MI Rewind: Peter Lynch & GARP Investing w/ Robert Reynolds

23 Jun 2023 · 52 min

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Episode Summary: MI Rewind: Peter Lynch & GARP Investing w/ Robert Reynolds

Podcast Title: The Intrinsic Value Podcast Host: Clay Finck Guest: Robert Reynolds Release Date: [Insert Date] Duration: [Insert Duration]

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Overview

In this episode of The Intrinsic Value Podcast, Clay Finck sits down with investor and content creator Robert Reynolds to discuss the legendary investor Peter Lynch, his investment strategies, and the principles of GARP (Growth at a Reasonable Price) investing. The conversation delves into Lynch's unique approach, the advantages of retail investors over institutional funds, and insights into potential investment opportunities.

Key Takeaways

  • Introduction to Peter Lynch
  • Renowned for managing the Magellan Fund and achieving a compounded annual return of 29.2%.
  • Advocates for a straightforward, intuitive approach to investing that favors understanding over complexity.
  • Advantages of Retail Investors
  • Retail investors have the ability to make swift decisions and capitalize on opportunities that institutional investors may overlook.
  • Individual investors can leverage their specific industry knowledge, giving them a competitive edge in forecasting growth and understanding market dynamics.
  • GARP Investing
  • GARP is a strategy that balances growth and value investing by looking for stocks with reasonable valuations relative to their growth potential.
  • Examples of metrics used include price-to-earnings ratios and enterprise value to EBITDA.
  • Active vs. Passive Investing
  • Active investors are better positioned to outperform passive investors in the current market environment, especially given the presence of numerous undervalued companies that passive funds may overlook.
  • Market volatility can present unique buying opportunities for active investors.

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Episode Breakdown

00:00 - Introduction

  • Clay Finck introduces Robert Reynolds and provides context for the discussion on Peter Lynch and GARP investing.

04:15 - Who is Peter Lynch?

  • Discussion of Lynch's investment philosophy focusing on simplicity and understanding of businesses.
  • His techniques for evaluating stocks and the importance of historical valuation metrics.

15:58 - Retail Investor Advantages

  • Importance of individual insights in niche markets and sectors.
  • Retail investors’ ability to take risks that institutional investors might not be able to afford.

25:08 - Active Investors' Position

  • Discussion on the potential for active investors to outperform passive investors in the coming years.
  • Examples of how market corrections can provide buying opportunities.

46:05 - Compelling Investments: Facebook and Google

  • The episode concludes with Reynolds discussing his views on Facebook and Google as potential investment opportunities.

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Investment Principles Discussed

  • Metrics for Evaluation:
  • Importance of using historical price-to-earnings ratios and other valuation metrics.
  • Evaluating consistency in earnings and balance sheet health through debt-to-equity ratios.
  • Do's and Don'ts of Investing According to Lynch:
  • Do invest in boring businesses and spinoffs.
  • Don’t chase hot stocks or follow market fads.
  • Portfolio Strategy:
  • Suggested sweet spot for number of holdings: 20-30 positions.
  • Importance of diversification while maintaining the ability to closely monitor each investment.

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Conclusion

The episode provides valuable insights into the principles of GARP investing, the advantages of retail investors, and the enduring legacy of Peter Lynch's investment strategies. By focusing on understanding businesses fundamentally, investors can position themselves to capitalize on opportunities in a fluctuating market.

For further insights, listeners are encouraged to connect with Robert Reynolds on his YouTube channel, The Popular Investor, and explore his portfolio on eToro.

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Additional Resources

  • Books and Resources:
  • "One Up On Wall Street" by Peter Lynch (related episode discussed).
  • The Investors Podcast Network Mastermind Community.
  • Stay Updated:
  • Subscribe to the podcast for future episodes on investing strategies and market insights.
  • Connect:
  • Follow Clay Finck and Robert Reynolds on Twitter for updates on their latest thoughts and market observations.

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*Disclaimer: This summary reflects the key points discussed in the episode and is intended for informational purposes only. Always conduct thorough research or consult a financial advisor before making investment decisions.*

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Transcript

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0:00You're listening to TIP. On today's show, we've started to reshare some older episodes that are my favorites for a few reasons. One, we get a bunch of new listeners each week, so the new listeners may not have heard this episode before. Two, even if you've been listening for a while, you may have missed this episode when it originally came out. Or three, even if you've heard it before, it can be a great episode to learn from again. If you've already heard this episode or you're not interested in hearing it, feel free to just skip it. There's no harm in that. and you can pick up with our new episodes next week.

0:34All right, guys, that's all I had for you for this new intro. Everything going forward is going to be from the original show. Hope you guys enjoy it.

0:45So for argument's sake, if I look at Amazon, which is a company I own, I'm not going to look at the price to earnings. I'm going to look at the enterprise value to EBITDA because they're in a massive reinvestment cycle. It's like$60 billion. So if I look at price to earnings, it comes in really high, but I'm penalizing the company for reinvesting in the future. On today's episode, I sit down to chat with Robert Reynolds. Robert is an investor and a content creator for the popular investor YouTube channel, which has over 40 ,000 subscribers. During our conversation, Robert and I chat about who Peter Lynch is and how he invests, the advantages individual retail investors can have over Wall Street, why active investors might be in a good position to outperform passive investors over the coming years, how Robert thinks about portfolio concentration, why Facebook and Google are potentially compelling stock picks, and much more.

1:38I hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did with Robert Reynolds.

1:57Millennial Generation.

2:04Welcome to the Millennial Investing Podcast. I am your host, Clay Fink. And today, I am joined by Robert Reynolds. Robert, pleasure having you on the show. Thanks for having me. Before we talk about Peter Lynch and a few other topics, could you talk to our audience about your journey as an investor. What led you to getting started as an individual stock investor? And what led you to eventually starting your YouTube channel? So I started investing back in 2009. That was the first year I started investing. And when I started investing, it was driven more so by materialistic reasons, come from a lower middle-class family.

2:42And I didn't really know much about investing, but I knew that people were making an awful lot of money. My cousin used to worked for Merrill Lynch. And Merrill Lynch shut down their offices in Ireland. She moved over to New York. She met a portfolio manager, married that portfolio manager. And that was the first time I realized what stock investing was. In Ireland, there's not really a culture of investing or there wasn't anyway when I started. Nobody really invested. There was no real education or anything on it. So it was really sort of firsthand understanding of the stock market and investing that I got from family members that moved over to the US and were in that sort of ecosystem.

