We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - RWH036: The Power Of Simplicity w/ Anthony Kingsley

Episode Date: November 12, 2023

In this episode, William Green chats with Anthony Kingsley, who oversees more than $10 billion at an investment firm named Findlay Park. Anthony is the portfolio manager of the Findlay Park American F...und, which has crushed its benchmark index by 1,200 percentage points over 25 years. Here, he discusses his firm’s surprisingly simple path to exceptional returns. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 03:09 - What Anthony Kingsley learned from his great mentor, James Findlay. 07:22 - Why their firm, Findlay Park, lives by the mantra “Keep it simple.”  10:38 - How the firm structures its fees to be simple & fair.  19:02 - Why the key to long-term success is avoiding disaster. 18:06 - How Anthony harnesses diversification to reduce stress. 24:19 - How to incentivize a team of equity analysts. 27:40 - How he avoids repeating common investment mistakes. 39:53 - How he developed his 28-point investing checklist. 41:07 - Why he focuses intensely on analyzing corporate culture. 45:46 - Why it’s perilous to dismiss or ignore ESG. 53:54 - Why he never invests in biotech or pharma. 54:53 - Why he’s more excited about mid-caps than mega-caps. 1:01:10 - What makes the US a wonderful market for investors. 1:10:08 - Why he’s optimistic about the UK’s economic future.  1:14:51 - How he balances work, family, & play. 1:42:08 - What role luck has played in his success. Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Anthony Kingsley’s investment firm, Findlay Park. Atul Gawande’s book The Checklist Manifesto. Matthew Walker’s book Why We Sleep. William Green’s book, “Richer, Wiser, Happier” – read the reviews of this book. Follow William Green on X (AKA Twitter). Check out the books mentioned in the podcast here. NEW TO THE SHOW? Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Stay up-to-date on financial markets and investing strategies through our daily newsletter, We Study Markets. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts.  SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: River Toyota Range Rover Fundrise AT&T The Bitcoin Way USPS American Express Onramp SimpleMining Public Vacasa Shopify HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

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Starting point is 00:00:00 You're listening to TIP. Hi there, I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, Anthony Kingsley. He's the chief investment officer at an English firm called Findlay Park, which focuses exclusively on investing in US stocks. Anthony oversees more than $10 billion in assets as the portfolio manager of the Findlay Park American Fund. Of the last 25 years, the fund has crushed its benchmark index, the Russell 1000, by a total of more than 1,200 percentage point. It's a remarkable feat of outperformance, and so my goal in this episode of the podcast is to explore in depth how the firm has generated these stellar returns.
Starting point is 00:00:41 What fascinates me is that Anthony, and a brilliant predecessor of his named James Findlay, have achieved this success in a surprisingly simple way. As you'll hear, Findlay Park has one fun, one strategy, and one team based in one place. They invest in one country and one asset class, and they charge just one fee, which is non-negotiable. You pay the same fee, whether you're a big client or a small client, and in fact, Anthony pays the same fee, too, which is both simple and fair. This very consistent emphasis on keeping things simple is a beautiful example of a theme I wrote about at some length in my book, Richer, Wiser Happier, in a chapter titled Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication. What I came to realize from my interviews with investing giants like Joe Greenblatt, Will Danoff, Jack Bogle, and Bill Miller is that it's a tremendous advantage to have a few simple, robust, guiding principles that you can stick with through thick and thin,
Starting point is 00:01:45 so you don't get knocked off course. We live in such a complex and confusing world, but I think this ability to simplify is a kind of superpower, not only in investing, but actually in other areas of life too. There's one other reason why I particularly enjoyed this conversation. As you'll hear, Anthony is not only a very successful investor, but such a nice guy. He's modest and decent and understated in a way that I really admire. In any case, I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Thanks so much for joining us. You're listening to The Richer Wiser, Happier Podcast, where your host, William Green,
Starting point is 00:02:27 interviews the world's greatest investors and explores how to win in markets and life. Hi there, folks. I'm really delighted to welcome our guest today, Anthony Kingsley, who's joining us from his office in London, the city where I grew up. Anthony is the chief investment officer at a firm called Findlay Park, where he oversees more than $10 billion, and he's the portfolio manager of the Findlay Park American Fund, which has achieved the very rare feat of crushing the market over the last quarter of a century. It's lovely to see you, Anthony. Thanks a lot for joining us.
Starting point is 00:03:08 Great to be here. So one of the things that I wanted to talk about in some depth is just how the Findlay Park American Fund, which is the one fund in your company, how it's racked up this extraordinary return of more than 12% a year over 25 years, which has beaten the Russell 1000, the index that you're benchmarked against by an absolute mile. I think the Russell 1,000 average rates, 7.2% a year. So when I last checked, basically you'd beaten the index by a cumulative total of 1,200 percentage points. So it's a remarkable success story. And I want to get a sense from you of what we can learn from your fund's achievement about how to build wealth in a sustainable way.
Starting point is 00:03:51 So I figure it probably makes sense to start at the beginning with the founding partners of the fund, James Finley and Charlie Park, who launched the fund back in 1998. What can you tell us about them? Yes, I worked with James Findlay in the early 90s. That was my first job as a graduate trainee in a fund management company, foreign and colonial, and they specialized in investment trust. Frankly, I knew nothing about investing, but it was a great place to learn. I was put on the American desk as a graduate, and James was making his way in US smaller companies. He had an investment trust and he had an open-ended fund. And frankly, he was sort of the first mentor,
Starting point is 00:04:33 I probably ever had in life. And he's probably been the most important mentor that I've ever had. And he just taught me so much in those early years about investing, about managing downside risk, about trying to reduce a good compound rate of return, the importance of compounding, you know, the eighth wonder of the world. And so, you know, I knew James pretty well. I didn't, you know, I wasn't one of the founders of Finley Park, but I'd gone off to do something slightly different in fund management. But we kept in touch. And he said, you know, for four years
Starting point is 00:05:07 into the business in 2002, he said, would you like to come and join? And, you know, I mentioned, you know, his importance as a mentor to me. And I think I always thought, you know, if I don't join, if I don't come, I might spend the rest of my life regretting that decision. And so I joined as a third partner and the fourth employee in the early 2000s. And James and Charlie had both independently developed a really good track record of investing in US smaller companies. And so I joined the team and off I went. And my sense is that one of the formative experiences for James was that he'd been this hot shop manager at Foreign and Colonial. And it had been kind of a great period for someone who specialized in US small cap stocks. And then I guess the market famously crashed in
Starting point is 00:05:55 1987, when I think I'm right in saying that Black Monday, which I think was October 19th, 1987 was the biggest one-day market drop in US history. This is coming right after a torrid period where the market had gone up something like 44% earlier in the year. And so my sense is that James was sort of this hot shot young fund manager when you first knew him, who then got absolutely clobbered. And I'm wondering if you have a memory of how that experience changed the game for him? Yeah, so, I mean, he had a rough experience in the late 80s, as I say the 87 stock market crash,
Starting point is 00:06:33 and I think sort of decided at that stage to read all the investment books he could and come up with a new philosophy, which was really more about managing downside risk. And so that by the time I joined F&C in the early 90s, he was already well on his way to building a new track record in US smaller companies using this philosophy. But certainly that, that experience was a pretty seminal one for him. At that stage, he as a mentor to me,
Starting point is 00:07:01 he told me to go and read all these books, and whether it was William O'Neill or, you know, reminisces of a stock operator, all the Barksha Hathaway, the biographies have been written on Buffett or Munger. And so, you know, I voraciously consumed these things. And he put together a seven-or-eight-page investment philosophy, which was really around the learnings from the 87 stock market correction and how to apply a new philosophy, which I say at the heart of it was around managing downside risk. So it seems to me there are several things that are really central to your approach that helped to account for the success of Findlay Park over the last quarter of a century, and hopefully we'll go through them in some detail in order.
Starting point is 00:07:45 So as I see it, this issue of managing downside risk is critical. I'd love to talk about simplicity is really key. The use of an investment philosophy checklist and the folks on high quality businesses and like, so we can go through these and other things in various orders. But I think I'd like to start by talking about this idea of simplicity, which was a major theme in my book because I feel like in a very complex world where we're all so confused and there's such a barrage of information. and there are so many different approaches and possible viewers and temptations to go astray.
Starting point is 00:08:24 It's an incredible competitive advantage, actually, to be able to distill things and have a few fairly simple guiding principles and a fairly simple approach. And one thing that's distinctive about Findlay Park is that you have this philosophy, a guiding principle of keeping it simple. So I wondered if you could talk about simplicity as it relates to Findlay, how it manifests in really everything that you're doing? Yeah, absolutely. So keep it simple was an important philosophy of James. And I think a really probably underestimated, you know, mantra. Simplicity, if you look at Finley Park today as a
Starting point is 00:09:04 business, it's quite unusual because after 25 years of investing in America and American companies, we just have one fund. We have one strategy, one investment philosophy. We have one team here, based in London and we have a focused group of clients who, many of whom have been with us since the start. That's quite unusual. Normally when fund management companies get a bit of success, I've certainly found is they say, well, what else can we do? What other strategies can we launch and they diversify? They try and asset gather. They're in the asset gathering business. Our focus from the beginning, our purpose has always been to generate really attractive, rate of return for our clients. And so we've never really seen any need to launch lots of
Starting point is 00:09:53 different funds and flavors and growth and value and long and short and small cap and large cap or whatever, you know, different geographies or different approaches. It's not to say that that doesn't work for other businesses, but ultimately what we've been very, very focused on from the start is trying to deliver this great compound rate of return through, you know, a single fund and just keeping it simple, you know, it helps focus the mind. I mean, we're very aligned with our, we think, with our clients. We've got one fund and we better do pretty well because, you know, we've got other funds to fall back on if that one doesn't do well.
