MI338: Inside the Mind of a Value Investor w/ Value Stock Geek

25:35That was the impetus behind developing the weird portfolio. And then finally, I started investing that way in 2018-ish, around then, 2017, for a portion of my money. And then when I saw how wrong I was about COVID, where I thought, for instance, I'm like, well, obviously, all these companies have all of this debt and the economy is shutting down right now. The Buffett metric and the Shiller P are at all-time highs. Obviously, this is the beginning of the end and this is going to be just like 2008. And then that didn't happen either. So that's when I kind of like half believed macro was unpredictable around 2020.

26:10And then COVID happened and I'm like, macro was completely unpredictable and I need to process to insulate me from all of this. And the weird portfolio was a key part of it. And then with my stock picking, a focus of more on companies that could be held for longer periods of time was another piece of the focus. And the whole thing is to just get away from that kind of macro prognostication. Right. So how do you break it down with your own portfolio? How do you delineate or what kind of allocation are you making towards individual stock selection versus what you allocate towards the weird portfolio?

26:43So I don't want to get into specific percentages, like I'm this percentage weird, I'm this percentage stock. But basically, I've taken my stock money and I've said, hey, I have it in a tax advantage account because with turnover, you want to reduce taxes. ETFs are a lot more tax efficient. So I set that aside and I said, I'm going to buy businesses just because I love it so much. I love researching companies. I love learning about companies. I love trying to figure out how a stock is going to turn around. I love learning about businesses. I didn't want to give that up. And then the rest of my money is in this weird portfolio situation.

27:17And with that, it's nice because it's more mechanical. I can just take, for instance, every time you get paid, it's going into the weird portfolio and I'm expanding that. And I can just buy systematically whatever ETFs are light every two weeks. And both portfolios help me in different ways. So the stock picking portfolio really gives me a way to scratch the itch so I don't screw around with the weird portfolio and change the allocations based on what I'm thinking. And then the weird portfolio kind of gives me confidence to take risks with my stock picking strategy where it's like, oh, well, I have this money to the side that is like my fortress of solitude that is safe.

27:53And that gives me some bandwidth to go out and really try to pick stocks and try to learn about them and try to learn about the market. That completely makes sense. Let's get more into the WEIRD portfolio, how you break it down. There's certain percentages you have, and I want to get into that a little bit and why you chose those specific asset classes. Sure. So the WEIRD portfolio is 20 % US small cap value, 20 % international small caps, 20 % real estate, 20 % long-term treasury, and 20 % gold. So the idea there is basically taking Harry Brown's concepts, like I discussed earlier, increasing that stock allocation, making it globally diversified, pivoting that to value, having some gold in there.

28:38And the gold is really there for inflationary environments or currency crises or things like that. The long-term treasuries are there for recessions and depressions because during recessions and depressions, the Fed tends to cut interest rates. And for instance, in 2008, long-term treasuries were up 20 % while the market was down 37%. And my thinking there was, I knew that small cap value and value investing in general helps to avoid major bubbles. It tends to deliver a more consistent rate of return over the long run. But at the same time, it's not immune to recessions and crises and things like that.

29:15And having been so deep in the macro weeds when I was younger, I think about that stuff way too much more than I should. So I wanted some protections there. And the key protections in that portfolio are the long-term treasuries, which, like I said, would perform well in an environment like 2008 or the early 1930s. And then gold also helps. And gold is there kind of like a safe haven asset if things really go to hell. But it also tends to perform well during long inflationary environments. It doesn't have an exact tick for tick tracking of the CPI if anything's going on like that. But in environments like the 1970s, it did pretty well.

29:53And it's actually done okay since 2019-ish, since we've had a bad inflationary situation in the United States. And then it's also there is just kind of like a safe haven asset if everything else, like for instance, say the US treasury defaulted. Well, I'm pretty sure my stocks would get annihilated, my treasuries would get annihilated, but gold would probably still be worth something and I would still be alive. I'd still be in the game, so to speak. And gold, I mean, gold, you mentioned Harry Brown. It's also an aspect of Ray Dalio's portfolio, isn't it? Yeah. So Ray Dalio, he has his own version of kind of a risk parity style portfolio like this that he outlined to Tony Robbins in a book, Money Mastered the Game.

