We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP375: Creating an Investing Checklist w/ Brian Feroldi

Episode Date: September 3, 2021

On today’s episode, Trey Lockerbie chats with Brian Feroldi. Brian has been covering the healthcare and technology industries for The Motley Fool since 2015 and has recently seen skyrocketing growth... on Twitter with his very easy-to-digest investing and financial wellness content.  IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: (01:15) How to approach financial wellness, before even thinking about investing. (11:12) Brian’s fascinating investing checklist for buying. (14:22) Brian’s 11 criteria for selling a stock . And a whole lot more. *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Brian Feroldi Website. Brian Feroldi Twitter. Brian’s Investing Checklist. Brian’s writings on The Motley Fool. Rich Dad, Poor Dad Book. Trey Lockerbie Twitter. NEW TO THE SHOW? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. 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 Vacasa AT&T The Bitcoin Way USPS American Express Onramp Found SimpleMining Public 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 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. On today's episode, I sit down with Brian Ferraldi. Brian has been covering the healthcare and technology industries for the Motley Fool since 2015 and has recently seen skyrocketing growth on Twitter for his very easy to digest investing in financial wellness content. Today, we discuss how to approach financial wellness before even thinking about investing. Brian's investing checklist for buying, which is super fascinating. Brian's 11 criteria for selling a stock and a whole lot more.
Starting point is 00:00:31 Brian's energy is infectious and it's such a delight to speak with people as passionate as he is. I thoroughly enjoyed it and I hope you enjoyed getting to know Brian Faraldi. You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we study the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerby, and today we've got Brian Feraldi on the podcast. Brian, welcome to the show. Trey, thanks so much for having me. Man, I am so excited to talk with you, mainly because I've been following you on Twitter for a long time. I love the content you've been posting.
Starting point is 00:01:22 The first opportunity that came to my mind in speaking with you was exploring the idea of financial wellness, which is a term I really love. It really resonates with me. but I'd like to hear from you. How do you define financial wellness? I'm a big believer in mission statements, and I wasn't for a long time. And one of my co-hosts on my YouTube channel, Brian Stofel, has really instilled in me the power of having a great mission statement. Great mission statements, once they are crafted correctly, are like a North star that you use to make all decisions around. So after a lot of time and thinking about it, I made my professional mission statement to spread financial wellness. And I picked every word there with extreme care.
Starting point is 00:02:09 And my career mission, like I said, is to spread financial wellness. What does that even mean? I think when you say the term wellness and think about health, it makes sense. If somebody has huge muscles, would you automatically assume that they're healthy or that they're well? Well, that's an indicator of health and wellness. But if that same person smoked cigarettes and had terrible relationships and ate nothing but jug food and was depriving themselves of nutrients in some other way, all in an effort to just
Starting point is 00:02:39 show the biggest muscles possible, I wouldn't say that that person is well. That same concept, I think, should be implied to your finances. People that follow me on Twitter, most think of me as a stock picker. And one of the things that's just a lot of fun to talk about in the stock market is high-growth stocks, right? Stocks that have the potential to go up hugely. But that to me is like the candy of finance. That's the thing that's really fun and engaging to talk about. But I think that that is so much less important than thinking about your finances holistically. In fact, I'm a firm believer that what you do with your personal finances is at least 10 times more important
Starting point is 00:03:18 than what you do with your investing finances. So when I say financial wellness, I think it's about thinking of your entire financial picture. And that includes how much money do you make? How much of your expenses? Do you know what those numbers are? Do you have, is your personal balance sheet filled with cash and assets and devoid of debt? Do you have a will? Do you have insurance? Do you have an estate plan? And yes, do you have your investments optimized for long-term growth? Thinking about all of those things collectively to me is financial wellness. I love that. Yeah, when you think about wellness, I think of it like a spectrum, as you said, where there's not any one panacea. So, you know, just yoloing and meme stocks, you know,
Starting point is 00:04:03 shouldn't be the panacea that gets you to financial freedom. You're talking about that blocking and tackling, that foundation, and setting the table of sorts for success. So maybe I have to ask you your own personal journey to discovering this for yourself. How did you arrive at this mission statement that you've come up with? My natural inclination is just to be a saver. Like, I was just born that way. And I think some people are just born natural savers and others are born natural spenders. I was just blessed for, I don't know why, to always have that bent in me to save money.
Starting point is 00:04:40 With that basic foundation, when I graduated college, I didn't know much about money at all. I was taught, and I say that with air quotes, the same thing that most Americans are taught about money in school. Nothing, nothing at all. The most important money lessons that I learned were learned mostly by observing my parents, who are my financial role models. And they never sat me down and taught me lessons, but they themselves were pretty good stewards of money. They always had money coming in. They always had a savings rate. They weren't flashy with their money by any sense.