Starting point is 00:10:29 We're all very aligned with our clients. And, you know, it helps focus the mind on, you know, what not to do often as much as, as much as what one should do. I think I'm also right in saying you once told me that you just have one fee. as well, like that there are no fee breaks for anyone who comes along, that even the partners in the fund like yourself pay the same fee. Why is that important? Well, I think keeping it simple just has a lot of advantages. And so if you have different fee structures for different clients, you know, you sort of forget what did you give that client
Starting point is 00:11:08 or what did you give that client? The next one comes along and you end up spending, you know, hours and hours negotiating on fees. and, you know, your head starts spinning. As I say, we've never really focused on, you know, asset gathering hasn't been key to our business. We thought, if we can deliver a really good rate of compound performance, hopefully we can have a fee that's competitive enough that people will feel that they're getting value in terms of the return that we're able to deliver. So, yeah, we've just got one fund, no separate accounts, one fee structure.
Starting point is 00:11:40 We all think, well, you know, if our clients are paying that fee, why shouldn't we pay this? same fee. And so when we quote in our newsletter or in our reports, the performance of the fund, 12% compound for 25 years, that is a net of fees number. And the reason we can quote that, unlike maybe some other asset management firms, is, you know, we only have one fee. And whereas, you know, they have to quote it gross because they've got a lot of different fee structures for different clients. So it's part of that, just keeping it simple. And you can then focus on what you do best. In our case, we think, you know, investing. There's also a really nice, alignment of interest there, I think, with the fact that you're not the most favored nation,
Starting point is 00:12:21 giving yourselves a much better deal than your clients. I think that's a really nice thing. And I was very struck. I think one of the first times we met and talked was when I came to your 25th anniversary celebration to be a speaker there. I remember you introduced me to James Findlay there, who's a surprisingly kind of quiet, modest, charming guy, very humble. And I remember you saying to me that one thing he had told you when you were taking over the firm, if I'm quoting this correctly, he just said to you, you know, treat the shareholders right, treat them fairly. Is that fair to say that that was always kind of an emphasis?
Starting point is 00:13:00 Oh, definitely. I mean, James taught me so much. We could be here for hours just discussing all the things that I've learned from him. And one thing I always say is he's a very sort of humble, low-key guy. But in my opinion, and I've, you know, I've come across me. many great investors, one of the greatest investors I've ever come across, who has a very, very low profile, but extraordinarily successful. And a super guy, you know, in terms of kind of morals, I'd say AAA character who taught me early on that the good news can wait, but
Starting point is 00:13:31 if you've got bad news, you must share that with the client. He must always be honest and open with the client and share, you know, if you made a change in the portfolio or something's not going right. I mean, it's so much so that in those newsletters in the early years, certainly, he used to almost sort of negatively market the fund in the newsletters. You know, we're not quite sure how well we're going to do. And so if you want a bit of technology, you would probably go and find a technology fund or, you know, shouldn't have all your money, or American money in this fund. And he was incredibly open and honest. And that stuck with me. So, yeah, I know it's been kind of a powerful force in my life, actually.
Starting point is 00:14:09 Yeah, the newsletter that you're referring to, which is unusual, is this 15 to 20 page quarterly newsletter that the firm sends out, which is very rich and full of advice. I think that's another thing, actually, just the clarity of the communication. You know what you're getting and you know it's what it says on the tin. And so you were mentioning that he's one of the most extraordinary investors you've met. And I know that you know a lot of the people I wrote about in my book, whether it's. the Howard Marx's or the Bill Miller's or the Nick Sleep in case of Carriers, when you look at James who's not well known, who's kept a really low profile, although obviously he's had huge success,
Starting point is 00:14:50 what in terms of his temperament and personality stands out? What makes you actually look at him and think, oh, that's what a great investor needs to be wired, like those are the personality traits of a great investor? Yeah, so he's very level-headed, you know, to use a sort of Charlie Munger word. He's very rational. He's just got a very, very good temperament. When things are going really well, he's not strong on self-congratulation, but equally when things are going badly, often the truth is when the stock market is penalizing something, it's not quite as bad as it may seem when you look at the share price. And so I think he's got a good temperament. He's rational. He focuses on the fundamentals. He's a fundamental, you know, he's a fundamental, you know,
Starting point is 00:15:38 to mark stock picker. So I think those would be some of the things in terms of temperament that give him an advantage, perhaps, versus some others. I think another thing that's been striking in terms of the simplicity of the firm over the years is that it was never that marketing oriented. I mean, I think you told me at one point that it had basically been soft-closed for something like 20 years that you had about 50 institutional clients in the UK and Europe, and that was about it. And so people couldn't invest directly, they had to go through a wealth manager. So there was also something about the quietness of what you were doing,
Starting point is 00:16:18 that you were just going about this very clear and focused task of trying to deliver compelling returns over decades for clients. Is that fair to say that it wasn't, I mean, there is something a bit like Nick and Zach, a nomad, that it was all focused on the returns and not really. on building scale, building your reputations and the like? Very much so. I mean, James and I know Nick and Zach well and what they were doing in those early years and we used to have some good conversations.
Starting point is 00:16:52 And in many ways, it was similar. I mean, one of the reasons, we were talking about the newsletter, one of the reasons that James wrote that newsletter was he was the marketing department. And it was a great way to, you know, while James and Charlie, invested in stocks to stay focused on investing in stocks, visiting companies, going to America, meeting the management, and just keeping up, you know, the investors up to date. And we always sort of said in those days, we said, you know, we'll send the newsletter out. But if investors want to see us, you know, give us a call. We'll come and see you. Many of our clients are here
Starting point is 00:17:25 in the UK, just, you know, easy to access them. But many of them were quite happy with the newsletter. So it was really a focus, as I said, to produce a really attractive compound rate of return by investing in a diversified portfolio in America. And, you know, compounding is just, as I said, it's like the eighth wonder of the world, as Charlie Munger says, you know, never interrupt it unnecessarily. I mean, we've been going now for 25 years. We've compounded at 12% after fees. So that's about 17 or 18x. But really what we want to do is we want to keep that going. I mean, James is not here, you know, James on the board, but he's not running the fund. We've got a different team running the fund today. I'm involved at some stage, hopefully in the
Starting point is 00:18:06 A long time from now, there'll be another team that's running this, but we want to keep that compounding. And if you can keep that compounding record going, as you know, you better than most know, you can produce extraordinary results over time. I mean, if we're able to generate another 12% over the next 25 years, you know, then you have a 300 X return approximately over two generations. And that's sort of pretty extraordinary. So I think I think it's always been this this understanding of compounding, you've got to stay in the game. You know, you cannot, of course, we've had some good years, we've had some tough years, but we've never, we've never blown ourselves up. We were in, we stayed in the game on this compounding journey. And
Starting point is 00:18:49 that's, that's really been the focus from the beginning for James, Charlie, myself is just produce a great return and hopefully we'll have enough clients to run a successful business. So as you've said to me in the past, a huge amount of the success of the firm actually hinges on managing downside risk and just not doing anything too stupid so that you don't interrupt that compounding. And I want to talk in some detail about how you do that because it seems to me that's one of the most practical lessons that our listeners can learn. Because as Charlie would say, it's really hard to be smart, but it's pretty easy not to be stupid. And that seems to me such a huge part of success in investing.
Starting point is 00:19:33 And one thing that's striking is that your fund, when I lost check, basically in 31 down quarters for the market since Charlie James founded the fund back in 1998, in 31 of those down quarters, the fund is outperformed in 29 of the 31. So it kind of has a remarkable record of not only racking up good returns, but with less risk than the market with less risk of total implosion or disaster or permanent loss of capital, however you want to define it. Can you explain how you go about this, how in very practical terms, you go about avoiding disaster? Yeah, no, it's absolutely key. And as you pointed out, we've built the record by going down less than, you know, the benchmark that we've been
Starting point is 00:20:28 measured against in most of those quarters. And what we try and do is keep up. We try and keep up in a good market, go down less than a bad market. And if you understand the power of compounding, we're trying to avoid permanent capital loss in any individual stock. You can't always get that right. But we're trying to... Our starting point is how much can we lose if we're wrong rather than how much can we make if it's right. And I think that is probably contrary to a lot of investors. Investors look at some shiny object or stock and they go, this looks very exciting.
Starting point is 00:21:01 And they think about how much they can make if they're right. Our stunning point is, you know, obviously we want to make good returns and compound over time, but our starting point is, yeah, but if we're wrong, how much are we going to lose? And, you know, understanding that if you're down a third in a stock, you've got to go up 50% just to get back to where you started. If you're down 50%, you've got to double your money. And so if you can avoid that downside capture, you can produce a really good compound rate of return, to use your words, by being consistently not stupid. You know, there are so many opportunities to get carried away by, you know, the latest fad or fashion or meme stock or IPO frenzy, or there's the latest, you know, AI thing or whatever it is.
Starting point is 00:21:44 over 25 years has been no end to things that you could have got sucked into. So by having a investment philosophy, which you don't just pay lip servers to, but you stick to, you use rigorously when selecting your companies, you can build this track record over time. And of course, you know, over time companies grow and they have nice tailwinds. I think I was listening to a podcast that you did with Tom Gaynor some, was it some months ago? And he was talking about even the person that doesn't do the lose. Luge, you know, can still get down there. You know, it's not like you're sort of loosing uphill.