30:36And his version is the all seasons portfolio. That portfolio is... So I mean, I had issues with both approaches, with Harry Brown's approach and with his approach. I thought that Ray Dalio's portfolio was way too heavy in the long-term treasury bonds. I think like 40 % of the portfolio is in there. I didn't think Harry Brown had enough in stocks. So I kind of settled on my own interpretation of it. And you've chosen small cap value both in the US and internationally, right? Yeah, I thought global diversification was very important. I didn't want to have a lot of home country bias. I'm definitely in like the kind of Jack Bogle mindset where, and this is ironic because Jack Bogle was only a US investor, but that said, his whole philosophy, don't buy the needle by the haystack and everything's going to work out if you just own.

31:23So I think the same logic works for countries as it does for companies. So you don't know which company is necessarily going to outperform. So you own all of them in an index fund. For a global investor, you really don't know which country is going to perform the best. It's often the United States, but it's not always the United States. So I wanted some global diversification there. And then with the pivot to value, that's really about avoiding major bubbles. So small cap value, while it draws down in a nasty way during the initial kind of bear market, it can still deliver a decent rate of return over say like a decade because it's kind of more of like grinding out a return.

31:59You're selling companies that are depressed. You're selling them when they're stronger. You're collecting dividends across the way. So it tends to deliver a kind of more smooth rate of return than the boom and bust that you see in like large cap growth. And you saw this in places like Japan after the Japanese bubble imploded. If you were a small cap value investor, you still, I mean, it hurt, you didn't do great, but you were way better off in kind of a systematic value strategy than you were just buying like large cap stocks. So are you also, did you say like 20 % of that is in real estate? Did I hear that correctly?

32:34REITs. Yeah, specifically REITs. And that's also about inflation protection. So that's more about like real estate values at the very least should increase with the cost with replacement costs. over time. REITs can collect rents from whatever industry they're in, whether it's an office REIT or whether it's a residential REIT, and rents should increase over time with inflation. If you plug it into a backtest, REITs tend to just perform like small cap value. But I thought it was important to have a very specific allocation to that to try to have an added layer of inflation protection in there. Outside of this, the weird portfolio and your individual stock picking, Is there any other investments that you do or do you just primarily focus on this?

33:18That's it. So I have the portfolio, which is my main asset allocation strategy. And then I have cash, which I keep in T-bills and a high yield savings account, which is my emergency fund. And then I have my stock picking, which is my real passion. Your love. Yeah. And you analyze a company a week, right? And write up a report on your findings. Is that right? Like looking at 10Ks? Yeah, that's right. And that was really inspired by Warren Buffett. So Warren Buffett, he said, if I were you, I forget who he was talking to, but he was talking to someone. If I were you, learn about every business in America.

33:54He said, that's how you should start investing. And they said, well, there's a lot of companies. And he said, we'll start with the A's. So that was Warren Buffett's advice. So I really took that to heart. And I said, well, if I want to really perform well as a stock picker, that's the direction I should take. I should really stop trying to perfect a back test and I should really focus more on and then trying to figure out what's happening with macro. And I should really apply that. I should really start learning about businesses consistently. And then the nice thing about that sub stack is it forces me to do that.

34:27Every week I need to get out an article and whether I feel like it or not, I spend a week researching that company, learning about it. And basically what I'm trying to determine, first of all, is like, is this a wonderful company? Like, is this actually a company with a boat that I think can sustain high returns on invested capital? And I learned about them. And the nice thing about that is in the past, when I was more of like a deep value kind of investor, during a big crash, the screens would all change and I'd have to start from scratch and start, oh, here's 20 stocks on the screen and I have to research all of them.

34:59And I realized that was very limited because first of all, that crash could end very quickly. By the time you've done all your research, you could have missed out on all the opportunity. So I wanted to say, I want a watch list of companies I like. And they may not be an attractive price right now, but you know what? I'm going to understand them. And if they ever are available at an attractive price, I'm going to buy them. And that's been a great way of going about this. And I've also learned so much just by going through a company every single week and digging into it and trying to figure out the economics of it.