Starting point is 00:05:16 So from that, just pure osmosis, I kind of picked up those habits. Plus, I think it was just genetically programmed in me to be that way. When I graduated college, my dad handed me the book Rich Dad, Boredad, which is the first time I ever read a book that talked about the basic principles of money, which is everybody's in business for themselves, the rich don't work for money, financial education is extremely important. You can become financially independent by saving and investing diligently. I don't agree with everything that's covered in that book by a long shot, but I will forever
Starting point is 00:05:48 be in debt to that book because it kick-started an absolute love of all things related to personal finance, money, and investing. And from there, I just went on a never-ending binge to consume the highest quality financial content that I could find. And I just love everything about money, investing, and personal finance. And money is one of the two subjects that affects every area of your life, whether you want it to or not. The other is your health. And despite it affecting so much about your life, it's largely a taboo subject.
Starting point is 00:06:21 It's something that people are uncomfortable to talk to with each other, which is just crazy to me. It would be like, what kind of exercise routine do you do? If that was like a taboo topic or what kind of food are you eating tonight. But money is incredibly important. And we are just all, a lot of people are naturally programmed to do money the wrong. way. We're programmed to be consumers, to go out and to buy things, and we compare ourselves to others. So it's really easy to do the wrong thing with your money. And since my passion is researching and learning about money myself, I'm a big fan of spreading that knowledge to other people.
Starting point is 00:06:55 You know, we have that in common, actually. Rich Dad, Poor Dad was the seminal book for me as well that kind of kick-started my interest in all of this as well. That and I was a musician at the time and I went to an event where they had me fill out a retirement calculator. Like what? I couldn't even start the page because my income was so inconsistent. And anyway, one concept you mentioned there that I wanted to touch on was the idea of debt and maybe more importantly, the idea of manageable debt potentially. So one concept I've struggled with is the idea of zero debt, since I have a mortgage
Starting point is 00:07:29 and a car loan, for example. So I know there's folks like Dave Ramsey, who are obviously an evangelist of of living a debt-free life, paying down debt before you do anything else. But the rub for me is that, like you said, the entire economy is built on credit. So, you know, if you want to save up to buy a home, you have to rent somewhere in the meantime. And in order to rent, you have to have a good credit score typically. And to have a good credit score, you have to have some credit lines open, et cetera.
Starting point is 00:07:56 So I guess what I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts on, what's your opinion on debt and do you believe in manageable debt? Overall, I recognize that debt is just a fact of life for most people. And when it comes to your credit score, I myself use credit cards. I love credit cards. They make paying convenient. You get perks for having them. But I pay my credit cards off every single month and always have and always will.
Starting point is 00:08:24 And when it comes to things like mortgages or student loans or auto loans, I recognize that those things are a tool that people use to get things that they want when they don't have the capital to do so. But overall, my general philosophy is more closely aligned to Dave's than anything else. I'm a big believer in eliminating all your debt, including a mortgage. I recognize that that's not always mathematically the smartest thing to do, especially when interest rates are 3% or even below. the math clearly says leverage your mortgage to the hill and invest that money and pocket the spread.
Starting point is 00:09:04 Mathematically, that makes a ton of sense. So it doesn't make sense to pay off your mortgage early if you're just looking at the numbers. However, the numbers and the emotions that you're going to live through are just two different things. The reason I'm a big fan of paying down your mortgage is because for most people, a mortgage is their largest monthly expense. And it's a fixed monthly expense, meaning it doesn't matter what's happening in your personal life. That is an expense that has to be paid and serviced monthly. By paying off your mortgage early, you are permanently reducing your largest fixed expense. Permanently. You are making your future self more anti-fragile because you're lowering your fixed costs forever. So that gives you more flexibility down the
Starting point is 00:09:50 road to do what you want with your money. So again, financially, I understand a lot of people say, I'm never paying off my mortgage, especially when interest rates are this low. For me, I accept the fact that by paying off your mortgage early, it is dumb mathematically, but I think it's incredibly smart emotionally. I like that. I think a lot of people fail to recognize also the option to pay double principal every month to help expedite that payment of your mortgage and also reducing your interest by typically half almost by doing that. And that's one of those things, those little tricks in life that I feel like not enough people know about when it comes to financial wellness.