Starting point is 00:22:18 You've got some nice tailwind. So being, to use a phrase, your phrase, by being consistently not stupid, avoiding downside risk, you can produce a really good compound rate of return over time. And that's sort of what we did, what we've done, even while making lots of mistakes. In some way, it's interesting also. There is an element of the Tom Gainer about your approach where it's relatively concentrated, but relatively diversified. There's a kind of middle way, a sort of tension.
Starting point is 00:22:44 between the desire to concentrate so that you can outperform and the diversification that enables you to survive. And so I looked at one of your most recent documents, and it seemed like you had about 42% of your assets under management in the top 15 stocks, which is relatively concentrated, but you own 59 stocks, which is relatively diversified and sort of makes it quite difficult in some ways to outperform compared to some of the more aggressive people I've written about who, you know, like Nick and Zach, who would get to a point where basically have most of their money in 10 stocks. How do you think about that tension between survival and outperformance
Starting point is 00:23:26 or diversification concentration? Yeah, no, it's a wonderful question. I think, I think it's to some extent to do with temperament. You know, it's not, it's not to say that Nick and Zach or some other folks who have a 10 stock portfolio aren't brilliant at it. But usually invariably, the high, low in a stock in any one year, even if the fundamentals haven't changed that much, is quite wide. And you get tested. And if you've got what we have found, certainly for Finley Park and our temperament, if you've got too much in a position, it's difficult sometimes to add to it. You just, you know, investing is, you know, you need to be on the right, on the front foot in terms of psychology. And if you're just on the back foot,
Starting point is 00:24:10 a little bit too much as something, you go, yeah, but I got a bit too much this, I can't add to. If you've got a diversified portfolio with some degree of concentration, you know, top, top 10, 30% plus of the fund, as you mentioned, top, top 15, you know, low 40s, you're making bets, but you can also just live with that volatility and let the compounding do the work. And so, you know, take text instruments we've owned for more than a decade. I mean, it's a, It's a cyclical business in analog semiconductors. I mean, it's a growth business over time, the electronic content of communication devices, of industrial products, of cars, of consumer products goes up and they sell more analog products
Starting point is 00:24:50 and they gain a little share. But boy, do you have semiconductor cycles? And so, you know, it's been an amazing stock over 10 years, but it's volatile. And for us and the Finley Park temperament and what we're trying to deliver, We would just like to have, you know, 60 stocks with, you know, 2%, 2, 3% positions, you know, 3% plus positions. And with things that we can live with. So we can live and let the compounding of those businesses do the work without getting
Starting point is 00:25:19 too stressed. We like to sleep at night and we want to deliver, we try and deliver a consistent, you know, return for our clients over time. So, you know, it's not to say that others don't do it well with 10 stocks. So it's just what's worked for us. I think another thing that's distinctive from the approach of a lot of the people I've written about who tend to be lone wolves making very independent decisions, or maybe there are two of them sometimes in the case of Nick and Zach, but often one, in the case of someone
Starting point is 00:25:47 like Monish Pabry. Maybe two with Howard, Howard Marks and Bruchkosh. I mean, usually smallish teams. You have a fairly large team. You have, I think, typically about 13, 14, 15 people in your investment team. and you have this system of two people covering every stock so that there's built-in debate. Can you talk about how that team approach also protects you against stupidity, against the likelihood of being blindsided by something that you just hadn't thought about?
Starting point is 00:26:21 Absolutely. I mean, we have this co-coverage model, which is perhaps a little unusual. So when an idea is being researched or reviewed to the team, team or indeed, you know, just ongoing coverage. You've always got a couple of people who are sort of experts looking at that. And that means that they can have, you know, a healthy debate about it and you don't get, you know, individual sort of confirmation bias, perhaps. But ultimately, every stock that goes into the portfolio is reviewed to the whole team. We review existing stocks. We'll do re-reviews. We'll review new stocks. And that co-coverage team will bring them to the
Starting point is 00:26:54 team. And ultimately, you know, we're just trying to get to the right answer. No, we've got to, you know, But culture is important and we might probably talk about culture, but we've got an open, we've got a culture where we trust, where, you know, ideas are, we want to hear from other people, ideas are encouraged. You know, I certainly don't have all the answers or ideas and I'm very open to listening to others. No one's shouted at each other in 15 years, but equally, we do kick the tires pretty hard. We have a very open and honest conversation about what we think. I mean, ultimately, we're just trying to get to the right answer. I mean, the ultimate decision lies with me in terms of the stock going into the fund. But, you know, very often I'm in agreement with the team and the portfolio managers recommending it.
Starting point is 00:27:46 And we have a very open debate. I thought it was interesting. I was looking through one of your documents last night. And it said the incentive schemes for your investment team members are based on three pillars. And one of them, obviously, it's quality of work, another is performance. And the third is collaboration. And I thought that was interesting that you can kind of talk about these grand ideas, like, oh, I want you to be collaborative.
Starting point is 00:28:12 But actually, if you pay people based on whether they're collaborative, it's much more likely that you'll actually get what you're incentivizing for. Oh, it's so true. And to use another Charlie Mungerism, he always says, you know, I've always thought the power of incentives were important, and yet I consistently underestimated the power of incentives in my lifetime. And, you know, show me the incentive, and I'll show you the outcome. And if you just incentivize people purely on performance, you'd get a bunch of fighter pilots doing their own thing. And if you incentivize people on performance and attitude or collaboration or how are you helping the team, how are you, are you involved in the debate, are you giving feedback, are you
Starting point is 00:28:59 critically appraising, you know, an idea, are you suggesting? It helps reinforce that culture. And ultimately, I think, you know, in our system, at least a better decision. Yeah, I think this understanding of incentives, once you actually get it, it transforms your view of so much in life. It's sort of everything, not everything, but enormous. So, yeah, I thought that was a very pragmatic move in managing your business. It made me think, oh, it's not just talk. It's like actually, actually, it's structured that way in terms of incentives. I wanted to also ask you about, in terms of avoiding catastrophe, a laminated piece of paper
Starting point is 00:29:42 that you have, that you mentioned to me once when we were on the phone, that you said, is titled, Avoiding Investment Mistakes. How helpful is that? I mean, what's on it? What do you do to remind yourself just not to be stupid by looking at that list of common investment mistakes? Yeah. So we obviously, we focus on this checklist of things that we're trying to find.
Starting point is 00:30:08 But over the years, we've produced a laminate of, you know, where we've consistently got things wrong and just to remind ourselves. And so those can be grouped under, you know, the business, financial management, process, valuation. I mean, I can go into, you know, it's probably about, you know, 30 or 40 points in total. And, you know, they're all sort of just reminders. I encourage them everyone to just look at this laminated sheet that they have on their desks every now and then, again, just to avoid sort of stupidity. But a lot of it is just incredibly common sense on management. Look for management that you can trust.
Starting point is 00:30:52 Look for CEOs who've got a track record in the industry. Be careful about management who are selling stock or giving aggressive guidance. Be careful about managements who are too smooth talking. Be careful about management who are running the business with, you know, considering leavered balance sheets and rolling up acquisitions. Look at, to your point about incentives, be careful of management's who whose incentives are not aligned with those of shareholders. So those would be just, you know, a handful just on the management side and we can go into
Starting point is 00:31:28 the business side or, you know, the process side. But it's just lessons over time that we have learned that help us avoid, you know, permanent capital loss. And are there mistakes and behavioral glitches that you're particularly prone to? Because I remember talking to you about things like Markell once, and you said to me, yeah, you know, we stupidly sold Markel. They had some short-term issue. Like maybe there were a couple of bad acquisitions or there were some underwriting issues,
Starting point is 00:31:58 but you were like, it was nuts. It was dumb. I should have held it. Like, are there things that you have to beware of because it's part of your own wiring? Yeah. Well, thanks for reminding me about Markell again. My pleasure. But on valuation of this avoiding mistakes, you know, one of the things there that we remind ourselves on is don't sell too early when it's a fantastic business, when you've got a good business that's growing, that's got high returns on capital, where there's a high
Starting point is 00:32:29 degree of inevitability of outcome, just because the stock gets a little bit expensive. Sometimes those other things can justify a high valuation. And that is, you know, that is on our avoiding mistakes. And I can tell you, you know, our return would have been meaningfully higher than 12% compounds if we paid more attention to that. You know, we're quite, what I'd say Finley Parker quite good at, have been quite good at over time is identifying good companies that meet the checklist. What we've not been so good at always is execution, which means that sometimes we're
Starting point is 00:33:04 who just sold stocks. We've been quite pleased with ourselves. We made three times our money, but they've gone on to be 10 baggers or 15 baggers. And you know, you just think, my gosh, that was really dumb. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys to imagine spending three days in Oslo at the height of the summer. You've got long days of daylight, incredible food, floating saunas on the Oslo Fjord, and every conversation you have is with people who are actually shaping the future. That's what the Oslo Freedom Forum is. From June 1st through the 3rd, 2026, the Oslo Freedom Forum is entering its 18th year bringing together activists, technologists, journalists, investors, and builders
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Starting point is 00:37:43 pages of his beliefs about what works in markets. And you then turned it into an investment philosophy checklist. Can you talk about how you went about that process? and how it benefits you and how it was influenced by Atul Gawande or whoever in figuring out the importance of having this type of very tangible written down, written in stone philosophy checklist. So, you know, I've been working with James for 20 years in sort of 2015 on and off, but, you know, since the start of my career, as I mentioned, and then rejoined Finley Park in 2002. And we'd always looked at this document on the website, which was James' investment philosophy from the 1987 experience.
Starting point is 00:38:32 And it was pretty, pretty timeless document. But I think the thing when I became CIO, I mean, he handed over to me into 2015, 16 and said, the kid's grown up, let the kid, you know, let the kid have a go. And so we were sort of joint CIA for a while, and then he sort of handed it for me. And I said, well, look, it's great to have this investment philosophy. But how do we know we're implementing it? And I didn't feel in all cases all the time we were implementing it, and especially as you bring new people in. I'd read this Atul Gawande book, you know, The Checklist Manifesto, I think at around that time or maybe a few years before.
