 40%, or maybe it drops 10% when the S&P drops by more than 40%. It’s really difficult to put to perspective, like why you own what you own, because the world is just fundamentally uncertain and things are always changing. And I wanted to also mention Monish Pabrai’s fund, because that is also a pretty large stake in your portfolio. So I was curious if you could share with the audience a little bit more about that.

[00:14:54] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, that’s a good point. So I should probably say that there are many reasons why I wanted to invest with Mohnish, but I did consider whether or not I should include it in my portfolio. So I have different private investments.

[00:15:08] Stig Brodersen: I also have public investments. I kind of felt to make a more comparable portfolio review and talk about the cake around that, it would have to be public listed assets. I also included gold, which it definitely drawing down my returns, but I kind of felt I wanted to have gold in there, even though it’s technically not listed, but I think it’s a very important component of a portfolio.

[00:15:28] Stig Brodersen: Again, depending on your life circumstances, all that good stuff. But going back to your question about Monash, so this was an investment I made back in 2022. And like you mentioned, this is a sizable position of mine, and it’s not a listed asset. So, but to me, it didn’t feel too different than including Berkshire Hathaway.

[00:15:46] Stig Brodersen: And I have like, I don’t know, 10% ish in Berkshire Hathaway. It didn’t feel too different like having Mohnish manage my assets or owning a small part of Berkshire Hathaway and have Warren Buffett manage those assets. And so I included that in my portfolio. And it’s also one of many reasons why I feel that the MCI All Country World Index made more sense as a benchmark.

[00:16:06] Stig Brodersen: And we’re going to talk later about whether or not you should have a benchmark in the first place, but I have a lot of exposure to the US and Mohnish has a lot of companies outside of the US, which I really like from a diversification standpoint for my own portfolio. And then of course, there’s also the inherent thing about having your own biases and being aware of your own biases. And so having someone on your team that just looks at other stocks that you do. I like that too.

[00:16:30] Clay Finck: You’ve interviewed who knows how many people you’ve been podcasting since 2014. And we’ve talked with a lot of fund managers. There’s a lot of people you could have invested with over the years, but you chose only one person to one fund manager, at least to invest with not counting the Warren Buffetts of the world. So why did you choose Mohnish out of all these people you’ve interviewed over the past decade?

[00:16:56] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, that’s a good question, Clay, and it’s a combination of a lot of things. So, perhaps the most important thing is to invest with a manager with a long and successful track record. And you could put Mohnish into that category.

[00:17:08] Stig Brodersen: I think it’s also a question of understanding the process. Someone like Mohnish Pabrai, at least with the skills that I have, that obviously it’s not at the same level as his, but I want to think that I understand what he’s doing and I think it’s very important to understand the process. And it’s not too different than whenever you want to invest in a stock, like you have to understand what can potentially go wrong.

[00:17:31] Stig Brodersen: And whenever the bull thesis breaks and so by, having access to Mohnish and not just, you know, on a one to one basis, like say, asking him for an interview, but like being able to follow him and listening to his other interviews and like figuring out what’s going on. I think I understand the process well enough to have an idea of if he would, do something silly and I should stop investing with him.

[00:17:55] Stig Brodersen: Whereas I think if I invested with a macro investor, like I think macro is very interesting. I just don’t know how to invest accordingly. And like, I don’t think I would know like whenever that asset manager would potentially go off the rails just because I don’t have that skillset to be like, that’s not the way it’s supposed to be.

[00:18:12] Stig Brodersen: So I think Mohnish has a similar skill set in terms of like being a micro investor, understanding companies just so much better than me. But I also think that there’s an element of, you know, in the value investing community, we meet so many people who speak Buffett fluently. But you know, you can walk the walk and they just talk the talk.

[00:18:32] Stig Brodersen: And so that’s also why you have to really consider the long term record and you know, because we hear and we speak with all of these investors and, you know, they talk about struggle competence and having a strong mode and margin of safety. But then whenever you ask about the track record, sometimes you, it’s just, it doesn’t look good.

[00:18:50] Stig Brodersen: And so it really goes back again to the track record. Then I have a criteria about investing with someone who has the vast majority of the net worth in their fund. I’m surprised to learn how rare that is. Most asset managers would not have that, which is a red flag in itself. There is a fee structure alike, the 0625. So, 0% fixed fees, 6% watermark, and then 25% fee for returns more than 6% and that 6% sort of like accumulates so it’s not enough, its good one year and terrible the next year. And I feel like that very much aligns our interest. It’s copied from the Buffett Partnerships, and I think I’ve probably seen and spoke with too many asset managers where it was a pure percentage of AOM or asset under management.

[00:19:33] Stig Brodersen: And if that’s the case, you, like we all react to incentives and it would give an ascent to more to become a marketing machine more than a great as a manager. I talked about before, like how reliant I am on the U.S with absolute love. I also think that it’s, you know, diversification is important and mine is just looking at all of those places.

[00:19:52] Stig Brodersen: I’m certainly not like Turkey and India and a bunch of other countries that I would never touch. And I rely on his better judgment on those investments and he runs a very concentrated portfolio, 10-ish positions and let his winners run. I don’t have any issues with him having, I don’t know, 50% and one holding if that was one of his winners.

[00:20:12] Stig Brodersen: I think that’s perfectly fine. I can size my own position with him accordingly if I don’t feel comfortable. I wouldn’t have 100% of my net worth with any asset manager, but like I can, if I have 10% with him, you know, and he has 50% in one stock, it’s only 5% of my portfolio.

[00:20:25] Stig Brodersen: And so I like that and I should have probably also say that it might sound a bit ironic, but I really like he’s not available to shareholders. I think that there was something to be said about learning from the cues from Buffett and Munger, where it’s like, yeah, you can do that once a year. In Munger’s case, like there’s a, there’s an online event and then there’s a live event at his office.

[00:20:45] Stig Brodersen: But I think too many asset managers spend too much time speaking with shareholders, investors, and that they should probably spend their time focused on creating value rather. So because of all those reasons, I know that was a long spiel. I think that Mohnish just checks the boxes, and I like this idea of only investing with the highest of convictions, and so, because of all that, I only want to invest with one, and in this case, it was Mohnish.

[00:21:12] Clay Finck: Yeah, and if I remember correctly, you invested with him in 2022, right?

[00:21:17] Stig Brodersen: Yes, from April 1st, yes.

[00:21:20] Clay Finck: Okay and taking my memory back, I believe you interviewed Mohnish right after you invested around that time. And he talked all about, you know, the process of, I believe he talked about why you ended up investing with him.

[00:21:31] Clay Finck: And you talked about how you can think about picking a fund manager and such. So I’ll be sure to link that discussion in the show notes and one thing that stood out to me in your response there is that you said that you feel you understand. What Mohnish is doing. I’d like to learn more about this because his track record goes back to around the year 2000 or so and he’s a very well-known value investor and I think back to some of the talks he’s gave one, two years ago and he talks about circle the wagons, buying higher quality companies and letting your winners run.

[00:22:02] Clay Finck: So part of me feels that his approach has maybe changed in recent years and part of me questions, well, is the first 20 years really that relevant if he’s, you know, changing his process and changing the type of companies he’s invested in? So maybe you could talk about that. What about it, you know, gives you the comfort of understanding what he’s doing and how he’s differentiated from the others with the exception of, you know, diving into these very unique markets.

[00:22:29] Stig Brodersen: So we’re both student of history and if you look at the greatest companies, they change and they change with the times. And I think that’s the, I’m going to interview actually minus a few days after this is being published. So perhaps I should ask him about that. But I think you bring up a good point where you’re saying, okay, so we have perhaps 20 years of you approaching things this way.

[00:22:52] Stig Brodersen: Now you’re doing it another way, why would you still have the same returns? I think that’s a great question. I think I want to go about this from an angle of success tends to leave clues. If you look at what Warren Buffett is doing now and what he did in the nineties, what he did in the eighties, what he did in the fifties, I think there was.