Starting point is 00:10:26 One downside to paying off your mortgage early by doing it that way is once the money is in the mortgage company, you can't ever get it out. So one other idea is to take that double principle that you'd made and put it into bonds or CDs or a checking account or something like that and continually build up that amount until you can wipe out the mortgage in one go. That way, if you need access to that money beforehand, you can still have emergency access to it. Another idea is to take that money and invest it in the stock market. And once that account balance is bigger than your mortgage, then say, okay, that's it. I'm switching it and paying it off. So there are numerous ways to do it that
Starting point is 00:11:04 still give you flexibility. But overall, I think that if you had a paid off mortgage, you'll just live a happier financial life than if you have one. I love it. And let's talk about the stock market, you have developed an investing checklist. And it makes sense to use a checklist to enter any investment. It's one of those things, in my opinion, that seems to be simple but not easy to actually be disciplined enough to follow through every time. I'd love for you to walk us through your investment checklist and also maybe explain to us how you've adopted each step along the way. So I've been buying and selling stocks for more than 15 years. And I use the word buying and selling stocks specifically because I would say I've only been investing for about 13 years.
Starting point is 00:11:48 The first few years of me having money in the market, I had no idea what I was doing and I made every mistake that you can possibly make with investing. So I've learned by consistently losing money what not to do. So I know how painful those lessons can be. About 11 years ago, 12 years ago, I became a paying member of The Motley Fool. And through interacting with them, my financial and investing knowledge just really skyrocketed. And Motley Fool has discussion boards that are for paying members only. And on there is just incredible information that other members who have been investing for long periods of time freely post.
Starting point is 00:12:32 And it's just unbelievable the knowledge that you can soak up simply by learning from other investors that have been doing this for a long time. Now, once you become a member like I did, you have dozens, if not hundreds of stock ideas that are thrown at you at any given time. And I just became overwhelmed with how do I keep track of what I'm actually interested in? And I was trying to do all this in my head. I would be like, well, this company is growing fast, but this other one has a bigger adjustable market opportunity. And this other one is small, but I like the CEO of this other one better. Which do I buy?
Starting point is 00:13:07 And it just became chaos trying to manage all this in my head. I finally became smart enough to write down the things that I'm looking for in an investment and write down the things that I'm trying to avoid in an investment. And over time, thanks to feedback from other investors, it evolved into the checklist that exists today. And just to give you a quick overview of the checklist, it spits out a score from zero to 100. and I have a number of different categories, and each category has a certain amount of points assigned to it.
Starting point is 00:13:39 And I take any stock that I've never heard of before, and I go top to bottom on my checklist, and I'm looking at the financials. I'm judging the moat. I'm assessing the potential of the business. I'm thinking about the dynamics between the company and its customers. I'm asking if revenue is recurring and high margin. Who's running the company? Do they have skin in the game, et cetera?
Starting point is 00:14:00 And then, once I get a positive score, then I go through the risks section and I subtract points for things that I don't like. For example, I don't like it when a company gets its revenue from just a few customers. That's called customer concentration. I don't like it when a company doles out stock options and dilutes investors seriously over a long periods of time. So I have a list of attributes that I'm looking for. I have a list of attributes that I want to avoid.
Starting point is 00:14:27 And by taking companies through this consistently, it spits out a score on the other side that tells me whether a stock meets the majority of the criteria I'm looking for or I should just be avoided. From there, I would take the highest scoring companies, which to me are the highest quality companies that are on the market, and I try to get them into my portfolio at advantageous prices. The latter is hard to do and requires a whole bunch of nuance, but that's my general philosophy on investing.
Starting point is 00:14:57 Well, you mentioned there scoring a competitive moat, which is obviously a very qualitative element of a stock. So I'm really interested in that. How do you go about quantifying something qualitative like that? A whole bunch of things in investing are just qualitative. It's a judgment. It's something that you're going to have to just get a feel for. For example, how wide is Apple's moat?
Starting point is 00:15:21 Pretty wide. Why is it wide? Well, you could argue that there's network effects amongst their users. You could argue that there's switching costs once you get used to the phone. You could argue that they have a durable cost advantage due to their size and their scale. You could argue that they have a very strong brand name and all of those things are working together to give Apple a moat. But to your point, how do you take that and you convert that into a number? That's what my system attempts to do. I know going in that that is just a limitation of my system. In fact, if you took my exact system and used the same
Starting point is 00:15:56 stock to two different people, the scores would be different because we're judging from different perspectives. I'm okay with that and I accept that that is a reality of my system. But as long as I am scoring things consistently amongst companies, I'm pretty happy with the final output. But to your point, there is absolutely a ton of subjectivity here. Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors. All right. I want you guys do imagine. in 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
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Starting point is 00:20:05 and start hearing... Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com. slash WSB. Go to Shopify.com slash WSB. That's Shopify. dot com slash WSB. All right. Back to the show. I'm also curious if you are updating this score on a regular basis with companies.