Starting point is 00:39:06 And, you know, the idea that a pilot has a checklist. And before they take off, they run through the checklist. Even though they know what to do, they run through the checklist. A surgeon in operating room, you know, has a checklist. Even though they know what to do, you know, you just, you run through a checklist. And fund managers tend not to have that. They think they can keep everything in their head and they can remember everything in an eight-page document. And I know that I'm just not smart enough to do that.
Starting point is 00:39:33 So I said, well, I said to the team, why don't we try and put this checklist into, sorry, put this document into a checklist. And so it was really a team effort. We distilled it into 29 points. And seven or eight years on, we're still using it. We've tweaked it a little bit over the years and tweaked a few questions. But essentially, it is the investment philosophy that's been tried and tested since the early 90s. And it's proved, you know, it's proved its worth, I think. It's funny.
Starting point is 00:40:04 I once asked Charlie Munger, when I first spoke to him, I think, about his own use of a checklist. And he's like, no, I can just keep it all in my head. And I was like, yeah, but I don't think anyone else can do that. Not many people are like Charlie Munger. I mean, you know, I'm a person with very average intelligence. I simply can't remember all of these things. And so you put them down a list. But the questions themselves are, again, they're very, it's common sense.
Starting point is 00:40:35 More than half of them relate to the business. So a business quality and business competitive advantage. And ultimately we're trying to get to what is that quality. We want to invest in quality businesses that have enduring competitive advantage so that we can feel confident about the inevitability of that. the outcome. And then a number of the other questions are around, you know, finance, financials, free cash flow and leverage and management, incentives, and confidence in management, culture, purpose. But the big chunk of them are related to business, business quality and competitive
Starting point is 00:41:09 advantage. We're trying to invest in high quality businesses that generate good returns, where you can just hold them and let them compound. It was curious to me that one of the three big chunks of the checklist appears to be about management and asking questions like, do we like their corporate purpose and culture and are they good capital allocators? Can you talk about this issue of focusing on the culture and purpose of companies that you invest in? Because it's a bit of a nebulous, vague thing. And yet it turns out to be hugely important, whether it's a company like Berkshire or Costco, both of which I think you own or Amazon. And I think at one point, didn't you decide to give yourself a double score on the
Starting point is 00:41:56 checklist for questions related to culture? So it's inordinately important to you. That's right. I think when you look back and you look at certain companies and why they've been successful, it's not always the case, but often culture is something that's been underestimated. And so, you know, companies that obviously look after shareholders are important. We're trying to make a, you know, a profit here and a shareholder return. But I believe that companies that look after their employees that have good glass door scores and where you've got satisfied employees, companies that look after their customers and have a strong customer of value proposition, you know, are well placed to succeed. So, yeah, culture and purpose.
Starting point is 00:42:45 I mean, one of the things that we look at is, you know, we don't like businesses where they have a product that customers have to have, but customers hate the company. You know, they've got pricing power, because the customers have got no choice of nowhere else to go. Ultimately, we don't think that leads to a very inevitable outcome. Whereas if you, you know, if you're like a Costco and you are permanently delighted, You look after employees, you pay them well. You put all these things together. You can deliver super normal returns over time by considering all the stakeholders and building
Starting point is 00:43:23 a good culture. I think we tried to do that at Finley Park. I think it's one of the reasons for the success of Finley Park. He's frankly, you know, a very focused purpose to generate great returns for our clients and a culture of creating environment for employees to do their best work to have fun and to deliver for our stakeholders. So I think culture and purpose, I believe we've probably underestimated in the past and that's why we've sort of double scored it.
Starting point is 00:43:57 A few questions we double score like culture, like pricing power and returns without leverage You know, a few things that we think are kind of super factors. So when you were trying to figure out the culture of a company, you're obviously doing a lot of due diligence in talking to divisional leaders and former employees and the like and competitors. Are you looking for inconsistencies in what they're saying to see whether someone is saying, yeah, yeah, no, it's a lovely place to work. And then you talk to people and you're like, God, I just wish my boss weren't such an ass. Yeah, I mean, it's, you know, you build up a picture.
Starting point is 00:44:34 picture over time. You cover a company and you meet management, you meet different levels of management. Obviously, Glass Door and in her site, there's other ways of getting data these days on employee feedback and satisfaction where some of the issues are. And if you're in the top, I mean, there is a correlation, in my opinion, between satisfies employees and shareholder returns. And if you're the 500 company in the S&P 500 on the glass door scores, you're probably going to be challenged to deliver really great returns. So there's some outside data. We can interview management. We can also use, you know, expert networks to access, you know, employees, former employees, competitors to get a sense of
Starting point is 00:45:23 that. And, you know, we're very focused on the leadership. You know, anytime the leadership changes, how does that, you know, how might that impact, impact the culture? So we build up with a picture over time. We produced a list of sort of half a dozen questions that help us probe on culture. What is the culture? How does it, how has it manifested throughout the organization? How has it changed over time? Why is it changed over time? So there's a series of questions also we've developed to just help us sort of get to the bottom of it. You never really get a full picture, but you can you can build up a picture over time. And we've certainly given it a good go. I was also really struck by the extent to which your documents really deal extensively with ESG.
Starting point is 00:46:05 And obviously there's been an ESG backlash here in the US recently and lots of polarization about the issue. And I guess I have some sympathy towards the view that there is a danger of greenwashing and that Wall Street is pretty good at selling anything. If they can sell stuff by saying that it meets their ESG criteria, they'll do it. So I do think it's appropriate to be somewhat cynical about it. But I also think these issues of environment and social good and governance are hugely important. And I think there's a sort of real danger of using that backlash and the allegations of hypocrisy to kind of dismiss this thing that's actually really important. And so I was interested to see the extent to which ESG runs through your checklist. And I think you have also a responsible investment gauge that you use that has something like
Starting point is 00:46:59 19 different factors related to climate and environment and human capital and business ethics and reputation and cybersecurity and data privacy and all of these things. Can you talk about this whole issue of ESG actually being a really important aspect of finding businesses that are sustainable and achieving long-term success? So it's actually, it's a practical and pragmatic thing and not just something that we should be debating politically. Yeah. No, no. Thanks, William.
Starting point is 00:47:32 I appreciate the opportunity to discuss this because, you know, I think the pendulum swung a long way in one direction. It now seems to be swinging a long way in the other direction. I think we take rather a more pragmatic approach. I mean, what is ESG? It could be ESG, it could be SGE, it could be SGE, it could be GSE. You know, I don't know. whoever chose the order of ESG and the E seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment. But the truth is, is that we believe that responsibly managed companies, you know, are best
Starting point is 00:48:03 place to produce great compound rate of return, compound returns for our clients. And so we do pay close attention to those factors. I mean, governance, good governance is an important factor when we look at companies. You know, does it have a sensible board? Our management incentives, we talked about incentives, aligned with those of shareholders, do they make sense? Would we back management to run this company well and successfully? And so the G is, you know, that's absolutely integrated into our philosophy checklist.
Starting point is 00:48:40 Equally, the S is integrated into our philosophy checklist. We want to have companies that are delivering good customer value propositions. And I mentioned the glass door scores. We want to have companies that ultimately are treating employees well, looking after employees and creating an environment where they can do their best work and thrive and they can retain and attract the best people so that they can be successful. So, you know, we've always thought about other stakeholders, you know, that when you think about customers and employees, you get better results for shareholders.
Starting point is 00:49:10 We talked about Costco. And there are many, many other examples. So that is integrated into our process. On the E side of things, we've got many companies that we think are providing products and services that are helping to create a more sustainable world. For example, some of our building insulation companies, we own top build, we own a nice holding in that. It's one of our bigger holdings. And they, you know, the dominant company in providing insulation to residential and commercial houses. Well, residential houses and commercial properties.
Starting point is 00:49:44 And of course, insulation actually is one of the best ways that you can reduce your carbon footprint. And so now it doesn't mean that actually TopBuild is not a high scoring company on our philosophy checklist. The starting point is, is it a good business? Does it fit? But it can also create opportunity. And so for me, I see ESG as a tool that is integrated into our investment process that helps us manage both opportunity and risk. manage, manage risk, downside risk, and find opportunity. And, you know, we take a really pragmatic approach here. And hopefully we've never, we've never greenwashed here on this run. We tend not to
Starting point is 00:50:24 have slides in our pack around ESG, but we just sort of get on and do it like we've always been doing it. We do have this responsible investment gauge where we look at other factors and pull in other information and data. Again, help us manage opportunity and risk. Yeah, I was struck by that pragmatism where on the one hand, you do still own some fossil fuel companies like EOG resources, which I think is a low carbon producer of oil and gas, and Conoco as well. But these are companies that, as you've pointed out in the past, are going to play an important role in the energy transition.
Starting point is 00:51:01 But at the same time, you also have a question. I think you added in 2021 to your checklist where you say, is the company a net beneficiary of climate economics. So it's very pragmatic. It's saying there is a trend here in terms of the environment and we want to align ourselves with that trend and we want our, we want to make sure that we're not blindsided by it, but also not the ideological, I guess. Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, we've always tried to be pragmatic. I mean, I clearly, I think it is an important trend, which in my view, although the tide may be shifting a little bit in terms of the, the rhetoric and the fund management company saying, I'm aligned with it or I'm not aligned with it.