[00:23:09] Stig Brodersen: I think it’s a natural evolution, but he hasn’t done the same thing because he needed a new skill set. He needed to adapt to the times, he needed to adapt to how much money he was managing and I think it’s the same thing with Mohnish. Like he had to change, like we all had to change and so I have a pretty strong conviction in that.

[00:23:25] Stig Brodersen: And then at the same time, I have a part of my portfolio with Mohnish, not all of it, because I think that diversification piece is so important because I could be all wrong. I could be completely wrong but then at the same time, I really like that you asked that question. You know, one of the things I do in preparation, I typically interview money throughout April, some point in time, and then it’s getting published throughout the Berkshire weekend.

[00:23:48] Stig Brodersen: And it gives me the chance to go through all the videos which I just started today. And there are 50 videos and they’re roughly one hour each. So there’s a lot to go through and it’s so interesting because whenever you do that, and you really concentrate on that for let’s say three weeks, you can almost feel that there is a progression going on throughout that year because you follow it so intently.

[00:24:10] Stig Brodersen: And I’ve probably done that and I know I interviewed him, like you mentioned 2022, but I think I’ve done that the past five, six years like that. So it’s very interesting to see the investment philosophy change, but at the same time, I feel it’s fundamentally the same and its still very much micro bottom up investing.

[00:24:28] Clay Finck: I’m also curious to learn more about your private investments. 100 % of my portfolios and things that are publicly listed, anyone can go out and buy, but private deals are quite unique because you never know some of the things that come up or what the connections you have as a host and the types of people you get to meet and the opportunities that get brought to you. Talk more about your private investments and how this plays into the bigger picture for you.

[00:24:53] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, so I haven’t included my private investments in the returns I talked about before or in the blog post I’m going to link to. And I haven’t because I felt that the results would be too extreme. For example, I have made an investment, a private investment, I think it was two years ago, something like that.

[00:25:12] Stig Brodersen: And I got access to it to your point through different connections. And so whenever I signed the dotted line, I probably made 10X. So a thousand percent return on that and not something that can be replicated. So if I were to include that type of return in my track record, I’m going to sound like I’m way smarter than I am because it was such a unique situation.

[00:25:31] Clay Finck: How is it possible to make a 10X when you sign the dotted line? I’m sure many in the audience are going to be curious about this.

[00:25:38] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, so private deals comes with, it depends of course, but in this case, the GP really wanted me to be a part of it for promotional reasons and whatnot and so there can be an element of a bit of spread equity in, or it might be the case that they’re giving you very favorable conditions, and then you’re supposed to be an advisor, being sounding board for a few different things.

[00:26:03] Stig Brodersen: And so, like, if you look at the dollar amount that’s put in, it looks outrageous probably, but it might still make sense for the other party. Not that I should compare myself to Warren Buffett by any means, but for example, whenever you know, He did the famous Goldman Sachs deal during the great financial crisis.

[00:26:18] Stig Brodersen: Like, the terms he got was just outrageously good. And you might be thinking, that was just terrible for the shareholders of Goldman Sachs, but it really wasn’t because Warren Buffett brought something else to the table. He brought his name, reputation, and a few dollars. And so, so it was a good deal for the shareholders of Goldman Sachs.

[00:26:35] Stig Brodersen: And so this was not a good deal. And I didn’t contribute, you know, billions of dollars, whatever he did back then. But the principle behind being in the fortunate situation where I could put my name up and get favorable conditions. And then you have other private, I don’t want to call them investments, but you know, friends and family who might’ve gotten a loan at 0%.

[00:26:57] Stig Brodersen: I also did not include that in the track record. And cause it’s not an investment. It’s love money. It’s because you care for your friends and family. So. There are a few things that’s out of the portfolio that you’re not seeing. And so everything else equal when, if you were to go to, to check up on that and say, oh, you have like 10 % or 15%, whatever it is in Berkshire Hathaway, know that these numbers are a bit skewed because they don’t include the private side.

[00:27:20] Clay Finck: Now in measuring returns, it sounds easy because you just look at, oh, this is where stock was at the beginning of the year. Here’s where it ended at the end of the year. And it went up 20%. That’s your return but once you start digging in and you do this over 10 years, you do various trades, you get into certain markets and you have different accounts.

[00:27:39] Clay Finck: It becomes very complex, very quick and then, you know, you’re buying things in the middle of the year. So, you know, you might have bought one position in 2015. You might have added to that position two months ago. How does that change the returns and such? So, how about you share how you use ShareSight to measure your returns.

[00:28:01] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, so this was something I’ve only started doing because I just looked at my brokerage account, just like, I guess so many others, but of course the problem with that is if you have other investments that’s outside of that account, like it doesn’t really, it’s not included. And so, like you said, it quickly became very confusing.

[00:28:19] Stig Brodersen: And so, for example, for my goal holdings, for PopRite funds and like some of that, we just like mess things up and so one of the members of the TIP mastermind community, He was like, Hey dude, why don’t you use [Inaudible] like the rest of us and I was like, oh, I never heard about that and so I signed up and I think I pay like 31 a month.

[00:28:39] Stig Brodersen: I think there was like different savings or something like that. And we should probably set up some kind of deal with them and figure something out. But like, it’s not a super expensive tool, but it does cost some money. But for me, it has been very good in terms of tracking everything and figuring everything out.

[00:28:53] Stig Brodersen: Like, I don’t know which broker you’re using, but like, I’ve been surprised to see how inflexible my own broker is in terms of measuring returns and ShareSight has just, that’s just been created for investors and can just give you brilliant reports and so I found that to be a very good, I should say, and this might just be me.

[00:29:13] Stig Brodersen: And because I live in Denmark, I have a broker in Danish. Like I had, I couldn’t auto import it, but I heard from other people way smarter than me, probably also because they use an English broker. That they can auto import everything. I had to import all of my trades manually. It took me like four weeks or something ridiculous like that to do that but it was actually a lot of fun doing it. It was rueful, but it was also fun because I had a chance to go through every single trade I made since 2014.

[00:29:39] Clay Finck: So trip down memory lane, right?

[00:29:42] Stig Brodersen: Tripped down painful, but it tripped down memory lane. Yes.

[00:29:46] Clay Finck: I just pulled up ShareSight’s site. They have a free version. It lets you do one portfolio, up to 10 holdings and then they have three other levels. It’s actually really accessible. So there’s a starter 7 a month, investors 18 a month. So yeah, the audience might want to check that out if they’re curious of what their returns have been. So given that you went line by line, entered every single trade, you’ve probably done some reflection on what you did right and what you did wrong over the years. How about we start with some of the things you did wrong? What were some of your biggest mistakes and learnings from that?

[00:30:20] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, so I don’t know how much time you have. There’s so many, there’s so many mistakes. It was like, I was going through it and I was just shaking my head so many times. Well, I think we also have to go in and define a bit.

[00:30:35] Stig Brodersen: What is a mistake? Is it percentage? Is it in dollars? Is it probably both to some extent? Is it more principle? So let me give you an example. I invested in Phillips 66 and I think this was back in 2015 and I did read the financial statements, I should say, but to be completely honest, I had so much confirmation bias, at least whenever I’m looking back, because Buffett just made a position.

[00:30:58] Stig Brodersen: And so I was really looking for ways to find a good excuse to do the same thing as Buffett. And I count that as a mistake. I actually ended up making a profit probably because Buffett is smart. I don’t think I am. And, but I think the mistake in that was the due diligence. I feel I did the wrong due diligence and it was more luck than anything else that, that made that a profitable trade.

[00:31:19] Stig Brodersen: And I know some studies that say that you can just buy whatever Buffett is buying and sell whenever he’s selling. And of course there, there’s a caveat that, you know, he can do it before, you know, and like, it has to be disclosed 45 days later and all of that. But like, I think if you make it like a very mechanical approach, you can probably make good returns like that.