35:29I'm just learning so much about all of those businesses and just about the world in general by going through that practice every single week and doing that. Yeah, it's such a great practice, I think. I remember listening to a talk that Lee Lu gave, and it was, I think, at Columbia to some students. And he recommended that they get ValueLine and go, same thing, go through these, start at A, or I think it started at one. There's thousands of companies listed in ValueLine and go through all of them? And he did. I think he actually did do that practice. Buffett probably did. Is ValueLine something that you utilize?

36:04I've checked it out before. It's not the key thing that I use. The main resources I use right now, I use quickfifest.net a lot. That's a great website where you can download over 20 years worth of financials, export it to Excel, and then you can go through and that really tells you a lot about the company. And then I will go into the public filings and then I start there. check out the economics. Is there something about this that interests me? Does this look like it's possibly an interesting opportunity? And then I go into the SEC filings and I try to understand them. And I try to find out how does this business make money?

36:37Is there some kind of secret sauce that they have going on that is a source of moat that allows them to earn these high returns? And then the last piece is valuation, which is always in a state of flux. Often when I go through these companies, if it is a good company, it's usually not at a good price. And then I'll add to a watch list and move on. In a lot of situations, I thought when I was looking at the company, there's no way this is ever going to get cheap. And then it happens sometimes. It happened to me with Meta. I looked at Meta a long time ago and I said, well, this will never be in the value bucket.

37:08And then within a year it was. So yeah, it's a great exercise to go through and learn about these companies. And pretty much all of them are at some point are going to be available at an attractive price. What else is in your tech stack or your toolbox that you're using to do your analysis? Is it pretty straightforward? I wasn't familiar with the website that you mentioned with all the historical financial data, but tell me more about your tech stack. Yeah, it's not that sophisticated. It's quickfs.net. That's a great website. I mean, it's not my methods aren't sophisticated. Quickfs.net is a sophisticated tool.

37:46But yeah, you can go in there, you can quickly bring up any company. And if you pay, you can download all of these financials. So I don't have any affiliation with quickfs.net. I just like the tool. But yeah, I download it and you can look at 20 years worth of financials. In terms of companies to pick, I tend to go through a lot of different sources to just kind of get ideas for companies I should look at. I look at a lot of big investor holdings. So an investor I respect is Terry Smith, for instance. I'll look through his holdings. He often pays higher prices than I would ever pay, but he has a very good eye for quality.

38:20So I'll go through his holdings. I go through a lot of ETF holdings. I mentioned Toby Carlisle. I look at his Zig ETF. I see what he's up to. I look at QVAL. That's Wes Gray's ETF that's based on Toby's work. I'll look at some quality ETFs like QAL. That's an iShares product. I'll look at that. The Wellesley Fund, they have a lot of very interesting dividend paying companies that I'll take a look at. And then a A lot of major sourcing of ideas is kind of like just driving around and looking at things. Like I stumbled into a tractor supply and I'm like, what's this place like? And I'm long tractor supply now.

38:52But yeah, just kind of saying like, hey, that parking lot looks full. I'm going to check that out. I do less of the mechanical screening. Like I used to run very specific screens and restrict my universe to that. But now I'll look at anything. I just want to learn. I'll learn about any business. And if it's not at a great price right now, okay, I'll move on to the next one and keep an eye on it. And someday it will be at an attractive value.

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42:44All right, back to the show. Yeah, I like the cloning idea. You mentioned Terry Smith and just looking at investors that you admire and maybe copying them to some degree. There's a great... Have you ever been on Data Aroma? I think it's called D-A-T-A-R-O-M-A. And it shows the holdings of all the top value investors. Have you ever come across that website? Yeah, I use that. And yeah, that's where I use to kind of see what Terry Smith is up to. You can see what Pat Dorsey is up to. You can see... Yeah, any big investor, Monish Pobrai, anyone you can think of, you can go on there and you can see what they're up to.

43:19And that's always a nice thing to look at. Yeah, it's great. It's a little delayed because it's whatever, a quarter late or something like that, but it's such a great source of information, I think. Yeah, absolutely. I love going on there and seeing what a lot of big investors are up to. I would say to that though, don't simply follow an investor into an idea. Definitely do your own work. And it's not just about maybe they've made a bad investment, that's possible. But the key thing is you need to develop your own conviction about things. Once something goes wrong, if you just copied an investor, you're not going to be able to stick to it.