Starting point is 00:51:44 If you look at businesses, if you look at what businesses are doing, there is a clear, there's clear momentum to, you know, reduce their environmental footprint and become more sustainable. I think it is an enduring trend. And so we have got a question there. One question, one point on our 29 questions. But at the same time, we fully recognize that there needs to be an energy transition and the world would simply stop functioning today if we didn't have fossil fuels. And so how do we get from A to B in a responsible way through responsibly managed businesses? And so we've never operated a sort of divestment strategy here of saying, well, we only want to be in AAA-rated ESG companies. We've taken a much more pragmatic approach.
Starting point is 00:52:35 And in fact, on our rig, our responsible investment gauge, company like EOG, actually scores quite well relative to all the sort of factors that we look at. By contrast, some of the social media companies, which get quite high ratings from third party party vendors, don't score so well. And so, you know, everyone has their own different ways of measuring these things. But ultimately, yeah, we are pragmatic. So things like Meta and X formerly known as Twitter in the same way, Glyf, formerly known as Prince, is now X, they don't score very well. These social media companies, would they be ones that don't score great? They don't.
Starting point is 00:53:21 And we've tended to avoid those companies at Finley Park. I mean, for various reasons, they don't score that highly on our investment philosophy checklist either. So, Finley Park right now, we're pretty underweight, you know, the mega cap companies. We've probably got about as lower weight, although we're an all-cap American fund, we've probably got about as lower weight as we've ever had in those mega-cap companies. And notwithstanding that, you know, the fund still continues to perform, you know, quite well. Because also it's not about what you, you know, sometimes it's also just about what you own and not sort of what the index is doing.
Starting point is 00:54:00 As long as you've got other companies that performing well, you can still produce a good compound rate pretend. Yeah, my sense, maybe this has changed, but my sense at least a few weeks ago was that you owned Microsoft, Nvidia, an alphabet, all of which you'd owned for quite a while. So I guess three of those eight mega-cap companies that have market caps of $100 billion or more. But the others like meta, Netflix, Tesla, Amazon, Apple, not so much. Is that fair to say that you That's right. We have three, you know, our last filing, we had three, three companies which made up, you know, I call it approximately 10% of the fund. And if you look at those mega-cap company, which have been driving the market this year and for a number of years, I think the last decade,
Starting point is 00:54:48 eight companies represented 60% of the performance of the S&P. You know, those represent 25 to 30% of the index and we're around 10. So we have a much broader diversified portfolio than the the index, which looks a little bit narrow today. And it seems like you've been very consciously shifting back towards an emphasis on midcaps. In its original iteration, the fund was very much a small cap fund and then a little bit midcats and then gradually became an all-cap fund. And now it seems that it's shifting back towards a pretty heavy emphasis on mid-cats. Is that partly a reflection of the fact that, as you call them, the mega-cap-8 have
Starting point is 00:55:30 gone kind of crazy over the last 10, 12 years and the valuations are just not that attractive. What's first, what's the problem with the mega caps and what's the comparative attraction of the midcaps? Yeah. So the challenge with the mega caps is that in the last decade or so, they pretty much had the sort of rails to themselves, you know, whether it's Google in search or, you know, Microsoft in cloud, sorry, Amazon in Cloud or Microsoft in, you know, office productivity and so on. If you look today, there's just a lot more competition. There's going to be more, there's more overlap. You know,
Starting point is 00:56:11 Google and Amazon and Microsoft are all competing in in cloud. You know, it's just, it's a more competitive area, you know, social media, Facebook has got, you know, more challenges there, you know, TikTok and there's just more competition. between those companies, they're not going to be allowed to acquire companies in the way they have in the past. They've compounded revenues at sort of 25% roughly for the last decade or so, which is pretty extraordinary. But if the valuation's moved up, if they're going to do that again over the next decade, you know, probably become a third of GDP. So I think it's just a sort of mathematical challenge. This is one and a half trillion of collective revenue.
Starting point is 00:56:57 you. And, you know, they're just being scrutinized far greater extent from a regulatory perspective and from a competitive perspective. So that's sort of one angle. The second angle is we're actually really excited about midcaps as these large cap companies have dominated. We feel that the opportunity in midcaps on valuations, we're sort of going back to where we were in the sort of late 90s when we were much more focused on small cap companies. And it wouldn't say they'd been ignored, but they've not performed. And so they've had a less attention on them. We are finding probably about 75% of the ideas that come into the fund over the last 18 months have been in this sort of three to $50 billion market cap range. And so today, you know, probably
Starting point is 00:57:42 two-thirds of the fund is under $100 billion, whereas two-thirds of the S&P is over $100 billion. And it's, you know, we're evolving in that direction. There is another factor here, which really is around de-globalization and the advantage that maybe more domestic-oriented companies are going to have as we move to a more de-globalized world. I mean, that's another conversation entirely. I'm happy to get into that. But we've got more of a domestic-focused companies that are going to benefit from U.S. reshoring, near-shoring, and we're really excited about that opportunity.
Starting point is 00:58:19 Yeah, so these are companies that a lot of our listeners, won't have heard about because maybe they're industrial companies or infrastructure services companies with a more domestic US buyer. So I was looking at your portfolio and there are things like Ferguson in heating and plumbing, you know, these companies that not all of us have heard of. But then I was also struck that you were playing the AI boom in an interesting way that although you own Nvidia and Microsoft, which are both pretty big positions and alphabet, there's also a big emphasis on what you've called the picks and shovels providers of products and services that are going to benefit from IT spending on things like AI. Can you talk about things like
Starting point is 00:59:05 Accenture or Gartner, these things that are maybe not as huge. They're not these mega cap companies, but they're very well positioned to take advantage, perhaps, of this AI boom and they're not quite as pricey, perhaps, I think, as some of these mega-cap stocks. Maybe just stepping back a bit, we probably have 40% of the portfolio in what I would call sort of these picks and shovels type companies, which most people find a bit boring and not growthy enough, but we absolutely love. So whether it's, and what I mean by that is often they are providing, you know, essential products and services that are a high value to the end, to the customer, but a very, very low percentage of their total costs. So if you take,
Starting point is 01:00:02 if you take Sherwin Williams, for example, in paint, you know, actually paint as a percentage of the paint job is not, is not a lot, but it's, you know, having good quality paint is important. Martin Marietta in aggregate. The aggregates that go into a new industrial gas facility or biotech plant, it's a pretty small percentage of the cost, but you know, it's sort of an oligopoly and you've got to have the product and you've got a bit of pricing power and you just need to have it when you need to have it. You know, if you look at Texas instruments or analog devices in analog semiconductors, I mean, they sell products for 50 cents for a dollar, But, you know, the content is maybe a few hundred dollars that goes into a car.
Starting point is 01:00:42 But they're critical products. But they're not, you know, you're not betting on, you know, you're not betting on Tesla or BMW or GM or some Chinese EV company being the winner. You buy the Picks and Shovels company like Texas Instruments. And they provide analog semiconductors to all car manufacturers all over the world. And, you know, whether it's the Chinese or the industry. Indian or the Tesla's or the German companies, you don't actually have to be that smart and make a bet on who the winner is because if they need the product, they'll go to Texas
Starting point is 01:01:17 instruments. And we know the auto content in cars grows over time. So these are I mean by high value, low cost, but critical products. And it's the same in IT services. These are sort of picks and shovels providers, whether it's in IT services, whether it's Accenture and consulting, or whether it's Gartner in providing technology advice, whether it's CDW in IT services. We just love these companies. Thermo Fisher, Danahar in healthcare. We've actually never invested at Finley Park in a pharmaceutical or biotech company in our history. And you may say, well, Anthony, why not?
Starting point is 01:01:57 The problem is, we're not smart enough to know which products are going to get approved. And, you know, what is the life cycle of that product? And when it comes off patent, do they have a product to replace it? If you're Thermo Fisher or Danahearn, you're providing the life science tools and consumables to scientists, and you're serving all the pharma companies, all the biotech companies, all the generic companies, all the Indian and Chinese companies, as long as you believe in science advancing, you're going to generate more revenue every year, most years, and you can grow margins a bit, and you can generate free cash flow and reallocate that into more acquisitions
Starting point is 01:02:35 or dividends or buybacks. So these are, sorry, it's a slightly long-winded answer, but these are the types of businesses that help us manage downside risk. And to most people, they might be quite dull, but you're not going to lose a lot of money in them if you're wrong. And I think I read somewhere in one of your reports that the valuations for these slightly less exotic kind of mid-cap companies
Starting point is 01:02:59 are basically 25-year lows compared to the value. of the mega caps. Is that right that there's a really big disparity that reminds us of, say, 1998, 1999? Yeah, we have a chart in our slide deck which shows the relative evaluation of midcaps. You could plot this against small caps as well, relative to the S&P 500, which is obviously a larger cap biased index. And it is trading close to where it was in, you know, in sort of late 1998, early 1990. And one of the things that we did is we're always trying to produce a good absolute compound rate of return for clients.
