Kyle Grieve (23:06)
all right, back to the show. Keynes realized that when you play this game, you aren't even really playing an investing game. Instead, you're playing a guessing game of predicting mass psychology. And given that Keynes went broke twice in his investing career using this strategy, he knew it was a game that very few people could win consistently. Keynes writes about this game using a brilliant analogy. Professional investment may be likened to those of newspaper competitions in which the competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from 100 photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a whole. So that each competitor has to pick not the faces which he himself finds prettiest, but those which he thinks are likeliest to catch the fancy of other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same point of view. We have reached the third degree where we devote our intelligence to anticipating what average opinion expects the average opinion to be. But whether you're guessing on stocks or pretty faces, the chances of you winning that game reliably is just a very unlikely outcome. As I alluded to earlier, Keynes decided that he would evolve from playing this guessing game, which he knew he couldn't win, into a game where he felt he actually did have an advantage. And that was to try to find businesses where he felt he could understand what they would earn at a given point in the future. Remember I mentioned his point on understanding earnings yields? This is where understanding a business in depth comes into play and can offer great results. The first mindset shift that Keynes had was to focus on the business and not the ticker. Instead of guessing what would happen to the ticker, he focused on what was happening inside of the business to help generate returns. Instead of focusing on macro narratives, which he had very unsuccessfully tried to do. He focused on the micro realities of the business. And the micro realities of a business include things like business models, balance sheets, earnings, power, and management quality. So if you're listening to this and want to understand how to better understand a business, you should be able to answer the following questions about each business inside of your portfolio. How do they make money? How will the business's intrinsic value rise, stagnate or decrease? And why would you own this business for the next five years if the stock market closed? If you can't answer these questions, I think there's a very good chance that you're speculating. But if you can answer them, you're on the right track. Another area where investors get confused about a business is in the information available to them with understanding. If you want to learn about a business, there's no shortage of information to help you get there. But everyone has access to the same information. The edge comes in how well you internalize the information, how well you generate differentiated opinions, and whether those opinions are actually correct or not. Do not make the mistake of blindly following someone else's thought process on a business. One exercise that I like is to try and find areas of good analysis that I actually disagree with. The reason I like this exercise is that it forces me to think critically and not rely on another writer's opinions. Now, I will admit most of the time when I disagree with an author or an analyst, I find out later that I actually do agree with them. But. But the point of this exercise is that it really helps me investigate things on my own, using source material rather than just relying on secondhand information which isn't always accurate and doesn't always align with my view. For instance, I was recently researching a payments company that I'll be pitching to the Tip Mastermind community. So one of our members sent me a video featuring a fund manager discussing the business, and in it he described how the business could be destroyed. When I heard what he said, that it could be destroyed if certain financial institutions decided to lower their FX rates, it really got me thinking. And while I ended up agreeing with what he said, I found myself thinking more deeply about the subject and even added additional reasons that would make his event even less probable. I think approaching questions about a business in a distinctive way is a very good way to develop your own conclusions and opinions, which is very essential if you hope to achieve differentiated returns compared to the average investor. Another problem with investing today is the sheer volume of information that we're just constantly bombarded with. And I think this information really just gives us a false sense of security. If I compared my ability to access information versus Kane's, I have a massive edge where he had to get financials, you know, mailed to him. I had them at my fingertips. I can get them in five seconds if I wanted to. I can also look at all their competitors and their industry. I can get insights from other analysts and I can watch interviews on things like YouTube or on podcasts. There's so much information that I have access to, but the best investors today are skilled at filtering out what is not useful, which is often a lot of the information that's out there. Now, one example of using deeper knowledge to ignore the noise was the tariff tantrum that the market had in April of 2025. Now, during