[00:31:38] Stig Brodersen: I just generally don’t think it’s a good strategy to, to follow. And so in any case, I, there was a one off, but I felt it was a mistake. If you talk about dollars, I know I’ve talked about this a few times here on the show. I definitely am not pleased with my investment in Alibaba. My cost basis is 120, and I think right now at the time of recording, let me just look up here, 73 dollars. Wow. Ouch. So measuring dollars has been my biggest mistake because I put a decent amount of conviction behind it. And you know, one day I might start like a self-help group for all of us who invested in Alibaba. And I constantly wonder if it’s a mistake still to hold onto it. You know, it’s certainly not worth what I thought it was at the time I made the investment, but I also feel that it is severely undervalued at 73. But there’s, I mean, there’s such a fine line between success and failure. And you know, if we ran this scenario a thousand times, who knows what would have happened? I certainly know that in this, I kind of feel bad about it because now I’m starting to excuse myself and say, oh, perhaps it’s just bad luck.

[00:32:44] Stig Brodersen: I don’t think it was bad luck. I think it was. It was poor judgment on my end. Full stop. So I think that there’s an element of you make a mistake perhaps, or in this case, certainly by buying into it, but it’s also a potential mistake to hold onto it. Like right now, in a situation with Alibaba where the business is not getting that much better, are you really then just hoping for a multiple expansion because you feel it’s being undervalued?

[00:33:10] Stig Brodersen: Perhaps that lack of multiple expansion is justified because the business isn’t getting that much better. Like it’s just a tricky situation or perhaps it’s just me that’s ignorant. Continuing down this painful trip down memory lane, I bought into the Stars Group back in 2018. They’re most known for owning PogoStars.

[00:33:27] Stig Brodersen: And they were later bought by Flutter Entertainment. So I sold it at a 55 % loss after a little more than one year. I think that was my biggest loss measured percentage. I did invest very little though. And so it didn’t really have any material impact on my portfolio, but it certainly didn’t feel good.

[00:33:44] Stig Brodersen: And then I should say, you know, another type of investment is not to invest with enough conviction in your best ideas. I started an investment in Spotify in December 2022, and I bought it at $78 and it’s up 231% here as of today. So that’s in what, 15 months? But it’s like 1% of my portfolio. And so if I’ve been smart, you know, I would’ve made a full size bet of 10% and Spotify was a stock I previously owned. It was a product they used. I saw what they were doing in the podcasting space and I only invested very little.

[00:34:19] Stig Brodersen: So I kind of feel that was a mistake, even though you could say I made a profit and so this is something I struggle with because I feel I had the same conviction in Spotify as I had whenever I was building a position in Alibaba, but one worked out and just the other one didn’t.

[00:34:33] Stig Brodersen: And I think one of the reasons why I invested so little in Spotify was because I just lost my shirt investing in a barber. So I was, I remember at that time feeling very vulnerable and like stick your process all wrong. You invest in this Chinese company and even though like you had such high conviction going into this, now you have the similar conviction going to Spotify.

[00:34:54] Stig Brodersen: You should probably just like dip your toes in the water, which I certainly did not do with Alibaba and so. I think that was probably one of the reasons why. And another thing, if you’ll allow me, is that I think I’ve also learned that it’s not a question of whether or not you’re right more than 50% of the time.

[00:35:09] Stig Brodersen: If you have a 10% probability of doing 100X on one of your investments, generically, I don’t know if that’s ever going to be the case, but like, if you have 10% probability of doing 100X, like you should be playing that game all the time and so it’s also a question of letting your winners run.

[00:35:25] Stig Brodersen: And I don’t always think I’ve done a good job of letting my winners run. And then I think the last thing I would say to this is that it was very interesting to see how many positions I had, like how many stocks ETFs I’ve owned since 2014. I figured out that the answer was 45 in my case. And I currently own five stocks and two ETFs.

[00:35:45] Stig Brodersen: And it really reminds me of the conversation with Ian Cassell that you did Clay on episode 606. And you talked about Nick and Zach from Nomad Investment Partnerships. And you said to Ian, well, they basically had Berkshire, Costco and Amazon. And then he responded, well, they had to hold probably hundreds of stocks to realize that those three companies were the ones to hold on to. I don’t know, I just really like Ian’s take on that.

[00:36:09] Clay Finck: I totally agree with what you said on Phillips 66. Say someone buys a stock that really doesn’t align with their philosophy. It goes up 30 % over two years, and then they sell it. 30%, we’ll say before tax, and then they sell it and they call it a win.

[00:36:26] Clay Finck: But Buffett has often said his biggest mistakes were mistakes of omission. So you can look at Phillips 66 and went up 30%, you know, you didn’t lose money, but you’re forgetting about all the great companies that you didn’t buy. And you just missed out on two years of compounding within those companies.

[00:36:43] Clay Finck: And Chris Mayer has really helped me appreciate, you know, having this, I just like how he just uses his 10 year view. It’s somewhat conceivable, you know, it’s kind of ridiculous to say, hey, we need to have a 50 year view. When do we invest? But 10 years, you know, it feels pretty doable. And, you know, as you mentioned, I’ve really also come to appreciate letting your winners run, appreciating that the power of these longer term compounders, because, you know, the power really is in the long tail of letting them compound.

[00:37:13] Clay Finck: So if you’re missing out on those first two years, then you’re just delaying that process. And it’s interesting also that you say that Alibaba was a mistake to buy, or you’re contemplating whether it was a mistake to buy in terms of the market price declining. Yes, it was a mistake if you judge it on that basics.

[00:37:30] Clay Finck: But, you know, in studying history, you start to really appreciate the Graham saying that the market’s a voting machine in the short term, but a weighing machine in the long term. And when you look at back at so many great businesses, I mean, a lot of great companies go nowhere or they decline over two or three year periods.

[00:37:49] Clay Finck: And, you know, the market does crazy things and you don’t know until say 10 years later, whether the market was rational or irrational in the pricing of that asset. And we had a community spotlight yesterday with a member of our mastermind community, and this member worked at Microsoft for 25 years, works alongside these heavy hitters, Bill Gates, and a lot of other names that people would be familiar with at Microsoft, and he joined the company in 1988.

[00:38:15] Clay Finck: And he was just talking about how he was just all in on this company and he told us he put a 100 % of his retirement money in Microsoft stock because he was just totally bought into what they were doing and their mission and then he mentions, you know, he joined in 1988 and over the 10 years that preceded that, the stock compounded by 40% a year.

[00:38:34] Clay Finck: And then when you look at what happened to Microsoft stock after the tech bubble, of course, it corrected heavily. It was something like, I don’t know, 50% correction, something in that ballpark after 1999, 2000. And then the stock went nowhere from essentially 2001 through 2013. It’s just a flat chart.

[00:38:51] Clay Finck: Like it’s not really doing much, you know, the GFC, it obviously went down. And obviously it’s been a big winner. If you would have bought it at any point in 2001 to 2013, you would have looked dumb from 2001 to 2011, but you know, in the long run, the market’s a weighing machine and Alibaba is probably a pretty good case study here because your average price, I believe you shared was 120.

[00:39:13] Clay Finck: Now it’s trading at 73 and that doesn’t mean that buying it at 120 wasn’t necessarily, you know, a bad decision. It could have been a bargain relative to the underlying value, because that’s all that matters is like, what’s the value of the business and what that value will be over time. And, you know, what we’re really getting at is the world is not as black and white as we’d like it to be.

[00:39:35] Clay Finck: There’s so much gray area and the Annie Dukes of the world have taught us that you can make a bet with a 99% chance of being right, but it not working out. You could have a, you could have a hand in poker. You’re almost certain is going to win, but then someone flips their cards and they got a four of a kind and you’re like, what in the world? And just like, you know, a bad beat, as you mentioned. So maybe you could speak more to Alibaba investment and you know, is it a mistake because the price declined or is it a mistake because of something else you overlooked?

[00:40:06] Stig Brodersen: There is this wonderful quote that risk is everything that’s left that you haven’t thought of. It goes along those lines. I think we tend to be susceptible to resulting. So we look at, in this case, Alibaba, and we say it’s down. So that was a mistake or we invested in Microsoft that’s flat for, I don’t know how many years, and it was a mistake, but perhaps it wasn’t. I think you’re too kind. I should say though in terms of my investment in Alibaba, I don’t think I appreciated the CCP and what they did and how, I mean, I could probably come out and say that you could only make a decision based on the information you had at that point in time.