43:53You're not going to be able to hold it. You need to have some conviction yourself and have some understanding of the business you're buying rather than just follow an investor into it. That said, great way for idea generation, for companies to look at, for companies to research. It's a great starting point, I think. And I like the idea of just driving around. That's kind of a Peter Lynch idea, right? Look around you, what businesses are doing well? You can keep your eyes and ears open and you'll be able to figure it out. Yeah, totally. And I've gone through an experience with Peter Lynch's ideas where I've looked at that in the past like, oh, well, that's naive.

44:27Just buy what you know, that's ridiculous. But then thinking about it, I'm like, you know, if I just bought stuff I liked, like Domino's and Home Depot and Amazon and stuff like that, I probably would be much more wealthy if I went back and then all the other weird things I bought, like if I just did stuff like that. So yeah, trust your own judgment. If you see a business you like, that's a great starting point. I'm not saying just buy stuff you like, neither does Peter Lynch. He advocates you do research beyond that, but it's a good starting point. If you're into something or someone in your family is into something, you see them going to a specific store or website all the time, it might be worth looking into it and seeing what's going on there.

45:05There was a tweet that you had recently and you asked, what's the most overrated investment book? I wanted to hear what your findings were. What were some of the things that you think, what some of your followers thought? That's a controversial question. I think there's a lot of people kind of trolling and saying The Intelligent Investor by Ben Graham. I disagree with that. I do agree with them in the sense that it is a very dense book and it is a bad place to get started. I think a much better starting point for an investor would be something like The Little Book That Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt, which is extremely accessible.

45:39You can sit down and read that in an afternoon. That's a great starting point to learn the basic principles of value investing. So yeah, some people said that. They said Ben Graham's work. I said I disagree with that, but I understand what they're saying there. Margin of Safety came up a few times by Seth Klarman. I like Margin of Safety. I think it's fine. I think it's a decent book. I wouldn't pay$1 ,000 for it, but... Yeah, I was going to say it's like$1 ,000 book, at least. I looked it up on Amazon recently. It was like, whoa, I don't think I'm going to be buying that anytime soon. Yeah, I think that the limited supply of it has increased its reputation maybe beyond where it's deserve, but I still think it's a pretty good book.

46:18I don't have any major issues with it. They mentioned Principles by Ray Dalio, which I thought was a good one. He's written about all of these principles he has. And there was a book that just came out, The Fund, which is all about Bridgewater and a lot of things of what that's actually like in practice. And most people can't really handle it, like the radical transparency and all that. And I don't know if it's really a great way to run a business, to have all that radical transparency where people are sharing brutal feedback with each other. And so, yeah, I thought that kind of ranked highly up there.

46:54But yeah, that was a fun little tweet. Yeah, it is fun. I also wanted to hear a little bit about your podcast that you've been doing. Talk to me about some of the guests that you've brought on and just like have any of them, I don't know, change your thought process at all or is it not an echo chamber, but like are you bringing on guests that will challenge your own thinking at all? Oh, yeah. I have people from all kinds of different persuasions and stock strategies. Yeah. Like I'll talk to, like I mentioned, I don't include macro in my process, but I talk to a lot of people about macro. And I'm always interested to hear from successful macro investors and hear what they're doing, hear their perspective on things.

47:32Yeah. And I have people from all kinds of different persuasions. So I've had JL Collins on there. He's a 100 % stock indexing investor. That was a great interview. I don't invest in 100 % stocks, but I think there's a lot you can learn from him and a lot from that strategy. And that was an excellent interview. His book is what? The Simple Path to Wealth? The Simple Path to Wealth. And I'd say if you are starting out and you just want to learn the basics of investing, buy that book, follow the plan, and it's probably going to work out over the long run. Yeah. So that's a great book. I have macro guys like I had Citrini on.

48:06That was a great conversation. We talked about GLP-1s. We talked about artificial intelligence. I have people that are more of a Buffett persuasion. I've had them on The Science of Hitting. He was a great interview. I talked to him about a lot of different things. I've talked to Toby Carlisle. I've talked to Lawrence Hamtill. He has a very interesting perspective. It's very oriented towards industries and sectors. And he's interested in a lot of very cool businesses. I've had very deep value guys on like Evan Blecker. He does exclusively net nets. So I had him on the podcast and that was a great interview.