this time, one of my largest holdings, Aritzia, was hit very hard, drawing down by about 43%. Now, was I one of the masses that was selling my shares to avoid short term losses? No, I felt my knowledge of the business was sufficient to understand that it would be able to weather the storm. They had multiple suppliers and they could reduce the reliance on China to a single digit percentage in the next few quarters, which would significantly reduce the pain of additional tariffs. And since April 8th of 2025, at the bottom of the drawdown, the shares were up nearly 200% as of February 2nd of 2026. If you have the right insight on a business and can withstand volatility, there's a lot of upside to be had. Now, as we've seen, Keynes had a great evolution in his investing, but it wasn't just a strategic evolution. He also improved his temperament and observed what character traits helped him succeed and which ones made him fail. And his conclusion was very similar to the great Warren Buffett quote about intelligence. Investing is not a game where the guy with a 160 IQ beats the guy with 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing. The emotional flaws that Keynes showed early in his investing career are not novel. I think there's the same problems that all investors face today. Keynes had two traits about 100 years ago that I think everyone will be completely familiar with, and those are overconfidence and impatience. Keynes thought process was that he just knew he was right and because of that, he couldn't tolerate that. He was often early in his predictions. This forced them to do things like doubling down, not in terms of adding capital to a position, but in terms of emotionally speaking. Keynes was the type of person who had a high degree of intelligence first that had to learn temperament as he gained more and more experience and lived through more and more pain. Does that sound familiar? We all learn from making mistakes. I spend all day looking at other legendary investors, their wins, their losses, and even I continue to make mistakes. And my most vivid mistakes are not the ones that I've learned vicariously through others. They were from losing my own cash, from my own decisions. Sometimes it's stupidity, sometimes it's bad luck, but those lessons are always the ones that sting the worst. What Keynes did, that many investors are unable or unwilling to do, is to make temperament into an edge rather than being a victim of intelligence. Keynes had two near death financial events that I've already alluded to. And this forced him to accept that while he was intelligent, he couldn't rely on that to make good investments. Instead, he began focusing more and more on slowing down and avoiding overactivity. What his experience and observations of the market taught him was how important the right behavior was. The problem with temperament is that it's simply just not easy to change. If you've been the type of person who's just gambled their entire life, chances are you're going to gamble on stocks as well. And if you treat investing as just another form of gambling, there's a very, very good chance that you'll just lose money to the house, just as you would lose to the house in a casino. And a really interesting angle to consider when investing is that two investors with two different temperaments can treat the same stock completely differently. Let's go through a hypothetical case study of two investors. Their analysis of a business might be the exact same. They see the same competitive advantages, the same levels of talent and management and capital allocation, and they know the potential market is just large for that business. They can both see that the business's value is completely disconnected from its price and that it's trading at a discount to its intrinsic value. But then something happens. The market becomes volatile and the stock, which they both looked at and analyzed and thought was cheap, becomes even cheaper due to this market sell off. This is part of investing where being a genius does absolutely nothing to help you. These are the times when temperament is going to benefit you or harm you. These two investors can be classified by temperament. One has a temperament of early canes. They are intelligent and believe their intelligence will give them an advantage over other investors. They know that the business we just discussed will benefit from very specific macro tailwinds. But when they're wrong and they See, the market is punishing their stock. They become perplexed, angry even, that the market is just too stupid to understand what they see. After a few months of losses, they just end up selling out because they get annoyed, the market doesn't agree with them and they can't stand the pain of losing any more money. The second investor has a better temperament for investing. They realize that the market will often disagree with them on a stock. But they did their work and even though the stock price has dropped, nothing has changed fundamentally with the business. They see this market wide drop as an opportunity to just actually buy more. The lower price gives them a larger margin of safety and increases their prospective returns. As a result, they actually decide to add to their position. They already have about 5% of their capital in the position by costs, but they really like the business and are fine with adding