[00:40:46] Stig Brodersen: Like let’s say that you invested in airlines like Buffet did before COVID, but then second level thinking would say. If you haven’t included COVID, is that your fault or whose fault, is it? Because it was something that was possible. I don’t think I certainly didn’t include COVID in my assessments before it happened, and I didn’t include, at least not well enough, everything that was going on in China from a regulatory perspective.

[00:41:13] Stig Brodersen: I didn’t consider how the Chinese government would go in and restrict Alibaba’s cloud product, for example. And so was that a mistake? I think yes. I think the answer is that it was a mistake on my end. You know, Morgan Housel in his wonderful book, Same as Ever, he talks about setting yourself up for success and talk about if you ran this experiment a thousand times, you want to be in a situation where you would win the vast majority of the times.

[00:41:40] Stig Brodersen: And so, everyone who invested in Bitcoin, for example, I mean, well, depending on which side you’re on, perhaps you’re a genius, or you feel that the people who invested in Bitcoin are degenerate gamblers. I don’t know, but I don’t think if you ran the scenario of Bitcoin and being all into Bitcoin a thousand times, I don’t think you would see the outcome that you’re seeing now.

[00:42:01] Stig Brodersen: I think you would see a lot of very bad outcomes, some of those times, I don’t know how many. And so back to your question, with Alibaba, if we ran that simulation a thousand times, would it be, no? I don’t think it would.

[00:42:13] Clay Finck: I think there’s also another lesson here with Alibaba. I know Charlie Munger was well known for betting big on Alibaba, then doubling down and I know there were other super investors.

[00:42:23] Clay Finck: I don’t want to name names because I’m not 100 % sure who all bought into it. But, you know, it’s a case where you can’t just clone people. It’s I mean, cloning isn’t going to have 100 % hit rate. Monash talked about this in your episode with him last year. Mistakes are inevitable. Even if you’re a super investor, you’re going to make mistakes and you shouldn’t just clone someone, especially Stig and I.

[00:42:44] Clay Finck: Again, we aren’t equity analysts or fund managers. We’re just out here trying to learn and get a little bit better every day. So that’s another thing just as an outside observer of what I see in Alibaba. Tying into mistakes being inevitable. I love that Mohnish last year on that episode, he mentioned that Investing is a very forgivable endeavor.

[00:43:07] Clay Finck: You can bat less than he said something to the effect of you can bat less than 50 % on your investments and still come out smelling really nice. I love the way he phrased it. He just has a very funny way of putting things. And I totally agree with him. You know, when you have this approach of letting your big winners run.

[00:43:26] Clay Finck: They hopefully tend to far outweigh your mistakes that, you know, again, no investor is going to bat a 100 % and mistakes are just part of the game. So I’m certainly not trying to pick on Stig here and trying to find all of his mistakes over the past 10 years. So with that said, let’s turn to your big winners over the past 10 years.

[00:43:45] Stig Brodersen: Yeah. Well, thank you for also teeing me up to, to talk about perhaps a few, you know, I’ll be the first to say that Bitcoin has been good to me. I don’t think I bring anything new to the party and I certainly don’t want to use this platform to be talking about why you should be invested and not be invested in Bitcoin.

[00:44:00] Stig Brodersen: And especially because of what Buffett and Munger has said, it tends to be a very toxic thing to talk about on the show, which is also why we have a different show that Preston is hosting when he’s talking about it. You know, whenever I was, I got my education and reading all of Buffett’s letters and reading the snowball and all the, like the 20 bestselling books on Buffett.

[00:44:18] Stig Brodersen: We learned that you should invest in real companies or invest in something like a farm compared to a nugget of gold, because one generates cash flow and the other one doesn’t. And I think I see that differently today. Every time I invest a dollar, I estimate the probability of getting more than that dollar back, you know, how much can I gain?

[00:44:39] Stig Brodersen: How much can I lose? And what’s the probabilities of that? And Preston and I started covering Bitcoin back in 2015, and I started building my position in 2017. But for me, it seemed to be a very asymmetric bet, like what we’re looking for as investors. And a lot of people would probably, you know, disagree with that.

[00:44:56] Stig Brodersen: And I think that’s perfectly fine. And, you know, we can Jump to the next point and luckily there have been other winners, but it’s not something I’ve invested in because I’m anti-establishment or because I think it’s going to replace fiat currencies. I know a lot of people think that and that, who knows, they might be right. They might be wrong. The way that I invest my money is I estimate the probabilities of upside and downside, and I could very often, and probably I am wrong, as you could tell from what we talked about before. And that was how I made the investment into Bitcoin. Nothing more, nothing less. I am mainly invested in equities, I should say.

[00:45:32] Stig Brodersen: Alphabet has been good to me. I started building my position in 2018. I remember at the time, and this was bought at a split adjusted price of 54. And it’s currently trading at 135. I remember thinking Alphabet at the time was already huge, like 600 billion ish market cap. But at the time I’ve started to gain an appreciation for good businesses.

[00:45:53] Stig Brodersen: And I saw no reason why it would change. I started building a position in Berkshire in 2014 at 115 for Berkshire. It currently trades around 400. And so in percentage gain as in a CAGR, it’s not as impressive as let’s say an Alphabet or something different or Spotify for that matter, even though it’s a very small part of my position, but in dollar value, since I’ve Invested significantly more in Berkshire and of course is a different situation.

[00:46:21] Stig Brodersen: So again, it depends on do you look at percentage or dollars. And then I would also say in terms of winners, I’m mainly talking about the positions I hold now, but I would say that I’ve transitioned into what Manish would call growing pies instead of discounted pies. I think a lot of value investors, they probably start with cigar butts, or perhaps it’s just my own bias.

[00:46:43] Stig Brodersen: But I’ve just heard that story so many times before. And then they’re threshing into paying off for quality down the line, which is also why I talked about before about having bought, you know, 45 different equities, but the last stock I bought was in April last year. And so, I can see how I trade less and less, but also how much I focus on quality.

[00:47:03] Stig Brodersen: And you can make a really good living investing in businesses and then have them appreciate whatnot up to the intrinsic value and then move on to the next stock. There’s nothing wrong with that approach. And that is how a lot of value investors invest. That’s just a different approach than the one I’m following now.

[00:47:17] Clay Finck: And you mentioned your approach to equities. You purchased a company in April of last year, and it was definitely a situation where we’d say you’re paying up for quality and with the attempt of buying a growing pie rather than a discounted pie. So I think that’s a good transition to talk more about that and how your investment approach and how you view investing in equities has changed.

[00:47:40] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, it’s kind of interesting. You, and again, I can only talk about my own story as a value investor, but again, I hear so many people saying that they started with cigar bots, which is not running because if you read about Buffett, you also learn that’s not the way you’re supposed to invest. And he’s saying that himself.

[00:47:56] Stig Brodersen: And then. At least I did. And then I made all the same mistakes as he did right out of the gates. Like I was saying before, it can be profitable to do the approach of discounted pies and then wait until it reaches intrinsic value, assuming that you’re right, of course, and then move on to the next stock.

[00:48:12] Stig Brodersen: And that was how I started. I don’t think it’s a bad way to start because you learn to be more comfortable with the quantitative piece of it. Like you learn how to focus on low multiples. Which I think is an important, you learn to find that margin of safety, especially whenever you don’t fully understand the quality piece.

[00:48:30] Stig Brodersen: And so even though of course you can be terrible mistaken and you can fall into value traps and whatnot, if you buy cigar butts in the beginning of your career, very often you don’t get burned too much. There’s a lot of caveats to that, but I will probably make that argument. And then I would also say that one of the mistakes I made in the early days was that I felt I owned too many stocks in my portfolio.

[00:48:53] Stig Brodersen: And I think you also have to consider a lot of things whenever you consider how many stocks to own. Whenever you’re young, it’s a diversification in itself. And so if you have no money or not a lot of money, you know, if you own two to four stocks, that’s perfectly fine. If you lose it, you’ll have plenty of time to, to get started once again.