Starting point is 01:03:43 And small cap and midcaps got really rather picked over. A lot of the big fund houses, the well-known ones that you'll know, closed their doors in the 2000s to small and mid-cap money and they had too much money and it had been a great area and out of favor, sorry, in favor. and S&P 500 companies were well out of favor. And that was the point at which we pivoted. And we said, well, actually, we need to look at all cap companies because you can buy Microsoft on 12 times earnings
Starting point is 01:04:12 and you can buy Walgreen on 11 times earnings, et cetera. And we can buy these high-quality companies that have underperformed for a while. So we evolved. And now I think Finley Part 3.0, 25 years on, I'm calling it sort of back to the future. We're going back a little bit to our roots. Today we look more like we did in those early days with sort of mid-cap companies, three to
Starting point is 01:04:34 50 billion dollar market cap companies being 40 plus percent of what we do, less than 100 billion, 60 percent plus of what we do. And it's really exciting. And we sort of stayed in the game in a way in the last decade. We hung in there in a period where you had zero interest rates, free money, not the best environment in a way for a Finley Park managing downside risk, low leverage. But now we're back at 5.5% interest rates, you know, there's a real cost of money. We're in a new era. It's really exciting. And I think going back to our roots a bit with these slightly undercover unloved companies, it is going to be fantastic. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Starting point is 01:08:42 the very start that determined the success of Findlay Park was that you made the choice to focus on one country that you picked America very early on, thanks to the good fortune of James and Charlie being experts on U.S. stocks. You have an unusual perspective on the U.S. because you live in the U.K., you spent five years early on in your career as a European stock analyst, I think, but you spent over 20 years analyzing U.S. stocks. So you're detached an objective about the US, but at the same time, very knowledgeable and very immersed in it. And I feel like people routinely underestimate the dynamism of the US, and they look at all these problems, and they always say, oh, America's finished and look at this country that's
Starting point is 01:09:34 going to take over. And then whether it's Japan decades ago or then China in more recent years, these countries that everyone says, oh, this is going to take over and the US is finished, the predictions of the U.S.'s demise always seem to be somewhat premature. And I wondered if you could talk about why the U.S. simply is a very attractive place to invest, not just now, but it's just such a sweet spot to be an investor. Yeah, it's so true. I mean, I spend the first part of my career, I say, working with James Finley on the American desk and I thought that's a great place to learn. But actually, ultimately, I live in the UK and
Starting point is 01:10:19 you know, I should probably cover UK and European companies. So I decided to make that switch. And after five years, went back to working with James again. And one of the lessons was there's just simply not the depth of companies, of quality companies that you have in the US. And where you do have a quality company, there's 35, you know, 35 sell side analysts and they're picked over and they're probably actually quite highly rated because there's so few choices of high quality businesses, they're trading on quite high multiples. And America has just got hundreds, thousands of companies that can't possibly be fully analyzed by everyone.
Starting point is 01:10:59 And just extraordinary companies and businesses. I mean, thinking about the America advantages, obviously you've got a capital market that's very, very liquid that works. We've got 300 million, is it consumers, against which to sort of leverage your business model. You've got a culture of business-friendly regulation. You've got rule of law, entrepreneurial spirit. And frankly, just a history of America creating new companies. I mean, just look at the S&P today and when we talk about those top holdings.
Starting point is 01:11:33 I mean, you talk about Nvidia today. I was talking about Nvidia at the moment, trillion market cap. I mean, where was Nvidia? 25 years ago? It probably wasn't even invented. America has the ability to just innovate, bring these companies, whether it's Tesla or Netflix or Microsoft or Apple at some stage. You look at Europe, look at the UK.
Starting point is 01:11:53 Where are the new companies in the UK? Maybe we had ARM for a while. That's been sold. Actually, I think it's going to be relisted in the United States. So it just isn't, you know, you look at the UK. You've got some banks and some oil companies and some telecom companies. It's just such a dynamic environment. And I think you're right is consistently underestimated.
Starting point is 01:12:12 When you read the UK press around America, it's always been negative. I mean, I'm naturally a slightly optimistic person, and I'm always quite optimistic about America, and it's dynamism, and, you know, the R&D that drives, you know, unparalleled levels of innovation and extraordinary companies and wealth. Also, an incredible work ethic. I was saying to my wife yesterday, I think I finished work at about, 11 something last night and she finished work at like 10.30. It's like, where else in the world are people just sort of routinely working that ridiculously hard at the end of summer when
Starting point is 01:12:48 I don't know. And I sort of feel, I'm not saying that to be self-congratulatory. I just look around and I see the people I know working really hard here. And I've worked in England and I've worked in Hong Kong. In Hong Kong, I think they had a tremendous work ethic. But it just seems like there's a kind of a dynamism and an intensity and a productivity here. And also this tremendous flow of capital to good ideas. I think you put it extremely well. It's the American dream. Even actually US college is interesting. My son has just started at US college, my eldest son, and we just dropped them off there. I mean, most people in the UK start equivalent of US college, UK university here at the end of September, beginning of October.
Starting point is 01:13:33 You know, he started on August the 15. You know, I did tell him, you're not going to get nearly as much holiday studying in America. He's like, yeah, Dad, I know, but he's committed to that. But whether it's, you know, studying, whether it's people have two-week holidays, I think, in America. And here, you know, they expect five weeks, four or five weeks. So, yeah, it's, you know, we've got a lot of national holidays. I think it's a cultural thing. Do you feel just looking at the UK that it's lost the plot a little bit?
Starting point is 01:14:03 I mean, with Brexit and the like and with the disasters of all your old Etonian prime ministers who went to school with me, like David Cameron and Boris Johnson, like, is there a sense that the UK has lost its bojo and is just not such a dynamic and important force economically? Or does it feel like the prognosis for the country is still pretty good in terms of business and investing and the like? I think we're in a tough spot, but I am hugely optimistic about, you know, this country where I live and work and the opportunities still in this country to succeed. And I think that the advantages in the UK are still significant, as much as it's easy
Starting point is 01:14:53 to kind of moan and say, you know, Brexit this or the current leadership. I'm still very optimistic about the UK's ability to sort of pull through this. I think there are a lot of parallels between the UK and the US. I think we've got to get the policy right. I think that's key. But I think we've still got a lot of advantages here. I was slightly surprised when I was looking the other day at the return since late 1997 of the Futsi 100, this big British index versus the US market.
Starting point is 01:15:28 And so this is a long period of time since 97, so what, 26 years, something like that. And the Futsi has averaged 3.7% a year, whereas the S&P, which hasn't been stunning, but has been 8.3%. And so, I mean, just a very long period of pretty dismal returns. Like, why is that? Like, why has the UK, the country that I came from and that I sort of left initially when I was about 21, 22 to move to New York. Why has it been so lackluster for the last quarter century? Well, I think part of the explanation is what we were just talking about, you know,
Starting point is 01:16:09 America's ability to renew, reimagine, create new businesses. If you take those mega cap companies, if you take some of those new companies out of the index and you just were to measure G and Exxon and some banks, you know, you probably wouldn't have a dissimilar result. So I think it's America's ability to create companies, you know, leverage that over, you know, a large consumer base and then, you know, leverage those internationally. I think the UK is at a somewhat of a disadvantage there in terms of, you know, the size and scale. You do get a lot of innovation and great companies, but they do get taken out. You know, they get, they disappear at $5 billion, $10 billion, $20 billion, or they relist in America. Ferguson's a great example. I mean, they reimagine their business to
Starting point is 01:16:57 to just a US business and they relisted in the United States actually been a very successful company. So I think I think I think that's it really. It's America's ability to create new dynamic businesses. You know, the UK sort of you look at the index is still composed of much the same sort of companies as 10, 20 years ago. You mentioned briefly your son going off to American University. I think you just have the one child, if I remember rightly. And when we first scheduled a conversation a few months ago, just informally, you wrote to me at the last minute and you were like, my son is about to play his last soccer game at Harrow, and I want to go watch him play. Can we reschedule for later in the day? Which I loved as the parent of two children,
Starting point is 01:17:45 although I never made it to very many of their games. And it just raises this question of how you've managed to balance this pretty intense job of leading a, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, team of 13, 14, 15 investors, managing $10.5 billion, managing this very successful fund, and at the same time, trying to have a family and some kind of life and some sort of hobbies. What have you figured out about how to manage your time and perform at a high level while also not burning out? Yeah, no, it's a great question. My son would say that dad, Dad, you know, I may have gone to that match, but Dad, you know, do you know how many other dads, moms and dads are these matches and, you know, you turned out to X many? So I'm afraid
Starting point is 01:18:38 I get the, you know, I do feel rather guilty that I, you know, I've done my best. You just try and do your best. I mean, I think one of the secrets for me is I don't sleep very much. And I, you know, since my 20s, I can get by on limited amount of sleep. And so somehow I can manage and balance my work, you know, my work, my sort of family time, and then the other things that I want to do for myself, you know, whether it's exercise or sport or, you know, hobbies, you know, I think I've balanced that sort of reasonably well, but it's, you know, it's a challenge. How little do you sleep? Well, I probably sleep about four or five hours a night. In fact, my work I woke up this morning.
Starting point is 01:19:25 And I have a very busy day today. And it's a big busy day yesterday. And I woke up at, my wife wakes up about seven and she woke up at seven o'clock and I was still in bed. And she looked to me and she went, what's wrong? What's wrong? Are you okay? It just reminded me that in fact, you know, when she wakes up, I'm never in bed because, you know, I get up at like 5.30 or whatever. I do my, I'm just my brain is buzzing.
Starting point is 01:19:52 I'm doing some exercise or I'm starting the day. And I do that seven days a week. So I feel like actually I've got a good balance between, you know, work, family and play. But it's always a challenge. It's interesting because I've written a bit about like health and the like. And so I got to interview all of these people like Matthew Walker who wrote this book, Why We Sleep. and so it's really become like almost this religious orthodoxy that you have to sleep seven plus hours maybe eight hours and that we just need it and that you're basically like
Starting point is 01:20:28 driving drunk if you're sleeping less and it causes all of these catastrophic effects on your health and I've thought about a lot and I don't know I think I only sleep about six and half hours on the whole and earlier in my career I I think we'd all kind of glorified the idea of sleeping less. I remember hearing that people like Margaret Thatcher slept four hours. I remember an old boss of mine at Time Inc, who was in charge of like 150 magazines, was set to sleep four hours.