to their current position. So they decide to back up the truck and get their cost basis to around 10% of their assets. So what happens next will be familiar to many investors. The market emerges from the doldrums and the capital that exited equities returns to equities. The businesses that are most clearly continuing to get better are the ones that tend to be bought up first and price and value begin to converge. The investor with poor temperament lost part of his capital simply because he had a short term mindset and an ego that interfered with his decision making. The second investor with a better temperament for long term investing doubled down, lowered his cost basis, which increased his returns even more once the price began to rise. Any investor who has been in the market for a few years will run into this exact scenario. You spend 40 hours researching a business, its competitors and its industry. You conclude that you like the business and then it's trading below intrinsic value. Then you buy it and the price inevitably goes down. We've all been through this, and one mindset shift that I focus on that really helps me deal with these kind of common problems is to improve my position. Sizing going in so when I first started investing, markets were quite euphoric and it wasn't unusual for a business that I would buy to go up 50% or more shortly after I bought it. So I was actually coming from a place of fear that if I didn't weigh a position high enough in the beginning, I would never be able to add to the position. So at this point, I decided to get as much money into a position at cost as soon as I could. But over the years, I've learned this was a mistake. For the following reasons. So the first one here is that there's been exactly zero times that I haven't learned significantly more about a business after I started owning it. For this reason, I think drawing out the accumulation phase of a business is very intelligent. The next one is sometimes I realize that I either don't want to keep owning a business, don't understand certain things that I realize are key to my thesis, or I might realize that I simply want a lot more of the business. But that comes after I first start buying it. So by taking smaller stabs at a position, I feel like I'm reducing the risk of costly analytical errors that I may have overlooked earlier in the analytical process. The primary risk of investing this way is that I may end up liking a position and only have, you know, maybe a 1 to 5% of my assets in it, only to see the price skyrocket. This has happened with nearly all of my big winners, and it's even more prevalent in micro caps where the disconnection between price and value can be even larger, leading businesses to go, you know, 5x in a year. Yes, this has happened to me, but to me, investing is a long term game. And if I own truly exceptional businesses, then it should remain exceptional for, you know, two, five or ten years from now. And that means I have multiple years to add to my position if it takes off in price. One great example is Terravest Industries. This is a serial acquirer of a variety of steel related businesses in H vac, containment vessels, water treatment and oil and gas services. I first started buying shares in April 2024 at about $70. I already felt like I was kind of late to the party, to be honest, as it had already doubled over the past year. But I realized this was a serial acquirer with a long road ahead run by very, very talented capital allocators who were very well aligned with shareholders. So, you know, I pulled the trigger. After buying, I was hoping that the business would go through a down cycle and maybe lose a few investors, causing the price to drop, but that just didn't happen. Instead, it went nearly parabolic, rising to about $170 in just a year. But good news, it dipped twice in 2025. The first time during the tariff tantrums in April and again by the end of the year due to a quarter with results that weren't quite in line with market expectations. Now, both of those times were times where I got to add to my position since I realized I probably wouldn't get into opportunities like that again. My first few buys only represented about 3 1/2% of my portfolio. This is relatively small for me. For a compounder, I'm usually fine getting the position to about 8 to 10% by cost basis. But with the ads from those drops, I've increased my position size to about 5% by cost basis. I'd still like to add more, and we'll be waiting for more weakness in the coming years to bring it closer to that 8 to 10% range. Now, I've discussed here how key temperament is to good investing, and I even hinted that I use temperament to help me position my portfolio accordingly. One key tenet that Keynes imparted to us was the importance of concentration and why it's vital to outperformance. Now, based on the limited amount of data that I can find in Walsh's book Keynes in the Markets and Concentrated Investing, it appears that Keynes tended to be more diversified much earlier in his career than later in his career. But later on, when he saw the benefits of long term investing, he became more concentrated. So in the book Concentrated Investing by Bonello, Biema and Carlisle, they mentioned that he had about 40 to 50% of King's College funds and just a few stocks with single positions well in excess of 10%. This level of concentration came after he