[00:49:12] Stig Brodersen: And the other thing is that if you feel you’re just starting out, you have 10,000 dollars whatever, and you feel, I really need to be diversified. And then you want to find 15 stocks. If you’re very new and you want to be invested in 15 stocks, you’re probably forcing the action. And I’m going to make the claim that if you find that many stocks, you probably don’t know them well enough to be invested in the first place.

[00:49:35] Stig Brodersen: And so, so how do we find them? Well, either like mentioned, you don’t understand them or you didn’t buy them at the right price because you were, you said to yourself, I have to have this number of stocks. Otherwise I’m not diversified. Whereas perhaps at that point in time in your career, you should probably be thinking, well, I’m like doubling my portfolio from, you know, the inflow of capital from my day job on an annual basis.

[00:49:56] Stig Brodersen: So I don’t really need to be as diversified as I would think. I think if you’re just getting started in investing, you know, one way you can slowly go into picking individual stocks would be to buy like a world ETF from Vanguard, whatnot. And then every time you find a stock, then ask yourself, is this better than what I already own? And through that, gradually, cautiously start to invest in individual stocks.

[00:50:23] Clay Finck: What’s somewhat impressive to me when I look at what you own is how few positions you hold. I mean, when you’re looking at the individual pieces, you now own a couple ETFs and invested with Mohnish that adds to the diversification.

[00:50:39] Clay Finck: And when I look back at my journey over the past couple of years, I’ve added heavily to a handful of companies over the past year or so, and did something similar to what you said, where I’m transitioning out of these maybe safer plays, things that I know are likely to work well over a long time, like an index fund.

[00:50:55] Clay Finck: And I often think about which companies I might not own in five or 10 years. I think it’s pretty foolish to think that, you know, we’re all trying to be long term investors, but it’s pretty foolish to think that. My portfolio will have the same holdings five or 10 years from today, just due to things changing as fast as ever.

[00:51:15] Clay Finck: And it’s really difficult for great companies to keep doing what they’re doing for a long time. You know, I’d like to also think that I’d be willing to part ways with the company that where the thesis just isn’t there anymore and things have changed and it’s time to move on. So. With that said, I’m curious if you have any best loved ideas that you’d be interested in sharing that you’ve been forced one way or another to part ways with.

[00:51:41] Stig Brodersen: Yeah, I used to own Process and the company is probably mainly known for its big stake in Tencent. And at the time I made the position, I thought, and I still do think that Tencent is undervalued, but then on top of that, Process was trading at a discount to the listed equities. Plus they had a sizable number of unlisted equities.

[00:52:02] Stig Brodersen: And so you get a double discount there and so I built it in 2022. I only held it for six months and it did became a profitable investment, but I decided to part ways with it because at the time, Alphabet was trading below 30. I just pulled it off here. I exited February 27, 2023. And I just felt that Alphabet was a better opportunity, partly because of the catalyst that I didn’t see to the same extent as Process.

[00:52:27] Stig Brodersen: They did have the buyback catalyst, but it wasn’t to the extent that I wanted it to be. Stig Brodersen. And I think it was also a reflection of, I moved more and more into a framework of high quality companies and looking a bit less at the discount to intrinsic value. I’m just going to do the humble brag and then say, since then, Alphabet is up 50 % and Process is down 30%, but as an investor, you’re playing the probability.

[00:52:49] Stig Brodersen: So if we were to do this like a thousand times. I certainly wouldn’t have the same result all a thousand times. And please correct me if I’m wrong here, Clay. I think you followed me into the trade because I think I sent you a message on Slack. Hey, I’m buying Alphabet.

[00:53:03] Clay Finck: Yeah, we went back and forth on Alphabet’s valuation.

[00:53:06] Clay Finck: And, you know, we looked at, you know, the big four or five, six pieces they have. They’re obviously search business, they’re cloud, YouTube, a lot of these really Incredible businesses. And yeah, we both thought it was well undervalued and the market happened to work in our favor as a, you know, quickly rebounded from that 90 price level and actually added to alphabet and Amazon at that time and ended up scaling out of both of those positions just because I found.

[00:53:33] Clay Finck: Some opportunities that really just felt pretty confident in the long term growth runway and not as much confident than some of these big tech names. And to your point on process, I’ve sort of given myself this unwritten rule to never invest based on some of the parts or discount to intrinsic value.

[00:53:51] Clay Finck: We’ll see if I am able to stick through that. There’s plenty of ideas running through our mastermind community, and you never know when something super compelling is going to come up that. might not align with that quality investing approach and You know, as you said, there’s nothing wrong with, you know, investing different from me or investing different from Stig.

[00:54:09] Clay Finck: And again, Chris Mayer just really helped me develop that thinking of, I almost use this filter where am I comfortable owning this business for the next 10 years? And when you ask yourself that question, do some of the parts or discount to intrinsic value play, a lot of times it tends to be like a two or three year type play where you’re hoping it reverts back to intrinsic value.

[00:54:30] Clay Finck: So, really focusing on that long term, I think is the advantage I’m trying to use in the markets for me personally and allocating to these other things. Of course you can make money, but also Stig, you’ve helped me appreciate the opportunity cost of time as well. You know, it takes time to go through different investments and fully understand them and get to know them well.

[00:54:51] Clay Finck: And even after I, I own a company, I get, I know it better over time and that knowledge and that understanding of a company compounds over time, I think. Selfishly, I just don’t want to have to research and start that research process all over again once I sell it for a 40% gain or whatnot.

[00:55:07] Stig Brodersen: Clay, I think this case study with Alphabet is so, so interesting because, so the end of January this year, Alphabet was trading at more than 150.

[00:55:17] Stig Brodersen: And I remember the conversation we had back then. I was thinking to myself, okay, so alphabet has reached somewhat intrinsic value. At least there might be a small upside to this, but like, it was sort of like whenever I bought it at 90, I was like, yeah, perhaps 150, perhaps more, but you know, whenever you have a pendulum very often, like it swings fastest right after it turns, and if I can use that analogy, I’ve never checked how a pendulum really works, but if it’s very much outside of the intrinsic value, you can get a quicker, shift back towards that.

[00:55:48] Stig Brodersen: And I remember thinking at the time, and I still struggle with this. It’s not because I know the answer, but to me, Alphabet is just such a high quality company. So the question now becomes, should I still continue to hold onto it, even though it’s probably around the intrinsic value. And I think if I found something else, I might have sold Google or Alphabet at the time, invested in that.

[00:56:11] Stig Brodersen: But at the same time, I’m thinking about this quality framework where you just, you’re holding on to a wonderful company like Alphabet that is doing, I don’t know, 20 % in return on investor capital or whatnot. So even though it has reached intrinsic value, it’s not timing the market, but time in the market.

[00:56:28] Stig Brodersen: And it’s just like, and it’s not easy because I know Clay and like you’re invested in other companies that like you talked about Dino Polska here on the show and a few other investments, Constellation, they just sent out a fantastic new 10Q and I’m like, oh, okay. You know, Clay was probably right. He should probably like sell just like I did, you know, whenever I started investing, sell whenever it reached intrinsic value, then move on to the next one.

[00:56:50] Stig Brodersen: And no, you don’t get any, you don’t get a 100 baggers that way, but then you get a lot of perhaps 50% winners and then you move on to the next one. And that. If you’re good, it’s another 50% winner. And then you go on to the next one. And so I think the alphabet case was quite interesting because we discussed it so much and I got stuck in my ways with this framework, whereas you said, well, it did its job. Now let’s move on to something else.

[00:57:13] Clay Finck: I don’t know if you listened to the Bill Ackman interview with Lex Friedman. For everyone out there, I highly recommend it. It was an incredible chat. They talked about Alphabet and Ackman. He also added to it, probably around the same time we did around the 90 range, I would guess.