3:17So I started investing back in 2009, perfect time really, right after the global financial crisis. Asset prices were mean reverting. In the first couple of years, I kind of felt like a genius. It didn't really matter what you bought, pretty similar to March 2020. It didn't really matter what you bought, everything was going to go up. And I made quite a decent chunk of change between 2009 and 2011. And then like all things, I mean, you get hit with a bit of a roadblock. You have the sovereign debt crisis across Europe, and I had a little bit of a drag on global growth. A lot of volatility increases.

3:47And as Mike Tyson says, everyone has a plan to get punched in the face. And so my journey in investing has really been a series of making mistakes. And I guess you get complacent every once in a while. You take a step back, you look at the broader picture, you learn and you move forward. And so the first step that I took was actually investing money in 2009. And then the first big lesson that I really learned from was in 2011, 2012 during the sovereign debt crisis. Fast forward then, the next big lesson was 2015. We had some macro issues with China, devaluing the currency, hit me pretty hard. And that was another opportunity for me to learn.

4:23And that's where I started to pick up macro and economics. And that's where I really started to focus on technical analysis as an overlay from a micro bottom-up perspective, which gave me a good broad toolkit to start investing. And then in 2020, it was the first year that I started investing on behalf of other people as well. So I've started the journey of professional investing for the past two years. And that's sort of brings me up into the present day, 13 years into investing. And it's forever like an opportunity to keep learning about yourself, but also keep growing in terms of developing your assets.

4:54That's pretty much your journey so far. Very cool. And really good timing starting to get into the market in 2009. And you just happened to have a relative that was a fund manager that kind of helped you get started and get going. Now, you've mentioned in your videos, your YouTube videos, your investment strategy very much aligns with Peter Lynch. And I'd like to discuss that approach a little bit with you. For those who aren't familiar, could you talk about who Peter Lynch is and what he's accomplished over his investment career? Yeah. So when I started investing, I didn't know anything about these super investors or anything like that.

5:32In the last couple of years, I've come to know who they are. And so when I say I'm very similar to Peter Lynch. It's more so learning about Peter Lynch's strategy and then realizing that an awful lot of the very hard lessons that I've learned over the past number of years kind of agree with Peter Lynch. So there's a lot of overlap between his strategy and mine, but there's a lot of stuff that I believe as an investor that Peter Lynch disagrees with. And I guess it's important to have your own style and your own flair as well. Peter Lynch was the manager of the Magellan Fund for 13 years, and he generated about 29.2 % compounded.

6:01Pretty impressive returns. He's very well known for approaching markets in a very basic, simple to understand manner. And that's what really appealed to me because I studied business, I studied accounting, and then I started to go down the rabbit hole of learning complex models to value stocks. What I realized was the incremental gain of these really complex models doesn't really outweigh your own personal experience. And that's sort of what I started to take away from Peter Lynch. So when I'm listening to Peter Lynch, I mean, he's got a pretty broad base. A lot of people say, Peter Lynch says, look under enough rocks.

6:32Peter Lynch says, don't diversify. It's the worst of occasion. Peter Lynch says all of these things. Retail investors have an advantage over fund managers, but it's a little bit deeper than that. And so I've prepared a couple of different points that I wanted to talk to you guys about regarding metrics that he follows, why they might be of use, the do's and the don'ts of investing, and of course, ideologies. Because I think now more than ever, we're going through a little bit of a slip up in markets. And I think a lot of people are looking at it as a risk as opposed to an opportunity. And I think that's the difference between making it as an investor versus panicking and selling on the lows and sort of starting from zero again.

7:06So I think we'll start off with metrics. I mean, when I listen to like quants, for argument's sake, they make up an awful lot of very difficult models. And the reality is, when you listen to Peter Lynch or anyone, whether it's Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett or any of these guys, I mean, it's really just about the present value of cash flows. And there's many different ways in which you can analyze a business. You can look at price earnings, you look at price of cash flow, price of book, all of these different ways. Peter Lynch looks at the historical price to earnings. And I guess one of the biggest challenge for any investor is, what price do you pay for cash flows?

7:37So we all know you're buying a business based on the present value of cash flows. But if I told you for the next 60 years, you can buy this asset that's going to produce$50 ,000 per year for 60 years, the present value of that is worth more than 50 ,000, but it's probably not worth 60 years times 50 ,000, right? And so you have to come up with a fair multiple to pay for that over time in order to make a reasonable return. And that's the biggest challenge in investing is knowing what to pay for that cashflow. And so Peter Lynch really breaks it down in a very simple manner. And this is something that I've come to realize as well, rather than try and speculate what multiple you're going to pay for, just look at the historical average that the market's been willing to pay for it and buy it at a discount relative to the trend that it's been over a longer period of time.

8:21So really basic stuff, but it's really impactful. And when I sort of dumbed it down really to focus on the simple stuff like price earnings, trading at a discount, it really starts to make sense. You're trying to understand what the market's willing to pay for a specific asset based on its cash flows. And why not just pay below what the average market's paid for it? So that's one of the metrics that Peter Lynch follows. Another one he follows is like consistent year-on-year earnings. So in 2020, you had all these electric vehicle type companies come up or SPACs, and they're all really new companies.

8:50And they're guiding on their investment decks. They're going from$2 million in revenue,$10 million in revenue to a billion dollars in revenue in three years. But it's completely unproven. And they've got like a couple of hundred thousand revenue proven, that's it. There's a lot of challenges along the way. So you could literally look at that company, just like we said a moment ago, like evaluating a business as a present value of its cash flows. You're looking at an investor deck that says they're going to ramp up their revenue in three years from a million dollars to a billion dollars. How do you price that?

9:18Because if there's a little bit of a mistake, I mean, and the company only generates a hundred million, not a billion, you've way overpaid for it. And so what Peter Lynch also says is you want to pay a discount relative to its historical valuations. And at the same time, you want consistency in earnings. You want some degree of consistency. So he often talks about Dunkin' Donuts. He knows people are going to go into Dunkin' Donuts. And so it's just really focusing on the really super simple stuff. Regarding leverage in a company, there's many different ways in which you can look at it. I personally look at quick and current ratios to understand what the assets and liabilities are.