48:42I've had some long short guys, like I don't short stocks, but I've had like, for instance, George Lovatas from Upslip Capital. That was a very interesting interview. But yeah, overall, it's just a cool opportunity to have really interesting conversations with investors that I respect. And they're from all kinds of different persuasions and ideas. And yeah, I learned something new from all of them. And they're really cool conversations to have. What about, you're into the small cap stuff. What about Ian Castle? He's more like micro stuff, micro cap, but have you ever had him on? I'm trying to get him on.

49:14I've approached him a couple of times. He's been busy, but I'm sure he'll come on eventually. But yeah, I love Ian Castle. He's a really entertaining guy. He'd be a good one. I want to touch a little bit on movies. I know you're a movie guy and I am too. So I wanted to hear some of your top money investing movies that you love, like something you'd watch year after year? Investing movies. I mean, you got to go with Trading Places, right? That's a fantastic movie. Hilarious. Eddie Murphy in his prime. That's an amazing film to watch. Another one I like is Other People's Money. That's a pretty funny one with Danny DeVito.

49:49That's a very good movie. He's a corporate reader and he buys... Actually, the company he's buying sounds like Berkshire Hathaway. It's a New England... They do wire and cable, New England wire and cable. They're getting destroyed competitively. It's a dying business and he wants to go in and liquidate it. What I really like about that movie... There's Wall Street, which I feel like is almost like a... It's a cool movie, but it's almost like only giving you one side of the argument, a very Marxist side of the argument. Capitalism is evil and these guys are terrible. Other people's money gives you the other side of the argument for the corporate raider.

50:23So he's like, hey, this company sucks. It's bleeding money. Why don't we just end this enterprise? And then he actually gives a great speech at the end of the movie where they're meeting with the shareholders trying to decide whether or not to liquidate the company. They're going to elect his board and liquidate the company. And yeah, Gregory Peck is the CEO of the company. He gives this very inspirational Gregory Peck style speech of why this needs to be saved and how it's about more than the company. It's about saving America and all this cool stuff. any other movie, they would just end it there and he's right and the corporate raider is wrong.

50:57But they actually have Danny DeVito come up and give the other side of the argument and it's compelling. It's like, why are we keeping this thing in business when it's not making any money for anybody? Take the money invested in something with a future rather than trying to keep this thing that's already dead alive. I'll have to check it out. Yeah, I've never seen it. I mean, I've heard of it, but I've never sat down and taken the time to watch it. Yeah, it's a good one. And then there's The Gambler. That's a good movie with Mark Wahlberg. The famous, has the famous F.U. money speech in it from John Goodman.

51:26That's a great movie. Yeah, I like that one. Recently, I rewatched The Color of Money. That's a good money movie, more of a gambling movie, but that's about... Is that Paul Newman? Yeah, Paul Newman and Tom Cruise. They're pool hustlers. That's a good film. But yeah, those are some good money movies, I think. I want to talk a little bit about investing love stories. Is there anything right now in your investment that you're really particularly fond of that holds a special place in your heart. You love checking the price action on it and just following it. Do you have anything like that right now?

51:57Yeah, I'm really fun. I invest in Taiwan Semiconductor. So I picked that up in December 2022. It was at a PE of 12. The expectation was we were at a bad point in the semiconductor cycle. It's kind of been perpetually cheap since then because everyone's worried about an invasion from China. My attitude is that if China invades Taiwan, Your portfolio doesn't matter that much because we're in World War III. It's kind of my thinking there. But yeah, great company. They manufacture the chips for companies like NVIDIA and Apple. They're really like the engine of everything that we're seeing right now with AI is really made possible by TSM's manufacturing methods.

52:34So, and it's still, it's not as cheap as when I bought it. Like right now, I think it's around 18 EV bit, something like that. But it's a fantastic business and I like owning it and I like following it. I want to actually ask you with all these podcasts guests that you're having on, do you fall prey to like kind of shiny object syndrome where they're talking about ideas like, and you're influenced by them and you're changing your own strategy? Do you have flexibility there? Are you pretty, this is your, I want to hear about that a little. I'm pretty set in my ways. Yeah, I don't really have that syndrome, but I do like talking to people and learning about what they're doing.