[00:57:28] Clay Finck: He mentioned that ChatGPT kind of beat down the narrative on Alphabet because, of course search could be in the works of being disrupted. Right now it seems to be pretty stable, if not growing, and Ackman even said that Alphabet might even be in the lead in the AI race, so. Yeah, it’ll be interesting to see how these big tech players with a lot of money end up taking the direction of AI.

[00:57:52] Clay Finck: There’s also going to be a lot of startups that get, just get bought up by these companies eventually. And I want to mention if anyone in the audience has a great connection to Bill Ackman, I’d love to chat with him on the show. And I’ve tried for quite some time and with no success thus far. My next question for you, Stig, is comparing your portfolio to a benchmark. Is this useful? Is it necessary? What are your thoughts?

[00:58:15] Stig Brodersen: I generally don’t think that benchmarks are useful for private investors. I think they’re probably just going to add to your stress more than anything else. I do think that if you’re an asset manager and you’re taking client money, like if the premise of what you do is you can outperform the S& P 500 or the MSCI all country world index, whatever.

[00:58:36] Stig Brodersen: Yes, I think you should be benchmarked and you should be beating that benchmark to be worth your salt. For example, in my case, I don’t think it would make sense to be invested with PubRife funds. If I didn’t think he might as well do better than me, or if he wouldn’t do better than MCI all country world index, like that would be a bit silly because I could buy global the stock index myself, and then you know, be done with the hassle.

[00:58:58] Stig Brodersen: Of course, if you’re an asset manager, there are also different types. You know, if your goal is, you know, family office and your goal is to preserve capital for the next five generations, no, you probably don’t want to add that stress of you want to outperform perhaps you want to diversify into a lot of different asset classes.

[00:59:16] Stig Brodersen: And those asset classes are probably not going to 500 and that’s okay because what you’re doing is you want to achieve your financial goal, which is something different. So, you know, it is with quite some hesitation whenever you asked. Before, like, which benchmark should I use? And I’m like, I don’t really know if I should use any benchmark, but Since I’m sort of like I put on the spot or I’m putting myself on the spot, I think it makes sense for a global investor to use the MCI All Country World Index.

[00:59:45] Stig Brodersen: You know, and another approach could be, you can of course also compare to the SPF 500. I don’t necessarily know if that makes sense unless you are a US large scale investor, if US is your universe. I think it has a different risk profile. I think a lot of people would probably say it has a lower risk profile.

[01:00:00] Stig Brodersen: I would probably say that it has a higher risk profile, but again, that really depends on where you’re coming from. I really like also to look at Ray Dalio’s all-weather portfolio. I think the thoughts behind that is very interesting because he’s not only looking at equities, He’s also including some bonds, commodities, gold into that.

[01:00:17] Stig Brodersen: And so I think if your goal is to preserve capital and you invest in multiple assets, asset classes all over the world, I think that’s could be an interesting benchmark to look at, but really it should be all about meeting your financial goals. And for that reason, I don’t think Benchmarks are that useful.

[01:00:35] Clay Finck: I’m currently going through the Intelligent Investor and Jason Zweig added some commentary on this and there was a brilliant point I read in it where a lot of investors like to think about the potential upside and the probabilities they think are associated with that upside. But he brilliantly, I believe it was Zweig brilliantly pointed out, we need to also consider the consequences.

[01:00:57] Clay Finck: So, if someone runs a highly concentrated fund, they might assign very high probabilities to all these picks, but you have to also consider what are the consequences of being wrong, and I’ll be sharing an episode, likely in a few weeks, that’ll I’ll dive into this much further, but I just thought that was a brilliant point of not only, you know, investing based on the probabilities, but like, what’s going to happen if you’re wrong and, you know, and when you relate that to your point of achieving your financial goals.

[01:01:27] Clay Finck: So for me, if my goal is to achieve financial independence and I’m like, hey, I found two or three amazing companies, I’m going to go all in on these two or three picks. It’s like, okay, what’s the consequences if I’m wrong? What’s the probabilities I assess are wrong? And yeah, that’s something super interesting that came to mind when you mentioned looking at your performance, judging it against what your goals are as an investor.

[01:01:52] Clay Finck: And I want to just transition here to talk about investing in a different light. Many investment podcasts out there have a fund on the backend of what they do. And some people have asked me when we’re going to start our own fund or when we’re going to open it up to let people invest with us. And I’m sure many more people have mentioned the same thing to you.

[01:02:15] Clay Finck: And, you know, especially with the track record you just mentioned, I’m sure someone’s wondering how they could hand you some money and I don’t think raising money would be an issue, you know, for TIP if that was a direction we ended up deciding we wanted to go. So I’ll just open it up to you. Would you ever be open to managing money for others considering the 20% CAGR you mentioned earlier?

[01:02:37] Stig Brodersen: You know, Clay, I occasionally get asked and I’ve, so far, I’ve said no, and I don’t expect for that to change. And it really comes from a very selfish perspective of happiness. I see a very limited upside from doing that and close to an unlimited downside. which is the exact opposite of what you should do as an investor, of course.

[01:02:59] Stig Brodersen: And so, okay, so let’s talk about the upside of managing money. So I was listening to this interview with Bill Ackman. This was an interview he did with David Rubinstein in his book, How to Invest. And he talked about how much purpose he found in managing money for other people. And, you know, Bill Ackman’s net worth is, you know, in the billions of dollars.

[01:03:15] Stig Brodersen: So it’s not like he needs, like, one thing is like, you need to pay your mortgage. So you manage money for other people. That’s not the case for Bill Ackman. Like, I’m, I don’t know his mortgage, but I’m pretty sure he can pay it. And I think it was just a, it was a beautiful purpose that he wanted to do wonderful things for other people.

[01:03:33] Stig Brodersen: And he, and I think for us here at TIP, I think we also find a lot of purpose in helping others and give them, empower them and give them the tools to make better investment decisions. And I’m going to make the perhaps unreasonable assumption that most people who like to manage money, they either do it because they need a salary or because they just like the game. And sometimes it’s probably a combination. And I think if you want to play the game, the highest level, it’s a huge driver for a lot of managers to taking client minus, because they can do other things with that. And, you know, there’s a lot of money in asset management. It’s not, I’m not going to be naive here.

[01:04:07] Stig Brodersen: And if I wanted to make more money, I think that as a management is probably the simplest way to go. I think it would come with a lot of grief, but I think it’s probably the simplest way to go. And like, I have no idea how much money I could potentially raise. I don’t know, let’s say 50 million, 100 million, something like that.

[01:04:24] Stig Brodersen: We could probably do a 2 and 20 structure. So 2% in fees and like 20% in profits and that would be like 7 figures in fees even in a down year. So the first thing I would say to that is I’ve had TIP for 10 years and I’ve always said that a 2 in 20 structure is ridiculous. So I would be quite the hypocrite to then say, oh, come to my fund.

[01:04:45] Stig Brodersen: Let’s do 2 and 20. There’s probably good reason to do the 2 and 20 structure in some, I don’t know, venture capital, private equity. I don’t know, but like for a company that’s doing public equities, I can’t see why you do 2 and 20. I don’t think you’re aligning your interests well enough with your shareholders or your clients.

[01:05:03] Stig Brodersen: You asked me before Clay about, you know, Manish and why we’re the best with him. I think a 0625 structure makes sense. It probably would be set up like that. And also that there will of course be a lot of money to be made if you want to go that way. And I should probably say that if you asked me like eight or 10 years ago, I probably have jumped at the chance to manage money.

[01:05:21] Stig Brodersen: It seemed like a lot of fun. It seemed like you can, I wouldn’t have to do my normal day job. I can sit back home and like read financial statements. And, but I think today, I would probably go crazy sitting all day reading 10 Qs. I just, I don’t think I have the temperament to do it. I’m also going back to my previous statement of I attribute my track record mainly to luck more than anything else.

[01:05:42] Stig Brodersen: So since you by definition can’t count on luck, I would feel bad about managing money for other people. Cause I don’t think it can replicate it over the next decade. And then, you know, just from a happiness perspective, you know, we’re, I don’t know, we’re 25 people here on TIP. You know, empowering team members and listeners.