9:50Peter Lynch looks at, I'm sure he looks at those too, but he looks at debt to equity. Debt to equity is a pretty good measure. If it's got a high debt to equity, there might be challenges or solvency risk or whatnot. And as well as that, if a company needs to raise capital, a bank would normally look at debt to equity as well. So when you're looking at evaluating the liquidity risk of a business, Peter Lynch uses debt to equity. There's many different ways in which you can use it, but that's also a really effective way. And then finally, net cash per share. How much cash are they producing? So that'll coincide with the valuation that you pay for the company.

10:21And so going back to what I mentioned before, I looked at Peter Lynch only in the last couple of years and I realized, well, wait a second, I came to the same conclusions. I guess the difference is I lost a lot of money coming to those conclusions first. But anyway, if you dumb it down and you You focus on valuation, consistency. You focus on balance sheet risk. And then finally, cash flows. You should be in a pretty, pretty, pretty good state regarding the metrics in order to evaluate business. And in that aspect, I kind of agree with Peter Lynch. And then he talks about the do's and don'ts. And I think these are really important as well, even more so after March 2020.

10:55And you're seeing the apocalypse, or de-SPAC, I think it's called, where some SPACs are down as much as like 95%, 98%. Some of the recent IPOs getting absolutely pummeled over the past couple of years where the market is happy to pay like 100 times price of sales, 200 times price of sales. And the reality is how on earth are they going to earn enough money in order to justify that valuation? And so the do's and don'ts of Peter Lynch, first and foremost, investing boring businesses. That was one that Peter Lynch really focuses on. Again, he uses Dunkin' Donuts. I think he said he made 10 times his money in Dunkin' Donuts, which is quite incredible.

11:28A boring business, selling donuts and coffee, and you make 1 ,000%. You don't need to go too far out the risk curve. Spinoffs, very interesting. I also invest in specific spinoff opportunities. So if you look through my portfolio, you'll see, for I'm going to take discovery, where there's a spinoff of AT &T, of Time Warner into Time Warner Discovery, and that creates an awful lot of value. So that can create outsized returns as well. Fast growing companies in no growth industries. These guys are normally stealing market share. So if you read books like Misbehaving, you realize that there's bottom-up innovators such as New Course Steel, which will start innovating in a pretty low-growth, boring industry, the steel industry.

12:08And these guys are growing at a much faster pace. And so if you can find those critical opportunities, you make a lot of money, share buybacks. So you go through a bit of a slowdown. There's nothing wrong with the company utilizing some of its cash. If it's very cheap, they buy back its stock. And as of right now, if I look at my portfolio, about 80 % of the companies are buying back stock. And then finally, insider buying. There's only one reason why insiders buy, and that's because they think the prospects are improving. So there are some of the reasons why Peter Lynch believes you should buy a specific business.

12:36And some of its don'ts is don't chase hot stocks. And that's something that I would definitely refrain from getting too excited about when you're investing. Going back to my experiences, I invested in 2009 right after crash, made a bunch of money, not because I was very good at what I'd done, it's more so the timing, right? So there's a big crash, mean reversion. I invested in real estate, which is actually a big part of where I grew my wealth in 2011, 12 during a sovereign debt crisis in Europe. And then in late 2018, I invested in some digital assets after an 80 % crash in Bitcoin. And on those three occasions, they were not hot topics.

13:08And in fact, everybody I'd mentioned to that I was going to buy stocks in 2009 or real estate in 2011, 2012, or Bitcoin in late 2018, everyone told me that you're crazy. Yeah, I really like how you're looking for those opportunities when everyone else is running out the door and giving you more favorable prices. That makes me think of the massive pullback we've had in growth stocks. We did see this run up in higher growth companies post-COVID, and now a lot of them are trading back to where they were pre-COVID. So I think you might be able to find some great companies at reasonable prices once you're able to weed through and find those businesses that have continued to improve their fundamentals throughout that time period.

13:49I also like how Peter Lynch has this approach where he keeps an eye out for businesses that he runs into in his everyday life. You mentioned Dunkin' Donuts. When I first heard this concept, I thought of Starbucks. When I'm on the road in the morning, a lot of times I'll see that the drive-thru line for Starbucks is going outside of the parking lot. Looking out for those indicators like that can be a good sign to take a look at the stock and dig a little bit deeper. If one Starbucks location is overloaded with customers, that means they probably have the ability to capitalize on that and open another Starbucks location just down the street.

14:27Apple is another great example of this, as most people I know are staring at their phones a lot of the day, every single day. It's not to say that just because people use iPhones, you should go out and buy their stock. It's just an indicator that you can go and look at the stock a little bit further because you know that people are getting value using those companies' products. So I like how Lynch's book, One Up on Wall Street, makes investing much more simplified for your typical person getting into the game. Yeah. And that's actually a really good point because I think he also expanded on that as retail investors have a bit of an edge in that, if for argument's sake, you're a bioscientist.

15:05I own a company called Regeneron. And Regeneron is a biotech company. But the reason why I own pharmaceutical companies is because once a novel patent has been approved, there's 20 years of a barrier to entry in that market. And if it's for argument's sake, a rare disease, there's a pretty decent probability that it doesn't matter what recession you're going to have relatively in the last of revenue. I like larger cap biotech companies in that sense if there's enough duration. If you go a little bit smaller into biotech, like smaller companies, higher risk in the sense where they might be phase two, phase three type drugs, just as a classic example, if you're a bioscientist and you can understand the science behind that, you've got a much better probability of understanding whether it's going to be approved, what the potential revenue and market's likely to be.

15:50And just going back to the example with Regeneron, last year, analysts had guided 35%, 36 % in revenue growth for Regeneron, and they hit over 80%. And so if you're a specialist in a specific market, whether it's the example that I mentioned a moment ago, whether it's like bioscience or something like that, you have a massive edge over analysts in order to generate outsized returns by focusing on your niche. If you work in, for arguments like a coffee shop, you understand the market in coffee or whether iPhones or whatever it may be. If you're in semiconductors, you understand the trends, whatever it may be, whatever your niche insight is.