learned the importance of understanding individual businesses was more important than understanding the macro. And it came from understanding himself better after the errors that he had made early in his career as well as the great insights that he had into mass market psychology. Another reason the concentrated approach worked well for Keynes was his ability to actually take part in it. Most financial institutions simply do not allow for a concentrated approach as they aim to reduce tracking error. So tracking error is the extent to which a fund's performance deviates from the performance of the market's results. For a concentrated investor like Keynes, the tracking error was nearly 14%. So when it's positive, that means a manager is beating the market, and when it's negative, it means that they are losing. Concentrated portfolios will have large swings in tracking error. So that means you need shareholders or counsels in Keynes situations who are okay with these heavy swings. Unfortunately, many people are simply just not okay with it. They want managers with low tracking error. Why? I guess it's because whether you perform well or badly like everyone else, there's kind of a comfort to be found regarding this. Keynes wrote, if he is successful, that will only confirm the general belief in his rashness. And if in the short run he is unsuccessful, which is very likely, he will not receive much mercy. Worldly wisdom teaches us that it's better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally. Keynes had several experiences with institutions. At King's College, he was able to run a concentrated portfolio and weighed out volatility and underperformance. For instance, in 1938 the fund dropped 23% versus only a 9% drop for the market. But Keynes also had experience as the investment manager of Natural Mutual Life Assurance Society, an insurer. He was appointed to that position way back in 1919 and that portfolio lost £641,000 in 1937, prompting a letter from the chairman of the insurer which mentioned that Keynes inactivity of his pet stocks was resulting in losses. In a response, Keynes replied with three primary points. One, he didn't believe that he should sell these stocks now that they had dropped because their intrinsic value hadn't changed. He also felt that the long term probabilities of their success still made them good bets. Number two, he had zero shame about holding a stock when the market bottomed. He was aiming for long term results and the short term fluctuations are not what he felt he should be assessed on. And thirdly, he just didn't feel like he had done a bad job. As an owner of public equities, there will inevitably be negative price fluctuations. Keynes eventually resigned as a chairman of the insurer. The board could tell that there was another war brewing and they wanted him to reallocate assets to safer assets like gold or bonds, which Keynes obviously resisted. Keynes said many things that Buffett would later echo regarding diversification. Keynes wrote in his letter to King's. My theory of risk is that it is better to take a substantial holding of what one believes in than scatter holdings in fields where he has not the same assurance. But perhaps that is based on the delusion of possessing a worthwhile opinion on the matter. He then added the theory of scattering one's investments over as many fields as possible might be the wisest plan on the assumption of comprehensive ignorance. Very likely that would be the safer assumption to make. Keynes actual portfolio management was a little bit harder to find. There was a great chart in concentrated investing showing his real value add wasn't necessarily in making larger positions out of his highest conviction bets. His big value add was in making sure that he was underweight in his bottom five positions. That is a very interesting data point. For instance, was this underweighting a result of the stocks decreasing in price or were these just smaller kind of tracking positions that he just never attitude because he never saw what he wanted to justify making them larger positions. I think this is a very neglected part of portfolio management. I've already discussed how I like to manage buying businesses that I want to add to, but sometimes it's just not so obvious whether a position should be added to, left alone, trimmed, or completely sold out of Keynes improved his abilities of keeping his losses small as he gained experience. During the 1921 and 1946 period, his bottom five positions accounted for 11.7% of his portfolio, but from 1940 to 1946 this dropped just 6%. Good value investors are masters at avoiding losses, so if you have positions that you like that offer good upside but also carry higher downsides than other positions, you may consider minimizing risk by just underweighting them. You can make the argument, well, why own them then? And I think the answer to that only comes over time. If you have a business in your portfolio, let's say that you can lose 50% on on a 5% probability, but make 200% on with a 95% probability. That's an expected value of 2.8 and you want to make that bet. But you have to also focus on the downside here. So in this case you might make it a smaller position. And as the narrative unfolds and more data becomes available, you can add to it. If you feel like it's becoming de risked, let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.