53:11But no, I haven't changed really any of my investing practices. When I talk to stock pickers, I can get some good leads there. I'll have a stock picker on and they'll mention a company I've never heard of. George Lovatis, he tipped me off to Ball Corp. That was an interesting one that I looked into. Ball Corp, what do they do? They make aluminum cans for Bud and Coke and Pepsi. That's a pretty fantastic business. When I looked into it, I didn't think it was necessarily at the right price right now, but I think it's great enterprise. It's got a great moat. Often they have their manufacturing plants set up right next to the brewers.

53:50So I think it's a great little moaty business. I wanted to hear if there's a younger listener that's listening right now, what would you tell yourself or what would you have done differently looking back on things in your own investment journey and process? Sure. So I'd say if you're younger, Sure. You want to really focus more on your career and your personal finances than necessarily like stock picking or that kind of thing. So, this is a Harry Brown thing. He says that your career is your most important source of your wealth and he's right. You want to really focus as much as possible on your career in those early stages so you can get yourself to a good income in the future.

54:30You don't necessarily want to spend all of your time buried in 10Ks and then neglecting your actual job. You want to really focus on advancing your career because that's where a bulk of your capital is going to come from, is from saving towards your career. I'd also say you want to really focus on personal finance. Like I mentioned, I kind of had to go back to basics. I was a finance guy in college. I had learned all this stuff about the stock market, but I found myself in a bunch of debt. And I think if you talk to a lot of people, even people in the financial industry, they may not admit to it, but there's a lot of them that are in tons of debt and are in atrocious shape with their personal finances.

55:06So I'd say the key thing is to establish those habits early on where you're doing things like avoiding bad debt. You are saving a fixed percentage of your income. You're automating your investments. You're very conscious about your spending. You're just not going out there and mindlessly spending money. You want to establish those good personal finance habits early on. I'd also advise that if you do get into stock picking and that type of thing to really write down and keep an investment journal. So you don't have to necessarily do it publicly like I do on a blog, but if you just keep an investing journal, that will really help you out later on.

55:43So when you ultimately go ahead and sell it and say the investment didn't work out, you can say like, well, what did I think two years ago about that? Or even what did you think about macroeconomic situations? You might say like, oh, I think there's going to be a recession next year and here's why. Write that down in your journal. And I think over time, that will start to reveal to you that you're probably wrong about a lot of things because people tend to be very selective about what they remember. They remember the wins and they don't remember the losses. And then from that, you can really learn a lot.

56:14So, I would just say that's a huge thing. Take rigorous notes on what you're doing and keep a journal and monitor your investments and that type of thing. And then overall, I'd say at that stage of the game, you're not dealing with enough money where your specific allocations and portfolios matter too much. Say you've saved up$20 ,000, you lose 10 grand if the market crashes 50%. That's painful, but you have 40 years to continue to make money. And in the long term, that's going to be a drop in the bucket compared to what you're going to have someday if you stick to an investment program. Yeah, those are all really good pieces of advice.

56:53I want to do a quick fire round if you're up for it. Do you have time? Yeah, sure. Let's do it. Cool. So the first question I had was, what's been your best investment so far? My best investment so far? In my current portfolio, it's Meta. I'm up about 125%, something like that on Meta from where I bought it. Yeah. So that was a really good one. That one worked out really well. So at what point did you buy that? A couple of years ago then, a little after COVID or when? I bought it in the middle of 2022. So I was actually early to it. It kept falling through December. And that was a good situation where it was a really good company.

57:31And if you looked under the hood and you looked at the actual financials, you saw revenues were growing. If you looked into their investor presentations, you saw that the daily average users were increasing. It was an ideal value situation. It also taught me not to move so quickly. I think I was a little bit too eager to buy it. So I bought it, like I said, early, like the middle of 2022. I should have probably waited a little bit for more of a blowout, but it still worked out. It still worked out okay. I want to hear, if you want, your thoughts on Bitcoin. Love it, hate it. My thoughts on Bitcoin.