Starting point is 01:21:02 And this was a sort of macho thing. And I remember Matthew Walker saying to me, yeah, but people like Reagan and Thatcher, who slept very little, ended up with Alzheimer's. And so it's a really interesting thing. I don't know whether to what extent we're,
Starting point is 01:21:18 being kind of brainwashed into thinking this stuff is really bad for our health. And to what extent it's really true. But again, it feels like the pendulum has totally swung to the other side. And there's a sense. Well, I mean, I've read Matthew Walker and I read that. Is it why we sleep? I read it a few years ago. And I thought it made a lot of sense.
Starting point is 01:21:37 And it was a brilliant book. And I tried to give myself the opportunity. Part of it is giving yourself the opportunity. You need to give yourself the opportunity to steal. I gave myself the opportunity. But I just couldn't do it. And I had the fit bits and I was trying and managing and measuring my sleep. I just couldn't do it.
Starting point is 01:21:53 And it just, you know, I failed. I mean, I figure that I'll probably die a bit earlier than my wife. But the number of waking hours that I'm awake during my lifetime might actually be similar, even if she lives 10 years longer than me. Listen, we'll see. Well, I think one of the things that Matthew doesn't, when I intude him, I think he's more open about this in private comments. than he is as a sort of public proselytizer is, and I think he's a very important public
Starting point is 01:22:23 proselytizer and sleep's hugely important. But I think he's more open and private about the fact that we are very, very different. And one piece of advice he gave me that was helpful was he said, you know, see what happens at the weekend when you don't set your alarm, see what happens during the day when you don't set your alarm, see what time you wake up. And so during COVID, I started to do that I just wouldn't set my alarm ever. I still wake up kind of around the same time, but I think I'm so screwed up by the fact that I basically subsist on about 300 cups of coffee a week. And so I think I may just be the worst example on earth. But without wanting to be self-referential about this, like, are there other things in terms of productivity and
Starting point is 01:23:05 handling stress and operating at a high level that you've just found very helpful for yourself? I think I'm, I mean, I love what I do. You know, people, it's a cliche. See, you know, actually, if you got any advice for young people, like, you know, follow your passion, do what you do, do what you enjoy. But I think I'm very lucky. I had no idea about this business. And I said I got a job in asset management with time when no one knew what asset management
Starting point is 01:23:33 was or most of my friends didn't. They knew what investment banking was. And I didn't really know. And I sort of landed on my feet in a way. way in this amazing company that, you know, I could listen and learn from a lot of people. And James Finley, this greatest mentor in my life. And I just love it. I love doing what I do.
Starting point is 01:23:52 So that makes life, you know, the last 30 years really great. I mean, you get paid to learn about the world and make a few bets and make a few mistakes and hopefully learn from those and get better. And it's just I love what I do. So I think that's really, really important. in the sort of mental well-being. I have an amazing wife who is my rock. I mean, she's incredibly supportive.
Starting point is 01:24:18 We've been together since we were 20. And if I ever have issues where I'm thinking about this issue I need to solve or sometimes it's not someone at work you can talk to about it, I have my managing partner here, Simon, who we're open with. But she's been incredibly helpful in helping me solve problems and manage through the odd issue. here or there or, you know, key turning points in when decisions need to be made. I've got a very supportive, she's got a very supportive family.
Starting point is 01:24:48 I mean, she's also been incredibly supportive. So it's made it pretty easy. And I think somehow we've sort of found a way to have a good, good, good balance. And when you know, she should always say, you know, Anthony, I'd like you to take a bit more holiday. Well, you'd like you to work a bit less hard. But look, it's the job I have and I love it. And it's a responsibility.
Starting point is 01:25:05 And, you know, that's so you take that seriously. And now when you look back on your success over the last 30 years, you know, obviously there's been a great deal of hard work and skill and you had good principles and a good mentor and good temperament and like. But I'm wondering how you feel luck has facted into it because you did just land there in that training program, the graduate training program with this great investor, James Finley, you had the luck of focusing on a good market with the US. I mean, it wouldn't have been so good if you'd spent the last 25 years focusing on Fancy 100 stocks. How do you apportion the degree of success that's come from luck and the degree that's come
Starting point is 01:25:52 from skill, do you think? I think it's a hell of a lot of luck. I mean, as you said, you know, I didn't know anything about asset management. I sort of got put on the US desk working with with Andrew Barker, who was my boss at the time and James Finley, and, you know, seeing this kid, he was 15 years older than me. I say kid, I was the kid, but he was a young guy in his mid-30s making his way. And we hit it off. We connected. We somehow, we connected. And I helped him and he loved to talk through ideas. And I was there to sort of be a sounding board. And I was a sponge. I mean, I love to learn. I've always loved. I think maybe this is the area that isn't there's so much luck. You know, you talk about curiosity. It's a theme that
Starting point is 01:26:34 runs three, but I've always been curious about, you know, learning. I'm sort of quite, I'm sort of okay at a lot of things. I'm not actually very good at anything, but whether it's sort of playing snooker or darts or skiing or I've always wanted to try and master or yoga or now it's calisthenics I'm sort of learning. You know, I've just try and I love to learn and challenge myself in new things. Then I think I have a temperament. which is, I don't necessarily love to follow the crowd. I love the road less traveled. My temperament is suited at James' philosophy of managing downside risk if you're wrong,
Starting point is 01:27:16 rather than going for that kind of shiny object where you can make lots of money and make a quick buck. I love this idea of getting wealthy slowly and for your clients, building wealth and doing it in a way that, you know, I'm very comfortable making decisions. that are not necessarily what other people are doing. I'm incredibly comfortable with that. And even in some of my hobbies, my collecting, I love collecting. And often I'm doing, I'm zinging where I'm, you know, zinging with all this is zagging
Starting point is 01:27:47 or whatever the right phrases. And then you look down the road and you just sort of project out and somehow, you know, the world comes towards you. And yeah, so there's a lot of luck and there's a bit of skill and there's a bit of temperament. And who knows, sort of bit of all of that. What, what are you collecting? Oh, I mean, I've collected so many different things over the years, but when I had a bit less money, sort of stamps and, you know, and then I've actually been collecting, not a lot of people know this, but I've been collecting watches over the last 25 years. I got really into watch.
Starting point is 01:28:23 I inherited a watch and I thought, well, what is this? And I went down a rabbit hole and found out what it was. And then from there, I sort of discovered this whole world. But the watches I've collected are completely off the beaten track. They're not, and these are not Rolex watches or Patic Fleet watches. They're actually watches that are made by independent makers. So independent people who have mastered the skill of making a watch all by themselves. And there was a chat called George Daniels, who I met in, you know, early on as I sort of went down this through.
Starting point is 01:28:56 And I couldn't believe that he made, you know, he could make a wristwatch every year. at one wrist watch a year or a pocket watch, all by himself, every single part from the dial to the case, to the movement, to the, you know, the jewels, everything, it was just mind-boggling. And I bought a few of his watches, which turned out quite well. But again, it wasn't what people were doing at the time. And I think I've always been quite comfortable with that. So there is a sort of parallel in the way that you invest and the way you collect watches. It turns out there is, yeah.
Starting point is 01:29:31 It sounds like there's an emphasis on quality, emphasis on what endures, willingness to go your own direction. And the road less travel, doing more other people don't, you know. If I'm wrong, I'm going to have something that I really enjoy. I don't think I'd lose much money in if I do want to sell it. But if I'm right, there's sort of optionality down the road. Who knows? It wasn't actually, no, I think I had one eye on a return, but it was sort of driven by,
Starting point is 01:29:57 probably driven by passion. And yeah, this idea of doing something different from others. His watches are in, you know, demand the world over. And, you know, it's absolutely bonkers. But there's also a combination of quality and value there, which is not dissimilar to what you're looking for with companies, that you're trying to get a lot of quality, but you're not paying, you don't want to overpay for something that's fadish and in vogue.
Starting point is 01:30:26 That's true. And actually, when you look at a lot of the, you know, you look at many of these big brands, actually a lot of the, a lot of their cost is, you know, there's, there's cost that goes into the making of the product, but there's a lot of marketing. There's a lot of marketing to convince you, whether it's in magazines or whether it's in sporting events or promoting famous people or, you know, megastars in different sports. So I like the idea that you were, you were not really paying for the marketing. You're just paying the artist for the product. And you're getting something a bit different.
Starting point is 01:31:00 And you're engaging with that artist while they make the product. You have to have a lot of patience. You know, sometimes it might take three years, four years to get something at the end of it. It's interesting. Also, it's sort of Findlay Park story as well because you guys aren't big marketers. You're going under the radar. You've never really talked that much in public. And yet you've quietly and humbly gone about actually racking up really
Starting point is 01:31:27 high quality returns. And so there's, there's something quite English about it as well, like not that much fuss and self-aggrandizement, but quite a lot of quality. Yeah, I think James, you know, James and Charlie set the culture. They're sort of low-key people. You know, personally, I think you should have been, you know, you should, you should have been interviewing James and not me. I mean, he's far more interesting and, and, you know, a real legend in my view, but not well known because he's just such a low, key person that he doesn't, you know, caught the limelight. You know, we never, you never really sort of did press interviews. You know, we were sort of closed and just, that's just the way he liked
Starting point is 01:32:06 it. Didn't need a lot of the, a claim that perhaps other investors like. He also seems to have established a trend of the firm being quite charitable. Like I, I know that you have a couple million dollars or so a year as a firm to lots of different charities. And when I went to your event, you had charities like City Harvest there that a friend of mine used to run and that Nick sleeps in very involved with. And it seems like that's also a very central part of this, that it's not, it's not big on swagger and there is something kind of charitable and decent about it. What do you think? It's not something that we really talk much about. Again, it's sort of, we like to be sort of
Starting point is 01:32:54 low key about these things, but James, myself, we both feel we've been incredibly fortunate. This country has given us, you know, opportunity. We've managed to, you know, make good careers out of that. And there is a feeling that we both have of the need to give back, to give back, that we've got stakeholders here. Our most important stakeholder is our customer who want to deliver great compound returns for a long period of time. But we want to look after employees and we want to give back to society.
