The Intellectual Investor – Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson

Around 155 BC, Athens sent the philosopher Carneades to Rome to plead for a fine to be lifted. He delivered a brilliant speech and swayed the audience. The next day he returned to the same square and delivered an equally impassioned speech making the opposite point, and swayed them all over again. Cato the Elder was in the crowd this time, and Athens paid the price.

This essay is an excerpt from my book Soul in the Game. It’s about building what I call a Sophist filter: the discipline of stripping the emotional coloring off other people’s words, and off your own.

In ancient Greece, Sophists taught oratory as a weapon of persuasion through emotion and reason. Stoics were wary of them. They believed the words you use to persuade others end up shaping how you think, since you don’t have one brain for the world and another for yourself. Marcus Aurelius would describe Basil Honey Glazed Wild Alaskan Salmon as “the dead body of a fish, with herbs and honey.” Epictetus would swap “our ship is lost far at sea” for “we are at sea, and we don’t know where we are.”

I walk through why this matters in my day job. I talk to CEOs and listen to dozens of conference calls a month, and after some of them I want to mortgage my house and hand over the money. I discuss what the filter looks like for executives, for cynics who sound smarter than optimists, for arguments smuggled in through jokes, and for people who advertise their own virtues.

The full essay is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Review on Amazon https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/?ie=UTF8&asin=0857199072

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post Your Sophist Filter: On CEOs, Cynics, and the Voice in Your Head – Ep 304 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

On August 30, 2026 we gained a daughter. My son Jonah married Molly after eight years and one week of dating, and the Wedding Politburo gave me exactly three minutes for a speech. (I kept it to 40.)

This episode is the speech I gave at Jonah and Molly’s wedding, along with the story of the rabbi who married them and my 12-year-old Mia Sarah’s contribution to the evening.

In the speech, I tell Jonah about the chess tournament he won at ten years old and then handed to his friend Kevin. I tell the story of how he talked his way into the St. Julien in Boulder for the price of a Motel 6, and how his Toyota ended up parked next to the Ferraris. I trace how he went from a 1.3 GPA in 11th grade to graduating with honors from CU Boulder, and why Molly deserves most of the credit.

To Molly, I explain why she is every writer’s worst nightmare. I talk about her parents Josh and Eddie, her decision to leave a comfortable job for a master’s in mental health counseling, and the one word I kept repeating throughout the night.

I also share what makes Rabbi Ray Zwerin, 89 years old and the founder of Temple Sinai and the Denver Jewish Day School, the kind of person whose one-hour meetings turn into three-hour ones. Plus Mia Sarah’s speech, and the bouquet story that has me ready to lock her up.

The full essay is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Operation Molly article https://investor.fm/operation-molly/

Rabbi Zwerin essay’s https://zwerin.substack.com/

The Letter to Rabbi Zwerin https://investor.fm/a-letter-to-rabbi-zwerin/

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post My New Daughter – Ep 303 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

The US is running a 6% budget deficit in peacetime. Peacetime is now over. Interest on our debt now costs more than defense. It crossed in 2024 and has stayed there.

This is the second half of my letter to IMA clients, and it argues for an asset I spent most of my career politely ignoring: gold. The fact that I am writing this is a bit shocking to me. Gold falls outside my value framework. It has no cash flows. I have no idea what it is worth. What changed my mind is not something about gold, but many things about the dollar.

The dollar’s place as the world’s reserve currency rested on three things since WWII: the largest, steadiest economy; a politically stable democracy; the best military. I walk through why all three are cracking at once. I get into the $1.5 trillion proposed defense budget, our highest debt levels since WWII, and what Fed independence looks like after the Justice Department investigated the Fed chair. I discuss the weaponized dollar after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the perception that the war with Iran was lost, and what that means for Taiwan. I dig into a $4 million Patriot interceptor shooting down a $20,000 drone, China’s manufacturing base, and the rare earth problem.

Then there’s the piece that made my blood boil: Trump Media reportedly charging trading firms up to $1.2 million a year for early access to Truth Social posts. I explain why I call this the corn republic. And I close with why gold is one position among many, not a panacea.

The full piece is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Previous Episode https://investor.fm/narrative-change-part-1-ep-301/

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post Depressing Reasons Why I Am Bullish On Gold (Part 2) – Ep 302 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

In mid-August 2026, the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level in 19 years, above 5.3%, and the 10-year touched 4.75%. What happened next did not shock me, but it worries me: the US Treasury bought back its own long bonds to push yields down, financing the purchase by issuing short-term Treasuries. Yields fell for a day and then went right back up.

This is the first half of my latest client letter. I sat down to write about individual stocks and kept ending up somewhere else. I get a feeling we are having a Caliber 89 moment.