16:21I mean, we definitely have a massive edge in understanding what the bigger picture trends are. And if you pick up the pretty simple ways in order to analyze the business, paying a discount relative to its historical trend, focusing on balance sheet, focusing on cash flow, all that type of stuff, and you can marry the two of them together, yeah, you've got a massive advantage for sure. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Even Einstein had blind spots. That's why modern science is built on the idea of peer review, Investing may be more art than science, but that doesn't make pure feedback any less valuable.

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17:33That's theinvestorspodcast.com slash intrinsic value community. Support for the show comes from public.com. You're thoughtful about where your money goes. You've got your core holdings. Some recurring crypto buys, maybe even a few strategic option plays on the side. The point is, you're engaged with your investments and Public gets that. That's why they built an investing platform for those who take it seriously. On Public, you can put together a multi-asset portfolio for the long haul. Stocks, bonds, options, crypto, it's all there. Plus, industry-leading yields on your cash with no fees or minimums.

18:11Switch to the platform built for those who take investing seriously. Go to public.com slash T-I-V-P and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash T-I-V-P. Paid for by Public Investing. Full disclosures in podcast description. Just like everybody else, there was a time when I was a beginner investor, and I have to say, investing is particularly filled with jargon that can just make it so difficult for new investors to understand what is going on. But it's never too late to get smarter about stock investing from the ground up. At The Investors Podcast Network, we've made a habit of studying the world's best investors, and now I'm distilling those learnings into a simple course for you or for anyone in your life who you might want to share the gift of knowledge with.

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19:31And for a limited time, you can use code stocks15 for a 15 % discount at checkout. All right, back to the show. Robert Leonard Lynch often argues that individual retail investors can have a massive advantage over the large hedge funds spending all day analyzing companies. And you alluded to this. This might seem counterintuitive to some people in the audience. Could you expand more on what advantages retail investors might have over these funds on Wall Street? Yeah. Well, one of them would be for argument's sake, understanding the industry a lot better. So if you look at Wall Street analysts and their backgrounds, it's probably finance related.

20:10So they might be very good at modeling, well, understanding balance sheets, risks, exogenous risks, that type of stuff. They may not understand the industry quite as well as you or I, who might be experts in the industry. So I think that that's a massive competitive advantage that we have as a deep insight into the industry. And for argument's sake, there's so many companies that I've owned over the past year where analysts in specific industries, for argument's sake, you look at the cannabis sector, it's very under-followed, very under-followed from analysts. So there's a huge opportunity for somebody that understands that space to go in there and do a better job of forecasting growth rates and whatnot, or understanding the different margins because you're on the ground working there.

20:45Whether it's semiconductors, you look at AMD, which is a design company that outsorts an awful lot of their production. You can understand the different trends and growth in terms of technology. For argument's sake, you look at NVIDIA buying ARM. I know the deal fell true, but that would allow them to pivot into many different sectors. For me, I'm not a tech person that's specific to that, but fortunately, I'm able to reach out to people that can give me some insights on that. But if you're somebody that's tech-focused, you understand the ecosystem, you understand what this acquisition is likely to do for the business and the long-term opportunity for NVIDIA, you have an absolutely competitive advantage if you can start scooping up cheaper shares and stuff like that.

21:22Understanding the specific industry that you're operating in is a massive advantage over Wall Street analysts for sure. And I also think that retail investors can take risks that many fund managers won't take. Lynch has said that no fund manager is going to get fired for investing in IBM, which has been a mature company for many years. And a retail investor might find a great business that's in the early innings that fund managers might avoid because of the uncertainty that comes with being in the early stages. And I think they're incentivized to really just not take risks and play it safe so they keep their job.

21:59And there's volatility in the markets where their boss might not be happy with them if the market's going against them and they take maybe a little bit too much risk. That's a really, really, really good point because I see so many investment managers that are in the closet indexers. And I think one of the biggest challenges is you're constantly comped to the index. So if you have a month where you're down 1 % and the S &P 500 is up 1%, you scrutinize for it. But if you beat the S &P 500 4 % versus 1 % in the S &P 500, it's like nobody realized it's an expectation. And I think when you take a step back, if you're managing money, you're at the mercy of short-term results as opposed to long-term gains.

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22:37And investors can be quite fickle in the sense where you go through a bit of a period where there's a lot of volatility. And without looking at that volatility as an opportunity, for argument's sake, I'll give you an example. In February of 2021, I wanted exposure to the fintech space. And when I looked across the board in terms of valuations, of course, there's lots of companies that I liked. For argument's sake, I would have liked PayPal, I would have liked Square. But I ended up investing in Fiserv because it was still a good opportunity. But the valuation of the company was, it wasn't as good an opportunity as for argument's sake, PayPal in terms of the business or Square in terms of the business.

23:11But it did give me a really good opportunity in terms of valuation relative to its peers. It wasn't my first choice, but in terms of valuation, it made a lot of sense. If you fast forward to the past couple of weeks, I've been unwinding my position of Fiserv to position myself in PayPal. And one of the reasons why I've been able to do that is because I focused on valuation. Fiserv is down 10%, but PayPal is down 65 % to 70%. Right now, I see that as an opportunity. So when we go into times of volatility where PayPal is down in the last six, seven weeks, 47%, 48%. And relative to its future growth, it's expected to compound at 20%.

23:47It's far more attractive than Fiserv. I see it as an opportunity. I did like Fiserv. It'd done very well for me to offset an awful lot of that downside risk. But now like this sort of storm, yeah, there's a little bit of volatility, but it's absolutely 100 % an opportunity to reposition your portfolio in what I would consider better opportunities. And so that's just a classic example where you get a little bit of volatility. Fund managers, they've got to position themselves to offset that volatility. Either raise cash, they have a problem with what's known as VAR, value at risk, and they conduct what's known as de-grossing when volatility increases.

24:20And the way I look at it is when volatility increases, that's where you want to get a little bit heavier. That's the risk and the market purchasing an awful lot of premium on the downside in order to offset that risk. And if that risk doesn't come to fruition, it's usually a massive opportunity. So that's another opportunity that retail investors have is we can view volatility as opportunity and not necessarily risk to reposition the portfolio, whereas fund managers really just got to balance that risk in terms of downside volatility. It's funny you mentioned Pfizer. I actually just recently had an episode where we talked all about Pfizer.