Starting point is 00:20:31 Obviously, as new earnings come out or new news comes out, are you rerunning it, the company through the mill and spitting out a new number on a quarterly basis or something like that? Very few quarterly reports will significantly change a company's number. that's by design, I've set it up so that these scores stay relatively consistent over a period of time. But investing is dynamic. There is news that come out that significantly changes the investability of a company over time. I'm generally putting in a lot of work up front whenever I'm thinking about making an investment and steadily updating the score every six months, year, or even two years. But if I find a company that scores extremely well on my checklist, which for me,
Starting point is 00:21:14 on that 0 to 100 score, any company that scores over 80, that's a very, very good score. The chances that that number is going to fall precipitously is actually pretty low. But again, I think the value of my checklist isn't necessarily the output. It's not exactly the score. The real value is forcing yourself to go through a consistent process, because what you learn about a company along the way is far more valuable than it's just saying, oh, this company is 75 versus this other one's a 77. therefore the 77 is an automatic buy. It's about the process of learning and consistently going
Starting point is 00:21:50 through this with each company. I'm also wondering how you distill down from this amazingly wide universe of stocks to begin with, right? Especially for those who maybe have a full-time job, they don't have all day, every day to just pick through stocks. How do you filter down into a reasonable amount of stocks to begin investigating? Do you have certain sectors or industries that you think are your circle of competence and you start there or walk us through that. Yeah, in general, if you're going to be an individual stock picker, one of the tradeoffs that you're making is it's a time intensive process. So if doing this process sounds like torture to you, just index and call it a day. My system is designed because I love everything about
Starting point is 00:22:34 investing. I love it when I find a company that I've never heard of before and I get to research it. That process actually makes me happy. So that would be a thing one that I would say. The way filtered down is by I have a few resources that generally feed me stock ideas, The Motley Fool being one. There's some people that I follow on Twitter, for example. And I just keep a ever-growing, ever-expanding watch list of ideas. From there, I tend to focus most of my time and effort on two sectors of the market,
Starting point is 00:23:05 healthcare and technology. And just the dynamics of those two sectors, they tend to score the best on my checklist. So if you pitched me a company and said, hey, this is an oil and gas company, I can almost immediately dismiss it as an idea. Like, that is just outside my circle of competence. But by taking any company through a few simple checks up front, I can tell if I want to research it further. For example, one simple check that I do with every stock is to just see how the stock has
Starting point is 00:23:34 done since it came public. If a company since it came public is beating the market substantially, that's a really good sign, in my opinion. I think that winners tend to keep on winning and losers tend to keep on losing. Plenty of exceptions, of course. However, if you give me a stock, the very first thing I do is I just throw it into a chart and just say, is this stock beating the market since IPO and over the last five years? If yes, that automatically takes it to further consideration.
Starting point is 00:24:03 If it's horrifically lost to the market, I would just automatically pass. So I do have a couple of filters like that that kind of separate the wheat from the chaff initially. From there, I will do the work and put it through my research process and anything that spits out a very low score, I kind of just dismiss forever. So it's just a process of finding a few trusted sources to come up with ideas, vetting those sources consistently, and then putting out a consistent list of companies that score very well, and then focus my time, attention on them. You know, I think I'm a little behind on this term. I know I've heard it before. I've heard you mentioned it and it's just finally stuck with me, but it's this idea of being a GARP investor, GARP, which is an acronym obviously for growth at a reasonable price. And the key is understanding what reasonable means. So that said, I noticed that you didn't really mention valuation as
Starting point is 00:24:55 part of your checklist, although it might be in there. I'm kind of curious how much you think investors should weigh valuation into their investment decisions? Valuation is an extremely tricky subject to really master because if you learn anything about valuation, it just makes sense. What's the thing we're all tart by watching Warren Buffett? You want to buy a dollar for 80 cents or 60 cents or 50 cents. That is all smart investing. And if you are the type of investor that puts valuation first, you are just never going to
Starting point is 00:25:30 by the best growth stocks on the market, period. Because the best growth stocks in the market are almost always, quote unquote, insanely overvalued the entire way up. If you look back on the history of some of the greatest performing stocks of the last 20 years, your Amazon's, your Netflix's, your market accesses, they have historically traded at very high valuation multiples, even 20 years ago. And yet, if you bought them 20 years ago and held, even if you paid a very high valuation multiple, you have significantly outperform the market. How can that be? Well, the greatest growth stocks can grow for a far longer time period than anyone would possibly give them credit for. Amazon came public 24 years ago, and it's consistently put up double-digit
Starting point is 00:26:19 growth that entire time. And yet in 2020, Amazon grew another 40%. If you were to run the clock to 2000 or 1999 and put that into Excel spreadsheet, it would laugh at you. It would be like, what kind of crazy assumptions are you putting in here that this company is going to grow for 20 years and then grow another 40 percent? But that's what's happened. Why? Because Amazon is one of the highest quality growth companies in the history of the stock market. So when I've learned things like that, I have learned to de-emphasize valuation. That doesn't mean I don't look at it, but I've learned to seriously de-emphasize it. And it also depends on just the stage and nature of a company.