Caliber 89 was the two-pound Patek Philippe pocket watch with 33 complications that marked the bottom of the Quartz Crisis in 1989. It was a narrative-change moment, a reversal of mass behavior after a decade when everyone thought mechanical watches were dead. I walk through why August 2026 may be that kind of moment for the US dollar and for inflation, and what it means when the Treasury starts intervening in interest rates and propping up the Japanese yen during what is supposedly a booming economy.

I also get into why we spend more on interest payments than on defense, why I would not buy a 10-year Treasury even at 6%, and the strange fact that 120 of the 500 stocks in the S&P 500 now have negative correlation to the market, something last seen in 1999. The AI economy and everything else are no longer the same economy.

Part 2, on why I have reluctantly turned bullish on gold, arrives in the next episode. Read the full letter at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post Narrative Change (Part 1) – Ep 301 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

A client of mine left $100 million to his wife and two grown kids after cancer took him at 66. He was Yale-educated, second-generation American, ran the family business his Russian immigrant father started, and worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, in the basement. His son, days away from becoming a father himself, told me: “I don’t want to be like my father.”

That conversation hit me hard. As a father who runs a business, I asked myself whether I’m doing the same thing to my own kids. A few days later I drove my 18-year-old son Jonah to the airport for a gap year in Israel, and he handed me a letter that referenced a passage I’d once read to him about Warren Buffett wishing he’d spent more time with his own children.

This essay is an excerpt from my book Soul in the Game. In it I work through what that client’s son said, what Jonah wrote back, and what Tim Urban’s estimate that we spend 93% of our total time with our parents before high school ends really means once you do the math on the years you have left with a five-year-old or a thirteen-year-old at home.

I also sit with the harder question underneath it: when work becomes a real-life Candy Crush where money is just chips we never intend to spend, what is the “more” actually costing us? My father often quoted The Little Prince: “You become responsible, forever, for what you have tamed.”

The full essay is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Amazon Review https://www.amazon.com/review/create-review/?ie=UTF8&asin=0857199072

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post You Are Responsible for What You Have Tamed – Ep 300 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

After my daughter Hannah watched Queen’s Gambit in January 2021, she said “Dad, let’s play chess.” With those fateful words, our lives shifted. Just over a year later, I could no longer beat my 16-year-old daughter. Neither could her 6’3 older brother Jonah.

I wrote this essay a few years ago. Hannah is off at college now, Jonah is all grown up, and Mia Sarah is no longer eight. I did not want to change a word, because everything I felt on those Thursday nights is still exactly true.

Once lockdowns lifted, Hannah wanted to play against live humans, and we discovered chess meetups happening all over Denver, at restaurants, bars, coffee shops, even Whole Foods. Hannah and I settled on the Thursday night meetup at the Red Robin near my office. One evening my laptop battery died, I started playing too, and a new chapter of my life began.

In this essay I introduce the cast of characters we met there. Don, the mild-mannered aerospace software engineer the single women somehow always find. Marven, an electrician of Mexican descent who has played 217,000 games and never brings the same board twice. Dan, the retired financial planner and gadget man who grew up in India. Ian, an assistant to a real estate agent who dresses like he walked off a 1930s movie set. And Hannah, known as one of the most aggressive players in the room, going straight for the jugular.

I also share why, for the first time in my life, I started taking chess seriously, and what Naval Ravikant said about hobbies that stuck with me.

The full essay is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post Chess Nights at Red Robin – Ep 299 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

Anthropic’s revenue has grown nearly 10x a year, three years running. Its losses are accelerating with it. And here is Dario Amodei in February: “If my revenue is not 1 trillion dollars, if it’s even $800 billion, there’s no force on earth, there’s no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I buy that much compute.”

The AI rollout has felt like déjà vu of the 1999 telecom bubble. It is starting to feel like that bubble is being supersized into something closer to what led to the 2008 financial crisis. Trillions in data centers, financed through the same opaque vehicles that broke the last cycle.

I walk through the two dynamics stacked on top of each other. The 1999 side: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, xAI, and Oracle racing to build capacity, while Nvidia and Micron earn software-like margins on GPUs and memory. Customers that once generated enormous free cash flow are now issuing debt and equity for the first time in decades. Open-source and Chinese models are already delivering good-enough results at a fraction of the cost.

The 2008 side: special purpose vehicles, vendor financing (Nvidia reportedly guaranteeing roughly $250 billion in lease and debt financing for an OpenAI campus in Ohio), and a Pranjal Drall and Andrew Granato paper on private credit sitting inside life insurers bought by private equity, with about 86% of any failure quietly landing on taxpayers.

I also share how we are positioning: smaller positions, AI losers, software, Europe and Latin America, less financials, more cash.