24:55It was with Bill Nygren and Mike Nicholas from Oakmark Funds. Fantastic episode if you or anyone in the audience would like to check it out. And we talk about the risk. We talk a little bit about PayPal and some of their other competitors, Square. But I wanted to transition. We talked about retail investors' potential advantages over Wall Street. Let's talk about their advantage over passive investors. You've had a video recently where you talked about how Peter Lynch has said that active investors have a massive advantage over passive investors in today's environment. Why do you believe this to be true, what Lynch said?

25:31If you take the index, it doesn't matter, S &P 500, and you were to break down its components and its weightings, and then you were to look at the valuation of the index in terms of forward price earnings, I think it's somewhere around 19 at the moment. So if you were to look at its weightings, 22 % of its weightings come from the top eight companies. So it's heavily skewed towards a small number of companies. And so the valuation is heavily skewed to a small number of companies. And that's the first sort of point that I would look at and say, oh, wow, that's kind of interesting. If you break down the full 500 companies, there's a number of companies in there that are disproportionately lower in terms of valuation.

26:07Like for argument's sake, energy coming into this year, the sector as a whole was only about 1.5%, 2 % over the past year of the entire index. And that was down from about 8 % a decade ago. So you can see there's disproportionate opportunities in terms of overvalued companies and undervalued companies. If you take that one step further and you look at companies that are not in indexes, so over the past 10, 12 years, we've had this revolution of passive investing where everyone just owns the indexes. Just dollar cost average every single month, month, month, month, month, just keep dollar cost averaging.

26:36That absolutely impacts those bigger positions in the index and they continue to grow and the valuation gets bigger and bigger and bigger. But companies that are not represented by an index will have a far lower valuation, produce a hell of a lot more cash flow. And there's an awful lot more optionality on that because they don't have that mechanism of passive investing. And so when you fast forward after a decade of passive investing, there's a lot of bloated companies, and there's a lot of very lean, very undervalued companies. And a lot of people talk about how overvalued the market is, looking at price earnings, but I don't think I've ever seen a period where we've seen so many fantastically valued companies at the same time we've seen so many overvalued companies.

27:15And so this is a massive dichotomy, and I think it's largely driven by passive investing. And so when you kind of break it down, if we start to see outflows for argument's sake, the indexes start to slow down a little bit, we start to see outflows and passive investing starts to reverse, active management is really going to start to excel. It's not necessarily that I'm bearish on the indexes. I just think that the upside is likely a little bit more limited, and you're probably going to see an awful lot more capital flow from passive into active, and there's a hell of a lot more opportunities. Some of the companies that I've bought recently are just bizarrely cheap.

27:48So I'll give you a quick example like Overstock is a company I'm very bullish on. It's got a market cap of 1.8 billion with 500 million in the bank and no debt. And it's producing 145 million in free cash flow. So I'm paying an enterprise value of 1.3 billion for 145 million in free cash flow. Plus they also have MDC Ventures, which is a sum of the parts valuation somewhere anywhere between$4 and$10 billion. So I get all that for free. Plus I get a business that produces in excess of 10 % in free cash flow yield on its enterprise value. And so I've never seen this sort of opportunity where there's so much value in the market at a time where there's so much overvalued companies.

28:24And I think we're going to start to sort that out over the next five to 10 years. Higher inflation is driving interest rates higher. And I think over the past year, what we've seen is not necessarily a recessionary sort of environment, but more so we're repricing risk. Let's say a company is at 100 times price of sales. Let's say they have a 50 % net income margin. Let's just say they're really lucky to have a 50 % net income margin, trading at 200 times price to earnings. So if you look at an S-curve, right? And a company normally starts at the bottom of the S-curve, and rightfully so, it should have a very high valuation because they're called essentially long duration assets.

28:57So you're overpaying today for all that cash flow that's expected to come. And so it has a high PE here. And eventually you're expecting the growth rate to ramp up, valuation to moderate, and eventually get to a point where it's a mature company and the valuation will be 20 times price to earnings. In order to go from 200 times price to earnings to 20 times price to earnings, you need to have a hell of a lot of growth just to get a decent return. And so I think as we move forward, we're starting to see a repricing of risk. And it's still early, but over the last six to 12 months, it's starting to look like we're moving into that direction where active investing should outperform passive investing over the next decade.

29:31I think if you adopt the principles of somebody like Peter Lynch, which is super simple, you have a massive advantage, just a huge advantage, certainly in today's market. Robert Leonard Very interesting. You mentioned Overstock as one of your holdings. I'm curious, what is your process for narrowing down your selection of potential stocks to invest in? Are you using some sort of stock filter or how do you approach that? Robert Leonard Overstock more specifically, I'll tell you how I came to that conclusion. I'll tell you a couple of different ways. I invested in digital assets. I bought Bitcoin at a broad amount of investments.

30:07I bought Bitcoin and a little bit of Litecoin back in late 2018, early 2019. And I've just been sitting on it ever since. And then midway around June, July of 2020, if you look at all these charts where it goes from, we'd be moving into the institutional phase in terms of adoption. So that was the next phase for Bitcoin. We've already seen early adopters and whatnot. We're moving into the institutional phase. And then MicroStrategy came out in June or July of 2020, and they bought like a billion dollars worth of Bitcoin. And that to me was a signal that we're moving into an institutional phase.

30:39We've since found out BlackRock are dabbling. We already know now that Bill Miller has half his portfolio in Bitcoin. Dan LeWeb is a third point capital. You have all these super investors that are allocating capital. KPMG now store Bitcoin in their vault, but that wasn't the case in 2020. And so I kind of made a little bit of a bet on what we were going to see increased volumes on exchanges while institutional capital comes in. It's not Joe Blog down the street investing$100 into Bitcoin. It's like this institution buying a billion dollars. And all of these exchanges would be able to get a couple of basis points or whatever it may be on large amounts of money and generate ridiculous amounts of cash.

31:15That was the thesis. And then when I started to look a little bit deeper, I came across all these exchanges, whether it was Binance, whether it was Coinbase, and I was looking at what was available and I came across T0, which is buried inside overstock. And then I realized that, and that's how I came to that conclusion was just Googling, trying to find out where all these exchanges are, how to get exposure. And it started out looking for a digital exchange. And then I bought an online furniture retailer because I got that for free. And that's sort of how I went down that rabbit hole. Other ways, when you have a good quality company, such as Facebook, which we can talk about in a moment, but Facebook is a company that I used to own.