Starting point is 01:33:27 And so we do give back a not insubstantial amount of our profit to charity. And we have a social responsibility committee here and we engage employees in charitable giving. And we give money. We give time. So we bring people through Finley Park and see if we can help them and we give our time. and, you know, charity is not just about giving money, it's also about giving time. And so, yeah, we do our bit. Yeah, it's interesting that aspect of moral seriousness about the company, which I think
Starting point is 01:34:04 also, I mean, we talked about James saying to you, you know, treat the customer fairly. I think it's also running through the ESG stuff. I was struck by the fact that you had outright bans basically on investing in certain types of company that were derived like more than 10% of their revenue from things like coal fire and coal mining or from oil sands or tobacco or controversial weapons like custom munitions and anti-personnel mines and the like. So there is a sort of moral aspect to it. And I was struck also, I mean, going back to the ASG thing, I was struck that I think in 2021 you said that you sold Nike due to human rights and geopolitical tensions. So there is a kind of
Starting point is 01:34:49 moral aspect to this approach to investing? Yeah, I mean, we're getting into sort of, you know, dangerous ground here. I mean, the primary litmus test is our investment philosophy checklist. And, you know, the truth is, is that many of those companies that you mentioned do not score well on our investment philosophy checklist. And so we tend to avoid them. I think you do get into dangerous ground sometimes when you try and put some kind of moral overlay onto your investing framework. And we try and be, you know, pragmatic, which I think I mentioned.
Starting point is 01:35:33 But when it comes to things like tobacco and coal and oil sands and so on, yeah, they're not great fits with what we're trying to do. I think what's really interesting is the way that you put it in terms of this. framework of what's sustainable. So it is a pragmatic thing. It's investing in business that are sustainable. And likewise, when you're investing as a firm, looking to make money over decades. And so I like that that there's a good argument that's not really idealistic and dogmatic,
Starting point is 01:36:13 but that's actually practical. It's like, yeah, there are reasons to, to, bet on companies that are helping their customers and that are making their customers' lives better rather than on things that maybe are making society worse. Well, I think that's absolutely right. I think responsibly managed companies, behaving responsibly, is a great way to generate compound rate of returns, compound returns over time. I mean, ultimately, that's what we're trying to achieve. And we think responsibly managed companies are best place to do that. And we're looking for business.
Starting point is 01:36:49 is where we have a high degree of inevitability in the long-term outcome. And, you know, that's where we're guided to by our checklist. I wanted to ask you one last thing, Anthony, if I may, which is when we first met early, I think in 2023, it was through a relative of your Simon Kelton, who's an old and dear friend of mine from high school and then college. And one of the reasons you'd stumbled upon Simon and become close to him was because you've done, you and he had done all this genealogical research tracking your family back, maybe even like the 13th century or something.
Starting point is 01:37:25 And I was wondering if you could just tell us a little about it, because it's such a strange story about what you discovered as you, I think you got this company genealogica, among other things, and you started to really dig deep into your family history. What did you find out? Yeah, so, I mean, my parents were both, of immigrants. My mother came to the UK. My father was a, you know, descendant of, you know, immigrants who arrived into the UK sometime earlier. And, you know, I mentioned I'm sort of curious
Starting point is 01:38:02 and I like to sort of learn about a lot of things. And when I, when I spoke to them, they never really completely answered questions about, I always felt that I never really got the full answer. And so after my father died in 2008, I decided, I said to my mother, I really want to find out the truth. Because I think actually understanding where you've come from, in my view, and having done this, I believe this even more, understanding where you come from helps you understand yourself. And helping understand yourself is no bad thing in life. Some of these things are very, very deep rooted and go back a long way. And so I embarked on this journey. Actually, initially, it was just sort of ancestry.com. And I discovered my cousin.
Starting point is 01:38:47 Simon Kelton, who you've known for years, who was also made a tree, a family tree on ancestry.com, and we sort of came together. And I didn't know Simon, although interestingly, his uncle was chairman of Finley Park. How bizarre, a four or five person company. And it turned out that James Findlay had appointed Simon's uncle as chairman of Finley Park and had hired me. So you've got quite sure about that. I used to go home and tell my wife, Robin, who sadly has passed away now, really reminds me of my father. And I used to say this for his and sadly he died before I found out that he was my cousin, Simon's uncle.
Starting point is 01:39:26 So, yeah, it turned out actually we had an awful lot in common. And, you know, he's become, he's become, obviously his family, but he's become a great friend. I'm godfather to his, to his eldest daughter. And it's a wonderful, it's been a wonderful journey. And I found out a lot about myself, which has helped me, I think it's helped me in life. And actually, perhaps even more so than that, brought family together in a way that if I could see, if I say I've done nothing else in life, through this, I have brought family together. And it may, it may actually be my greatest achievement. And that, that makes me feel good.
Starting point is 01:40:05 One thing I loved when Simon started to dig into the family history is that when we were at Oxford together, he was so posh. charming in a kind of classic old Etonian way, like very smooth, very charming. He at one point, he wrote a book called, I think, The Rich Bostas guide to living in L.A., right? So he was sort of the quintessential, elegant, polished, urbane, upper class Englishman. And then when he starts to dig into the family history, discovers that I think it maybe was his great-grandfather who had been this very, very posth-seeming English wall. and then turns out to have been Jewish and to have concealed it. And I come from a similar Jewish background.
Starting point is 01:40:51 And what I love is that Simon was so pleased to discover this. Like instead of this being a source of shame as it would have been to some posh English families, he was so delighted to discover, you know, that, you know, as the poem says, we contain multitudes, that he contain multitudes. What do you think? Absolutely. I felt exactly the same way as him. And of course, you know, his family is my family. So we were both delighted. But, you know, there are some people who don't want to discover these things and would rather not, or not, and it's a little bit awkward. So, but for Simon and I, we were absolutely delighted. And we want to learn about, you know, where we've come from and our ancestors and the challenges they faced and how fortunate we are to be here as a result of all the things that they did for us.
Starting point is 01:41:41 Is that the biggest lesson in a way, that sense of your good. fortune that your family had gone through so much over the centuries and you end up here in this incredibly privileged position? Absolutely. I mean, I think that this country, whether it is my mother or father, you know, or their ancestors, the UK gave them opportunity. And at some stage, you know, I am incredibly grateful. So, you know, I live in the UK.
Starting point is 01:42:11 I pay my taxes. I don't do anything clever. and I like to give back to this country. And I'm still, as I said earlier, hugely optimistic about so many of the aspects of the UK to make this country so remarkable. The social mobility has been incredible. I talk about this a lot with my mother because my grandparents really were pretty poor and came from tough backgrounds.
Starting point is 01:42:34 And my grandfather used to sleep in the kitchen of his apartment, his parents' apartment in Glasgow in Scotland. and sharing it with his brother. And my grandfather became an eye surgeon and his brother became a brain surgeon. And then they sent my dad to Westminster and to Oxford, these very privileged schools, and then I went to Eaton in Oxford. And the social mobility that's been possible in the UK, which really reminds me of the US, is such a stunning thing.
Starting point is 01:43:05 And we've been such incredible beneficiaries of that, of the fact that both the UK and the US took in talented, people in my case, people who fled from Russia and Poland and Ukraine and let them thrive and get ahead and give them good educations and healthcare and the like and an opportunity. It's really, it's a very humbling and important thing to recognize, I think. It's a mark of why the UK and the US have been so successful. Yes. I know I agree.
Starting point is 01:43:36 And I'm hugely grateful to this country. And my wife and I, in addition to the giving that we do at Finley Park, we set up a charitable foundation about 15 years ago. And it is focused and always has been on reducing social inequality in the UK. It's not to say there aren't other hugely worthy causes, but that's, you know, you can't do everything. You can't be all things to all people. And focus is important. Focus at Finley Park. And we've focused.
Starting point is 01:44:06 And we, you know, that's what we're trying to do in our. our small way is to have an impact and give back, you know, to the extent that we can in the areas of education, training and mental well-being through human intervention from kind of cradle to grave. And so we currently support about 40 charities in the foundation and it's all focused on improving social equality, social mobility in the UK. That's a beautiful note on which to end. Anthony, it's been such a delight chatting with you. I'm really glad that Simon introduced us and that we've got to hang out several times in the last year. And I look forward to many more conversations with you in the years to come.
Starting point is 01:44:50 William, thank you so much. It's been a real pleasure. All right, folks, thanks a lot for tuning into this conversation with Anthony Kingsley. I'll be back soon with some more fascinating guests, including Laura Gerrits, a really interesting global investor who talks at length about high performance habits and the importance of reducing the noise and complexity and mental clutter in our lives. It's a subject I've been thinking about a great deal lately. I also have a special episode coming up that explores a hugely important trend in investing,
Starting point is 01:45:20 which is the enormous wave of money pouring into innovative climate change solutions, including everything from electric cars to solar energy. My guest, Bruce Usher, says the transition to a low-carbon future is creating the investment opportunity of a lifetime. He actually believes that what we're witnessing is the greatest reinvention of the global economy since the Industrial Revolution. It's a very interesting and timely conversation that I hope you all find as thought-provoking as I did. In the meantime, please feel free to follow me on Twitter at William Green 72, and do let me know how you're liking the podcast. I'm always delighted to hear from you. Until next time, take good care and stay well.
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