[01:05:57] Stig Brodersen: It just, it seems more fun than picking stocks, at least for me. And really like it comes with so much downside. And whenever you go into that, sometimes I do speak with asset managers about, how is it to manage funds? And some people really like it, but everyone hates all the red tape around it. Because for good reason, you’re like, there is a lot of red tape because you’re managing other people’s money.

[01:06:20] Stig Brodersen: And the reason why I started TIP was because I didn’t want to, you know, ask my boss or whatever for permission to do X, Y, Z. Like, if I want to go to the dentist, I would go to the dentist and, you know, you’re under such a scrutiny all the time by managing money for other people. And then of course the biggest drawdown of all of it would be what would happen if I lost money for clients?

[01:06:43] Stig Brodersen: And I don’t know, I the more I read about people who manage money for all the people and speak to those people who do that, the less I just want to do it. You know, one, one example could be something like Bill Miller. You know, he has the biggest stake in Amazon without the last name Bezos. And he talked multiple times about how.

[01:07:02] Stig Brodersen: He just got pestered by his investors since he bought Amazon because it was such a huge part of the portfolio. And Bill Miller kept on saying, I don’t want to sell Amazon. It’s going to be great investment. And they said to him, no, no, it’s too big a part of your portfolio. Like I just, I don’t want that stress.

[01:07:18] Stig Brodersen: And there’s probably an irony of whenever I needed the money, I wanted to manage money. And now that I’m financially independent, I just don’t want. To manage money because of the stress and you know, you and I, Clay, we have this joke that we meet some of the wealthiest people in the world and everyone thinks that they’re frugal.

[01:07:34] Stig Brodersen: Seriously. Everyone is telling us that they’re frugal. I don’t want to give you a spiel of being frugal. My wife and I don’t have any kids. We don’t own a car. We don’t pay for health care. We have a 1,200 mortgage. It’s just like this stress of managing money for other people just seems It’s terrible if you don’t need it.

[01:07:52] Stig Brodersen: So I know there’s a very long way of saying no, but I guess to your question, would I like to manage money? I think the short answer is no.

[01:08:02] Clay Finck: Yeah, it really comes down to if it’s not like a screaming yes. Then it’s probably a no. You can’t just want it. You have to really want it. And I mentioned that Ackman interview with Lex Friedman, man, hearing that interview and just some of the, like Ackman was very public about many of his investments and there were so many people out there that just wanted tear him to the ground. For whatever reason. You know, some people did it, not even to make money. They just wanted to take him down just because they wanted to. And imagine, you know, going to bed at night, not knowing if some billionaire is going to be betting the other side of a position that you’ve been public about.

[01:08:43] Clay Finck: And that. It’s just very frightening. And I’m not saying that’s what would happen if we started a fund here at TIP. And Bill Miller also helped me sort of see it in a different light too. I’ve revisited William’s excerpt in his book, Richer, Wiser, Happier on Bill Miller and during the great financial crisis, I’m not sure if many people are aware, but Bill Miller saw his assets under management during that time, go down by 99% from 77 billion dollars down to 800 million. And part of it was because Bill Miller, he bet really big on financial stocks during the crisis. He thought the Fed was going to come, you know, ease markets, but these financials just kept falling and Bill Miller, he’s also well known for being really a stoic when it comes to losing his own money, but he just became a mess when he was losing so much of his client’s money.

[01:09:37] Clay Finck: And, you know, he just hated it. And I sort of resonate with this myself because I feel that I can handle a lot of volatility. I see it all the time where these stocks, they go gap down 5%, 10 % a day and it’s just for like either random unknown reasons or some reason it’s just ridiculous. Like it really doesn’t bother me too much because I know that when you really compress the time frame, it’s really just a lot of noise and it tends to not really matter.

[01:10:05] Clay Finck: But that doesn’t mean I would feel the same way if I was investing someone else’s money. And a lot of the things I own, I really wouldn’t recommend that anyone else owns it. Like, I can’t recommend that just because there’s a lot of, there’s a lot of volatility and there’s always this uncertainty. Like, what if I’m wrong?

[01:10:20] Clay Finck: You know, like a lot of these things could probably go down 50 % over the next year. And I know how I might react and I know how my, I might assess the situation, but how someone else might react and how someone else might assess that is totally different ballgame. And also in managing a fund, like Bill Miller saw his AUM go down 99%.

[01:10:37] Clay Finck: Part of that was because the fund itself went down. The assets did stock prices, but another part is just investors were fleeing and they were just, they needed money. Just to see that investors can just pull the plug on you at any moment is also very frightening, you know, because if that’s your source of income and that’s how you make a living, and that’s really your reputation, like what are people going to think about you?

[01:10:59] Clay Finck: If you, they see your funds, assets go down 90%, like they’re probably not going to look too positively on that. And, Bill Miller, he was also forced to fire a lot of employees because of that. You know, he’s bringing in substantially less income and, you know, he is publicly shamed in the press, ridiculed on social media.

[01:11:17] Clay Finck: And then of course, in very Bill Miller fashion, in the decade that followed, he was a top 1 % U.S. equity fund over that 10 year period. So he definitely bounced back and sort of redeemed himself. And, you know, reading about stories like this, hearing about what happened to Ackman, it’s very humbling.

[01:11:35] Clay Finck: Even someone like Bill Miller, who beat the market for 15 years in a row can see dark days come eventually, and, you know, just look like a total fool in a span of one to two years. And for those that are interested in reading the whole story, it’s in the epilogue of Rich or Wise or Happier towards the end of the book.

[01:11:53] Clay Finck: It’s just also a good reminder that life is inherently really hard, and asset management is no exception to that, and all of us are inevitably going to go through these very difficult periods when things aren’t black or white, there’s a lot of gray we have to sift through, and being humble during the good periods helps us recognize that it probably won’t last forever like it didn’t last forever with Bill Miller, and the good times and the bad times are just driven by so many things outside of our control. So I’ll throw it over to you. If you have any other concluding remarks on that.

[01:12:24] Stig Brodersen: I don’t think I have too much to add other than Bill Miller that you mentioned, like he, he completely changed his setup to be more congruent with the way he lives his life now. And so I do think that still take on clients’ money, but it’s structured very differently now.

[01:12:37] Stig Brodersen: So he can more or less do whatever he wants to do. And I kind of find this to be an irony of some very wealthy people. Who can’t do what they want to do, but just don’t do it. To me, that sounds a bit ironic. And you know, one of the things that William and I talk a lot about off the podcast is like how we, how can we best live a life of subtraction?

[01:12:59] Stig Brodersen: How can we best take things out of our life? And it’s so tempting to set up so many things, like whenever we have the TIP platform, we can do so many things and we also do a lot of things, don’t get me wrong, but like I think managing money, to go back to your point, just falls in the too hard pile. It’s just like if you want to live a life of subtraction, that’s probably not the road you should go, even though there’s like this almost, I wouldn’t say guaranteed part of goal, cause I kind of feel like it sounds wrong, especially if it’s a 0625, but like, it’s a weird situation you have in, if you have a different type of platform and you get a lot of different opportunities, like we talk a lot about the best productivity tool you can have is just to say no, and it’s so tempting to reach out for that new shiny item and we should probably say no more often than we do.

[01:13:49] Clay Finck: One thing I’ve learned. Just through experience and observations over the past couple of years is Things are always going to change in ways. We just can’t even imagine and who knows six months from now maybe we meet someone who wants to manage the fund with us and they are the perfect match and all the stars align and we end up launching a fund Who knows maybe it will happen and Stig has a total change of heart in due time and you know maybe it never happens.

[01:14:16] Clay Finck: Who knows and one of those things that has really changed, you know, my role with TIP and what we do here is starting our TIP mastermind community. So I was organizing our free events in Omaha for 2023, and we put together four events, social hours in Omaha, and we put a signup sheet out there, registration form to get an idea of who, who’s interested.