31:51I'm familiar with the business. The earnings come out and I listen to the earnings just out of interest. Share price drops 26%. It comes down to a valuation where most of my fears and concerns are completely dissipated. And all of a sudden, I'm back in. So you look at pretty decent discounts in markets, you look at an awful lot of turmoil. Going back to my experience, March 2009, I bought into depressed assets. 2011, 2012, bought depressed real estate. 2018, 2019, bought depressed digital assets. And so anytime I see that kind of depressed asset, I like to do a little bit more digging. And then finally, just through screeners, where it's screening out specific multiples, free cashflow, balance sheet, growth and earnings, that type of stuff.

32:33They're the three different ways where it's more specific. It might be something that's, for argument's sake, a special situation. So Discovery was more of a special situation. The merger between Time Warner and Discovery, that was all over the news. And I said, you know what, let's see what the valuation would be, what the market would be willing to pay for, comping it relative to its peers, stuff like that. And then sometimes you invest in them, sometimes you don't. But once you do all that analysis, it's already there. It's stored in the back of your mind. It's in a folder on your computer.

33:01And if price continues to drop lower, then you just strike. You just put it to one side if you're not interested at a specific price. But if at some point in the future that comes around, you're ready to roll. And that's sort of how I do it. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. Hey, it's Sean O'Malley, just popping in with a quick message. If you like this podcast, well, I've got great news for you. We've got a handful of other shows for you to explore, from learning about Bitcoin to embracing a richer, wiser, happier lifestyle. Just go into your podcast app and type in We Study Billionaires to find our collection of shows.

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36:36All right, back to the show. You had a video where you kind of walked through your stock filtering process. And I know Peter Lynch is pretty famous for using this approach of GARP, growth at a reasonable price. When you're looking at this filter, what are you typically looking at for growth rates? Maybe the multiple, say, price to earnings or price of free cashflow or however you look at it. I would look at the multiple in terms of price to earnings, price to cashflow, enterprise value to EBITDA, depending on the business. So for argument's sake, if I look at Amazon, which is a company I own, I'm not going to look at the price to earnings.

37:15I'm going to look at the enterprise value to EBITDA because they're in a massive reinvestment cycle. It's like$60 billion. So if I look at price to earnings, it comes in really high but I'm penalizing the company for reinvesting in the future. If I look at price earnings, I'm penalizing that reinvestment in the business. But if I look at enterprise value to EBITDA, EBITDA adds back an amortization of the capital expenditure. So I get a fair reflection of what the earnings would be. And so it depends on the business, depending on the ratio that I'd look at. So for something like Amazon, I prefer to look at enterprise value to EBITDA, but something that's that's consistent, the net gets close to zero, I'd probably look at price to earnings.

37:53If it's a lightweight business, I'd probably look at price to cash flow. And so depending on the business, I'd look at a specific metric. If it's got high capital costs, like a business that I own, for argument's sake, would be micron, I'd look at price to book. So what's the replacement value of that company? And how many more times should I pay for that replacement value if it produces cash flow? And so I'd look at a multiple to understand what a valuation is. And then I'd look at different stuff, like for argument's sake, return on invested capital to understand, are the management team generating a reasonable return for me?

38:23And what would you determine a good sort of return on invested capital? Well, if you think about the cost of capital, how much capital costs to a business, so there are simple calculations you can do, like the weighted average cost of capital. This will give you an idea of what capital costs to a specific business. So every business has a different capital structure. And so every business has a different sort of discount rate, let's call it that. You've heard it and discounted cashflow models and whatnot. So let's say it comes up at 8%. I want the return on invested capital. That's my hurdle rate.

38:50I want it to be above 8%. And so that's normally how I determine whether they're creating shareholder value. I'm paying a discount to what the market's willing to pay for it and stuff like that. Both of those are very important. It's also very important to dig a little bit deeper and understand what the competitive advantages are of a specific business. So one company I'm building out right now, I look at Crocs. From the outset, you might look at that and say, oh, it's just a boring sort of shoe company, but then you realize that they have patented materials like Crosslight, which is actually a competitive advantage.

39:20My wife will only buy Crocs because the plastic alternatives give you blisters. And so it creates this little barrier to entry that you can start to realize that the revenue growth is probably going to be a little bit more consistent. And so yeah, understanding the business, but also looking at metrics, such as valuations, return on investment capital, and stuff like that. So interesting. Now, I'd like to talk about another topic related to Lynch. He, sometimes in his fund, he held hundreds or maybe even over a thousand companies in his portfolio, whereas someone like Buffett tends to be a lot more concentrated.

39:53How do you approach the number of holdings in your portfolio? When I was reading about Lynch's strategy and how he holds so many companies, I was actually pretty surprised that he held that many, how he would be able to keep track of all these and keep up with all their earnings reports and things like that. So I'm curious what your approach is since you're a huge fan of Lynch yourself. The sweet spot for me, everyone has a different view on it. I mean, Charlie Munger has literally gone a leverage long bet into Alibaba. So everyone has a different view. For me, the sweet spot is like 25, 30 positions.

40:25As of right now, I think I have 23 positions. And so the reason why I've got a sweet spot there is because I know I'm not smart enough to get everything right. And I mean, when you look at, for argument's sake, Warren Buffett's track record, 20 % compounded for 60 years is incredible. And then if you look at some of the flaws over the years, so for argument's sake, selling airliners in March 2020 lows, or he had Kraft Heinz, IBM, all of these different mistakes that were made with Berkshire Hathaway, yet he still returned 20 % year on year. When I look at somebody like Warren Buffett, who's absolutely an investing genius, make mistakes like that, I'm sure I'm going to make a lot of mistakes along the way.

40:59And so I look at it in the sense where if I'm very concentrated, like Buffett's not going to invest in IBM unless he thinks he's going to make money. He's not going to invest in Kraft Hines unless he thinks he's going to make money. And those have been disastrous investments. And so the way I look at it is, look, I don't want to be over concentrated in one position because I can absolutely be wrong. But I don't want to have like 100 positions because I don't have enough time to look after those. Somewhere in between 25, well, let's say 20 and 30 positions is sort of like my sweet spot. And as of right now, I'm getting more concentrated because as we start to see pretty decent corrections, I just find more sense in concentrating some of my lower conviction plays into my higher conviction plays.