58:03I'm not really a huge fan of Bitcoin. I mean, from an investment standpoint, my view on it is that there's the risk that the government can make it a zero. That's my main concern with Bitcoin, where I feel like if you read about a lot of the use cases for Bitcoin right now, a lot of people are like, it's used by human traffickers and terrorists. And North Korea has their own mining operations because they're an impoverished society trying to make money in any way. But I'm pretty sure if we go to war with a rogue state or there's a terrorist attack and then they tie the funds back where it was moved via Bitcoin, I could see them ending it.

58:46I mean, the US government has already, in the past, they ended private ownership of gold. It was a crime to own gold in the 1930s. And I think if they have the incentives there, they could absolutely do something that could potentially make Bitcoin a zero. So for that reason, I still look at it as a pretty speculative kind of investment. And I'm not really sure if we know what the use cases are for Bitcoin right now. I think that it doesn't really work too well as a medium of exchange, as a currency, because I can make a deal with you today to do something in Bitcoin. And well, if I say I'm going to pay you one Bitcoin for this task, well, it could rise 100%, it could decline 50%.

59:29I know that the kind of proponents of it say that that volatility will slow down over time as there's wider adoption, but I don't know. So for that reason, I consider it more of a speculative thing. But that said, I need to get some Bitcoin people in my podcast who can maybe open my mind to that. But that's where I'm at right now. Yeah, no, thanks for sharing that. I wanted to hear too, go back to when you were 18 and somebody gave you Ben Graham's book to your 18-year-old self. What book would you give to somebody that's 18 and just kind of starting to get interested in investing and showing the sparks of the love of investing?

1:00:06I would give them the simple path to well by JL Collins. And I would say, this is a great place to start. The place to start is more on the, I think the indexing side of things and keeping things simple. And if you do that, you stick to this, it's going to work out over the long run. And then I would say, if you are interested in stock picking and you want to get more into that side of things, I think a good starting point would be the little book that beats the market by Joel Greenblatt. And then I'd say you should also go in and read a lot of the Buffett letters. Another great Buffett resource is a book called Tap Dancing the Work, which is a collection of all of his best articles.

1:00:43That would be another place. Yeah, that's a good one. Do you read many biographies like Snowball or different biographies on investors that you love? Oh, yeah. I actually just recorded a podcast about the Snowball. I just reread it. So myself and the Canadian dividend investor got on and talked about it. But yeah, the Snowball is an incredible book. Yes. Yeah. Alice Schroeder, I think the author. Yeah. I remember reading it when it first came out. It's dense, but it's so good. It's yeah. I mean, it's a page turner for sure. Yeah. A little controversial because Warren Buffett doesn't really, he doesn't seem to like it too much because probably a lot of it hit pretty close to home.

1:01:20To his credit, he opened himself up to this biographer and he said, write the least flattering version. And I think that would be a tough thing for anyone to do. Like if someone interviewed everybody in your life and wrote the least flattering version of it. That would probably be a hard thing to read. I get where he's coming from, but it's a great book. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. Now you stock geek, this has been a lot of fun. I really enjoyed this. Thank you for your time. Before we sign off, is there anything that you wanted to talk about that we didn't get to touch on and how can people find out more about you, learn about what you're up to and things like that?

1:01:53Yeah. So you could check out my sub stack. That's where I publish a company right up every week. I publish a podcast every week. So that's the best place to learn about my content is right there. It's securityanalysis.org. You can go to valuestockgeek.com. That also redirects there. That's really where I've got everything. I've got all of my write-ups, updates on my portfolio, and then all of these podcast conversations that I'm having. Nice. And then you're fairly active on Twitter as well, right? Yeah, I stay active on Twitter. The handle's at valuestockgeek. And yeah, I try to post something at least on today.

1:02:27So I try to keep up with that and I meet a lot of cool people on there. Cool. Yeah. We've connected through Twitter. So it's a great tool. I will put all this in the show notes. So all those links will be there and people can find out more about you. But thanks a lot for your time today. This has been a lot of fun. Yeah. Thanks. I enjoyed this as well. Okay, folks. That's all I had for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I'll see you back here real soon. Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to follow Millennial Investing on your favorite podcast app and never miss out on our episodes.

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