[01:14:40] Clay Finck: And within weeks, it was just like crazy how many people wanted to meet up with us in Omaha. And really that sparked the idea of starting our TIP mastermind community, because we realized that. People really want to network with other likeminded people and it’s just been such an amazing journey of meeting so many Incredible people earlier I mentioned, you know meeting that member who worked with Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer at Microsoft for 25 years and on our call yesterday he’s just like he worked his butt off essentially for 25 years straight and he just had to unwind for a bit and retire and just sort of unwind from all those experiences and all that work he put in over the years.

[01:15:22] Clay Finck: And it seemed to certainly pay off well for him. But you know, that’s just one example of so many people I’ve met through starting the community. And I actually, I hop on a call with each member to get to know the type of people that are joining, what they’re looking to get out of the group to ensure that we’re a good fit for each other.

[01:15:38] Clay Finck: You know, we want members to come and, you know, get a lot of value and, you know, join for the right reasons, essentially. And Stig, over the past year, we’ve talked quite a bit about what’s been going on in the community. We had a live event in New York City in October of last year, and we have our next set of social events in Omaha here in May during the Berkshire weekend, specifically for our TIP Mastermind community. I was curious if you could talk more about your role with the community and some things, you’d like to work on going forward with them.

[01:16:10] Stig Brodersen: One of the challenges that I felt that I had, you know, building the podcast together with Preston was that most of the interaction came through email. So there was a very one on one thing.

[01:16:22] Stig Brodersen: And. You know, I tried Twitter to mitigate that and create more value and reach more people and I just found it so toxic to, you know, you know, the way that people communicate or some people communicate on Twitter that I just, I had to stop it. And I also think that there was like, actually, even before we had the mastermind community, even before we had TIP, Preston and I had something called Buffett’s Books.

[01:16:46] Stig Brodersen: I think it still exists, but I don’t think the community exists or like, it was a forum. It like looked something like the nineties and it was programmed in HTML. And, but it was, and it was a lot of fun sort of like to start building relationships. That was how Preston and I, you know, got to know each other in the first place.

[01:17:00] Stig Brodersen: But it was also challenging because you didn’t really It was just a screen name that you were interacting with. You know, this was a time when people use something called Skype. So to our new listeners, think of it as old fashioned Zoom. And it was an interesting forum, but also, I felt we wasted a lot of time because anyone can sign up.

[01:17:20] Stig Brodersen: It was completely free. And, you know, people will go in and say, how can I be rich? question mark. And you would go like, I don’t really know, like, I don’t know where to start from here. And so one of the things that we wanted to do, because we had so many interesting conversations whenever we were doing our live events with TIP was, can we create what we do now in Omaha or wherever that might be?

[01:17:42] Stig Brodersen: Can we do that in a global format, an online format? So we have access to each other, you know, all the time and not just like once a year in Omaha, because another thing that I also find, I don’t know if frustrating is the right word, but like, there’s 40,000 people. There’s just so many people and I get a little overwhelmed.

[01:18:00] Stig Brodersen: And, you know, I’m sort of like the kind of guy who’s okay standing, you know, in the corner of the room with my phone and just be all by myself. And so for me, it’s not the right forum in a way for me to go to Berkshire because I just get so overwhelmed. And so I kind of like the idea of having like an online place to chat.

[01:18:19] Stig Brodersen: So whenever I feel, you know, I have the energy and I have the time I can interact with members. And it’s very often the same people. Like right now we are around a hundred ish people and we want to cap it 150. So you do get to know people. And because we also don’t live in the eights of Skype anymore, we actually have calls on a weekly basis, sometimes multiple times a week.

[01:18:36] Stig Brodersen: And so we can interact just like a normal call with a video call with people. It’s a lot of fun. And you know, we can talk about stock investing or life or whatnot. And so the next call, for example, that I have a schedule is that I’m going to interview Manish April 1st. And so on, this is probably be around the time this being published a few days before I’m going to meet up with the mastermind community.

[01:18:58] Stig Brodersen: And I’ve given myself the mission to go through all of Mohnish’s content from last year until now. It’s, I just calculated it today or count is 50 videos and so I’m going to go through that 50-ish hours of content in the next three ish weeks. And I’m asking everyone to join me. It’s not like you have to go through 50 hours of content to jump on the call.

[01:19:19] Stig Brodersen: And then I’m going to selflessly ask the community if they have any questions that I can ask Manish. But also like talk about what can we learn from him? What can we learn from each other? So that was one call. The last call I did was I interviewed Christian Billinger. You interviewed him on episode 582 and we talked about MS and LVMH and because we have a bit of a different format in the mastermind community, where we also have, you know, we can do video, which we can’t do on the podcast for obvious reason.

[01:19:47] Stig Brodersen: We analyze the balance sheet together, which is very difficult to do on the podcast, like whenever it’s pure audio format. So Christian was very kind and, you know, he broke down the balance sheet and what do they invest in and why do they invest in like, so you can be a bit more nitty gritty to in, in some topics because of the video format. So I don’t really know if I actually answered your question, Clay, but as people can hopefully tell, I’m very excited about the mastermind community.

[01:20:12] Clay Finck: I also booked a couple events I’m really looking forward to with the community. One of which is, I like to try and find members that are especially working in the investment industry or just manage their portfolios full time.

[01:20:26] Clay Finck: And it, you know, it just signals that they’re taking this endeavor of investing very seriously. And what I really just call it is just talking new stock ideas. And it’s like a round table. So I asked four or five people that I know are super serious investors. I asked them to come in and just bring one idea and just, you know, kind of paint a bit of a picture around why they like it.

[01:20:47] Clay Finck: You know, and a lot of people like to do that. It’s a really big ask to ask someone to, you know, put together his whole pitch or put together a presentation. We do have people do that. You know, people share ideas in a one pager format or some members even do a whole hour and a half long presentation, but it’s a lot easier to ask people like, hey, are you free at this time?

[01:21:05] Clay Finck: And are you open to sharing an idea? And you know, PE that’s pretty easy for people to do and they love it. And you know, and it attracts a lot of attention. We’ll have five people join. They have an idea, and then there’s like 15 others in the community that join in as well and have some contributions to the discussion.

[01:21:19] Clay Finck: And you never know. Who in the group is going to be knowledgeable about the idea that you end up sharing? So I find that quite interesting. And I also booked a YouTube interview with Brett Kelly, founder and CEO of Kelly Partners Group and he was kind enough to also do a Q& A with our community. That Q and A is scheduled for the first Tuesday of April.

[01:21:40] Clay Finck: I think it’s April. Yeah, it’s April 2nd, 5 p.m. Eastern time. So really looking forward to that one as well. And yes, it should be a lot of fun. One difficulty that’s been sort of impossible for us to work around is the time zone issues. When I say 5 p.m. Eastern, it’s, you know, call it midnight ish for you for the Q and A with Brett Kelly.

[01:22:00] Clay Finck: What we really try and do is just kind of mix it up, like Stig does a lot of his calls in the afternoon Europe time, and then I mix it up and do some of my calls in the morning U.S. time or afternoon U.S. time.

[01:22:11] Clay Finck: All right, so before we close it out here, I also wanted to mention that we’re also hosting what we call the Berkshire Summit in Omaha. This is a higher ticket event for those that really want to make the most of their time in Omaha. I’ll be in charge of organizing a couple of very special dinners we’ll be having. One is on Friday evening during the Berkshire weekend, May 3rd. And then another dinner on May 4th on that Saturday. And William Green and I have invited several special guests for the dinners.

[01:22:38] Clay Finck: A couple of We Study Billionaires guests for Friday. And then William invited a number of his guests from the Richer Wiser Happier show for Saturday. And we have some other very special things planned. We only have two seats available. So if you’re interested in checking that out, I’ll make sure that’s linked in the show notes, or you can just simply email me clay@theinvestorspodcast.com. We’d love to have you join us and Stig. Thanks so much for joining me today. It’s always fun chatting with you on the show and always learn plenty of new things. And I’m sure the audience does as well.

[01:23:06] Stig Brodersen: Thank you so much for having me, Clay.

[01:23:08] Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow We Study Billionaires on your favorite podcast app, and never miss out on episodes. To access our show notes, transcripts, or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only, before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.