41:36And so that's sort of the way I see it. I have no idea what Peter Lynch was thinking to have over a thousand positions. I don't even know if I know a thousand companies. I really can't comment on that. Somebody had mentioned to me though that he did own like one share of a company in order to get their annual report sent out to So he might spend like a dollar or something buying one share to get the reports. So I don't really know what he was thinking. I would say that that's probably closer to the truth, buying one share in order to get the annual reports because a thousand companies, I don't even know if I know a thousand companies.

42:05It's pretty remarkable you can achieve a 29 % return holding that many stocks. You'd think he'd be more concentrated. So that's pretty interesting. How do you think about entering positions? You seem to be someone that really takes disadvantaged opportunities once they're presented. So does that lead to you scaling out of positions that are maybe closer to what you'd call intrinsic value and entering positions that seem to be good opportunities? I'm never afraid to enter a position. If I look at the company, there's always a chance I'm going to be wrong. And that's why I diversify and I split up the risk.

42:40So there's always a chance I'm going to be wrong. And I sort that sort of systematic risk up by diversifying. And then when I buy into a company, I'm usually looking for some sort of barrier to entry, some sort of mode, some sort of competitive edge that will give me some sort of conviction that the revenue is going to be consistent for argument's sake moving forward. Or there's some degree that will give me confidence that if I value a business on a specific multiple, it will be a fair multiple. So I'll buy into a specific company and I'll start a position. And if it goes down like 20 or 30%, I know the company, I know what it paid for, I was happy to pay for it.

43:11I'll increase that position. I have a problem increasing that position. If it continues to go down, I'll get heavier and heavier and heavier. And so over time, what I realized is if I'm happy to pay a specific price and I start a position and it gets cheaper, one of my edges has been if I really understand the business, there's usually a pretty quick mean reversion out the other side. When you get deep discounts on specific companies, like for argument's sake, I started to buy in Discovery at$31. It went down all the way to$21.50. And I bought a lot more at around$26, $24,$24.50 and around that region.

43:45My average cost goes from$31 down to$27, and then the share price bounce back up to$30. I have an opportunity then to lighten the load because I got a little bit too heavy, and I still have a position on a better cost basis. And so if I'm happy to pay a specific price and I get an opportunity to buy more, that's absolutely what I'm planning on doing. So it goes back to what Peter Lynch used to say. He doesn't diversify, he buys into 10 different stories. And if story two goes up 50 % and story seven doesn't, well, he'll take money out of story two and put it in story seven. He suggests that you should rotate capital as opposed to selling because if you sell, you're not really committed to the stock marketing.

44:22The question is, where are you going to buy back in? So he has this idea of rotation, rebalancing positions. And that's how I look at it. When one company has a pretty big bump and another company is down, the two of them have the same opportunity, but one of them is a hell of a lot cheaper, rotate a bit of capital. And you'd be surprised how much that adds to your annual performance and reduces your risk. Positions correct all the time. And certainly after you get a big pop, for argument's sake, a 50 % jump in a short period of time, like what happened with Micron last year, I invested in Micron, which has continued to grind lower.

44:52And then inside six, eight weeks, it's a 50%. And if you can seize that opportunity to rotate capital into another company that's underperforming, that's essentially what I like to take advantage of. So when I'm investing into a position, the most important thing for me is not to go too heavy. And then the second most important thing is if it does get cheaper, buy more. And that's how I look at it, but don't overexpose myself. Very interesting. And I did have a chance to take a look at your portfolio. And I did notice that you used to own Facebook. And Facebook and also Google are companies I've considered adding positions to.

45:26And since you sold your Facebook position, I'm curious what your thoughts are on the company and also maybe some thoughts on Google as well. I bought Facebook back after earnings. Originally, I had a problem with Facebook in that I think the opportunity is great. I thought the valuation was fair, but I was concerned about antitrust challenges. I was concerned about corporate governance risks regarding insider trading and how that might impact, create a lack of focus for management. So I sold out of the stock, but then obviously earnings came around, the share price drops 26 % in one day. And so there's a number of things that I needed to consider.

46:01If you look at Facebook, first and foremost, you understand the opportunity that exists in Facebook. So Facebook, everybody throws around this idea that their specific company that they've invested in has network effects. Well, most of the time, there's very few actual companies and assets that actually have huge network effects. Facebook is one of them that actually does. And the idea of a network effect is each incremental user adds value to this sort of network. And so what I mean by that is if you look at the US population, it's 330 million. If you look at the Canadian population, it's 38 million.

46:30So you've got 368 million people. And if you look at the number of people from that region that are on Facebook or Facebook's products from those regions, it's 195 million people. So you've got over 50 % of the entire population, including old age pensioners, newborns, 52%, in and around 52 % of the entire population on the platform. If you need to contact somebody that you haven't seen in ages, you can't find the number in the yellow pages because it doesn't exist anymore. You can't look them up. You pop onto Facebook and there's more than likely you're going to find that person. So if you go back to 2018 during the Cambridge Analytica scandal, and there was this sort of like all over social media, people were saying there was campaigns to ban Facebook and get off Facebook.

47:10It never happened. No one ever left Facebook. In fact, the numbers continue to grow. And so that's a sign of just how strong the network effects are on Facebook because it's so convenient. If you want to keep in touch with family members across the world or whatever it may be, you know they're on Facebook. And so when I look at that for Facebook, it's not something that I ever think is going to be recreated. There's 2.93 billion daily active users on the site. And it's not something that I think is ever going to be recreated. And if you look at, for argument's sake, recently, people are talking about a concern over users actually leaving the platform.

47:40Well, if you look at the revenue breakdown, the 195 million people from the US and Canada, the ARPU on those users is$60 per user per year. And if you look at rest of the world, it's$3.60. So the users that they're losing is in the rest of the world. So for every 20 million people that they lose in the rest of the world is the equivalent of 1 million in the US. So I'm not really concerned about them losing users. And the network effect is really, really, really strong. It still remains very strong. So the business as a whole is a solid business. And then it comes down to problems with antitrust.

48:13They've been scrutinized significantly about antitrust issues, monopoly and whatnot. On the latest earnings, they came out and they said, Apple have impacted our business, going to cost us$10 billion this year. And at the same time, TikTok are stealing all of our users. How on earth, first and foremost, can the FTC come out and say, that's a monopoly when you see a billion users in four years on TikTok and Apple have impacted the business by 10 billion? Very, very, very difficult to accuse them of that. But secondly, antitrust laws only apply to businesses that are over$600 billion in market cap.