The full piece is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Private Credit’s State Backstop Paper https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=7152239

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post Today’s Market = 1999 Capex + 2008 Credit – Ep 298 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

My wife and I are taking a perfectly good 25-year-old house and spending 20% of the purchase price on a sizable remodel. Parts of it are going back to the studs. I had never done a big remodel, I knew nothing about construction, and I was shocked by how many landmines, wrong decisions, and outright deceptions we had to avoid just to start.

Strangely, the experience gave me incredible empathy for the smart, highly educated people who walk into a financial firm like mine: lawyers, doctors, engineers, businesspeople trying to decide who will manage their life savings. They feel what I felt. A mix of confusion, fear, and paralysis.

So I interviewed a dozen contractors and designers the way I would interview a CEO. From the competent ones, I learned new things; from the incompetent ones, I learned what incompetence looks like. Out of that came two tests I now apply to anyone I hire, including someone who manages money.

I walk through the tuna test, borrowed from Jiro Ono’s tuna supplier in “Jiro Dreams of Sushi,” and what it reveals about advisors, planners, brokers, and asset managers who sell a dozen things under one roof. I discuss the incentive test, Charlie Munger’s line about incentives and outcomes, a story from Soviet Russia about my parents’ summer house, and the difference between the suitability and fiduciary standards. And I explain how to hand an SEC Form ADV to an AI model and finally read the fine print.

The full essay is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: ADV Form https://imausa.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/2026-05-22-IMA-ADV-2AB-May-2026.pdf

Trusting a Stranger with Your House (or Your Money) PDF https://investor.fm/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/Trusting-a-Stranger-with-Your-House-or-Your-Money.pdf

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post You Don’t Need to Be an Expert to Hire One. You Need a Tunaman. – Ep 297 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

I was at a conference in Switzerland. A reader came up to me and asked, “Vitaliy, I’ve been reading your articles for years. I’d like to write. How should I start?” This question spilled into a long conversation over dinner. When I told him what almost two decades of writing have taught me, his face fell. He’d tried it. He’d spent weeks staring at the computer and written complete garbage.

Welcome to my world.

In this piece, I work through what I told him over that dinner. Frustration and empty pages are par for the course. Quantity and quality are joined at the hip. “Writing is rewriting” is not an empty platitude, and by the 47th rewrite the pile of coal dumped onto white pages from your subconscious slowly turns into orderly diamonds. I talk about finding your voice, why I visualized my friends when I started writing for TheStreet.com (they were the first victims), and what happened when my reader brightened halfway through dinner and said, “Maybe I should hire a ghostwriter.”

That last question is where the conversation turned. I walk through why the answer depends entirely on your “why,” what Anaïs Nin has to do with it, and the honest reason I don’t paint even though I’d like to have painted. My brother Alex paints. My father paints. I tried. J. Cole gets quoted. There is a difference between wanting to write and wanting to have written, and figuring out which one you are is the whole game.

The full piece is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Fiddler on the Roof and Value Investing https://investor.fm/fiddler-on-the-roof-and-value-investing/

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post Most People Don’t Want to Write. They Want to Have Written. – Ep 296 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.

Lately, I’ve been getting this powerful feeling that everything I touch turns to gold. Every time I buy a stock, it goes up. Did I finally figure out the stock market game? Did I find a secret way to follow Will Rogers’ advice: Buy stocks that go up, and if they don’t go up, don’t buy them?

No. I didn’t get much smarter. I was simply a willing participant in the latest cyclical bull market. A bull market makes you feel smarter than you are, the same way a bear market makes you feel dumber than you are.

This piece is a small excerpt from my first book, Active Value Investing (2007), which I later rewrote into The Little Book of Sideways Markets. I still stand by every word, but the older, more mature Vitaliy has some additional thoughts to share at the end.

I walk through why feeling smart makes you do the opposite of what you should be doing, and my favorite trick for reminding myself how dumb I am (it involves pulling out an old annual report on a stock I lost a boatload of money in). I discuss the four-letter word R-I-S-K, the “buy and forget to sell” investor a bull market quietly creates, and why every sell looks dumb in the moment. I talk about selling discipline, valuation targets, and why my objective is never to buy at the bottom or sell at the top.

In the additional thoughts, I get into the discomfort of making rational decisions against the grain of the tribe, and what evolutionary programming has to do with it.

The full piece is at investor.fm.

_________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy’s FREE weekly newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/

📚 Vitaliy’s books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A

🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter – https://x.com/vitaliykLinkedIn – https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram – https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website – https://investor.fm/

_________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron’s, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: https://investor.fm/disclosure/

View IMA’s regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com.

The post You are not as smart as you think you are – Ep 295 appeared first on The Intellectual Investor - Value Investing by Vitaliy Katsenelson.