48:46And after the drop, they drop below$600 billion in market cap. So they can make acquisitions now and not be scrutinized by it. And I find that quite appealing as well. So the FTC issue at these prices, it's not really that worrisome. A lot of people are worried about the metaverse and all that type of stuff. It's a$10 billion investment into reality labs, plus their business is going to be impacted by$10 billion in free cash flow because of iOS. So their free cash flow is going to go from$39 billion down to$26 billion, which is a pretty big drop. But at the same time, the valuation has dropped pretty significantly.

49:18So I get optionality on the metaverse plus a 4.7 % free cash flow yield. Little to no scrutiny from the FTC, as long as the market cap's below$600 billion, they could go out and buy Roblox or something like that, maybe Take-Two, something like that, where they can get younger engagement on their platform, have some sort of metaverse today while they build out some sort of monopoly into the end of the decade. And so I see it as a very compelling opportunity. It's interesting how Facebook stock has seemed to act a bit differently than some of these other big tech names. Facebook, you mentioned the Cambridge Analytica scandal, the stock went from roughly$210, huge drop on earnings down to roughly$125.

49:58Then COVID, it went back up to the 220 range down to$150 or so. And then now just recently, stock went up to$380 in the fall of 2021. And now we're just north of$200. So many times, people have scrutinized Facebook while the business has been a compounding machine in terms of revenue and free cash flows and things like that. But the stock has been pretty choppy. But in general, it's been up and to the right with now looking to be potentially another one of those opportunities. Robert Leonard Yeah. I mean, last year, they bought back$44 billion worth of stock. So you think about like, they've got no debt, they're producing all this free cash flow.

50:37They're already reinvesting tens of billions of dollars in R &D and capital expenditure, and they still have 26 billion left over. They're not going to issue dividends, they're just going to keep buying back their stock. They've got$58 billion on their balance sheet. It's a really unique situation where it's got so much hate, really strong network effects that don't seem to be waning. And I just see it as a very compelling opportunity. And so Back to your point regarding the differences between them and Google. I don't own Google, to be honest. I'll tell you why I think it is. If I go back to 2012, Peter Thiel done an interview with the CEO of Google at the time.

51:10And he pretty much said, you guys have a monopoly on search. And you guys are lazy. And you guys are not innovating. And you guys are going to turn into a bureaucratic sort of company that's slow growth. And it's going to start to slow down. When I listened to that, I was like, you know, I think it was maybe shades of what happened to Nokia in the late 1990s, the most innovative company in the world. Bureaucracy takes over, and then they just crash and burn. I was thinking to myself, and I think it's that sort of memory kind of pushes me away from it. But if you look at the company today, it's like they've got a monopoly on search, a duopoly on advertising with Facebook.

51:42You also have Android. And so, yeah, I think it's an interesting one. Robert Leonard Yeah. I mentioned Google to Bill Nygren. He's heavily invested in that one in his Oakmark fund, and he believes that YouTube still has a lot of runway to grow. And they bought YouTube back in the day for a billion dollars and now seems to have a ton of potential, just like many of these other platforms like Google to Search and Facebook, what they have with the Facebook social media platform and Instagram. Facebook and Google both seem like very similar picks to me in that they have these huge platforms with these massive network effects that they have just been able to monetize so, so well.

52:21You know what's funny? So I got a new machine and I've got Windows running on it and they keep trying to get me to move over to a Microsoft Edge and I just can't do it because it's just so convenient and easy to search on Google. And so that's a testament to their network effects. Yeah. I mean, there's not really too many companies that have those type of network effects. And YouTube as well, in the latest quarter, I think it was about$8.6 billion in revenue in a quarter. So they bought it for a billion, pretty successful investment. Yeah. There's another sort of, I heard Terry Smith talk about Google.

52:53He's invested in the company now, but he had a hard time investing for years. And one thing he was pointing to is like, they've made 235 acquisitions and none of them, none of them actually were successful. And so he's come to the theory that they were just buying the competition and putting it on a shelf and getting rid of the competition that way while they were early. I guess if you come to that conclusion as well. You've got all this cash, you've got a perfect monopoly on the market, and it's trading actually at a very reasonable price. It's not expensive at all. Certainly, when you're looking at a relative to some of its peers, it's trading at a very reasonable price.

53:24And every single quarter, they just continue to perform very well. I think both of them are interesting. I personally chose Facebook. I love getting involved with the hysteria that goes around it. And I think it's quite low-hanging fruit at its current valuation, but Google, I could put it in that category as well, for sure. Yeah. Two very interesting picks that have both been on my mind quite a bit recently. So Robert, before I let you go, where can the audience go to connect with you and learn more about your YouTube channel? I guess you guys can check out my YouTube channel. The Popular Investor, I post more sporadically on YouTube, Twitter.

54:02I speak a little bit about Twitter, but it's more speaking my mind. Sometimes I'm wrong. Sometimes I frustrate people, but it is what it is. And you guys can check out my portfolio on eToro. So I've got an open portfolio. You can see my stats and the growth rate in my portfolio. My username on eToro is Robert Merck. And you'll see all the different positions that I'm holding and the ones that I talk about on YouTube as well. Awesome. Robert, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast. Thanks for having me. All right, everybody. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please go ahead and follow us on your favorite podcast app so you can get these episodes delivered automatically.

54:37And if you haven't already done so, be sure to check out our website, theinvestorspodcast.com. There you'll find all of our episodes, some educational resources we have, as well as some tools you can use as an investor. And with that, we'll see you again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by the Investors Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only.

55:15Before making any decision, consult a professional. This show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

From the publisher

Clay Finck and Robert Reynolds chat about Peter Lynch, his investing strategies, GARP investing, and more. Robert is an investor and a content creator for The Popular Investor YouTube channel.

IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:
00:00 - Intro
04:15 - Who Peter Lynch is and how he personally invests.
15:58 - How individual retail investors can have an advantage over Wall Street.
25:08 - Why active investors might be in a good position to outperform passive investors over the coming years.
46:05 - Why Facebook and Google are potentially compelling investments.
And much, much more!

*Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.

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