Starting point is 00:27:04 If I find a company that is worth $1 billion today and I do the work and I say, I believe that this could be a $20 billion company someday, I'm just going to buy it. I don't really care about the valuation because if the market cap is $1 billion and I think it could literally be a $20 bagger in a decade or so, the valuation I paid doesn't matter. What matters is, am I right or am I wrong? If that company goes up to 20x in value, the initial valuation I pay will be irrelevant. On the flip side, if you find a company that is big, mature, and much lower growing, then valuation really matters. So if you were going to buy a Microsoft today, a Procter & Gamble today, a Coca-Cola today, I would seriously emphasize valuation
Starting point is 00:27:48 because their future is so predictable and so known. But if you found a dynamic high company that was trading at a $1 billion valuation, I would de-emphasize valuation. So it's always about keeping it in mind, but knowing when to emphasize it and when to ignore it. A couple ideas come to mind from what you just said, one of which is position sizing. So from what I've heard about your style, it's very reminiscent of actually Tom Gaynor, who we've had on the show, and it actually sounds like similar to even Warren Buffett's personal portfolio. By that, I mean, it's pretty diversified. And the position sizes are are fairly small. Walk us through how you think about position sizing.
Starting point is 00:28:27 In general, I am a big fan of diversification. I own roughly 70 stocks or so. And when I am interested in building a new position in a company, the first thing I ask is, what is the risk reward ratio here? If the company could be a 10 plus bagger, as I said, I de-emphasize valuation. But I'm going to build into that position very slowly because the odds that I'm wrong are really high. If a company is high risk and high growth, the odds of that company flaming out are really high. So I would scale into it by using 0.5% increments.
Starting point is 00:29:09 So I would devote 0.5% of my portfolio into that stock on day one. Then I would watch it. If the company was executing and the thesis was playing out, I would be happy to add to that company again and again and again in 0.5% increments over time, even if the price was higher. Because I care about the long-term potential of the business and the business executing far more than I do about paying the perfect price to get in. So that's how I would build a position if it was a very risky, very volatile company.
Starting point is 00:29:45 If it was a much more stable, mature, predictable, profitable company, I would be more willing to take a larger position into that company up front. So a company that I really like that's very big is Adobe Systems, the software company that's been around for decades. It checks so many boxes in what I look for in an investment. But that company is worth over $200 billion today. So if I was going to build a position in that company today, given how mature and how high quality it is, I would be more willing to devote a larger portion of my portfolio to that
Starting point is 00:30:17 company on day one. So maybe I would build in 1% increments at a faster clip. Now, once a company hits 3% of my portfolio, either from me building the position with fresh capital or from it just growing, I stop. I don't add any more. At that point, it is up to the company to do the rest of the heavy lifting for me. So if you look at my portfolio today, my biggest positions are companies like Mercado Libre or Tesla or Amazon or DocuSign.
Starting point is 00:30:49 And I didn't go out and say to myself, I want these to be my biggest positions. I bought them slowly and through sheer price appreciation, they became my biggest positions. So I don't attempt to concentrate my portfolio. I let the market concentrate my portfolio for me. I love that. You know, you mentioned Amazon a little bit ago. And I know that optionality plays a big role into your investment checklist. And again, it's one of those seemingly qualitative metrics.
Starting point is 00:31:21 You've also said that a business's optionality is very underrated. So I want to explore it a little bit more. How do you think about the optionality of a company? In general, when I think of the word optionality, I think it's an ability of a company to produce new products or new services that open up new revenue opportunities for the company over time and expand its total adjustable market opportunity. You just called out one of the most optional companies of all time, Amazon. When Amazon first came out, they sold books.
Starting point is 00:31:52 What do they sell today? Everything, including computer services through Amazon Web Services. The number of businesses that Amazon has entered and successfully grown in over the last 25 years is just astounding. So that to me is a classic example of optionality. And when you're thinking about that in real time and asking yourself, how actionable did I think business is, there's a couple of things that you can look at. The first would just be the company's own history. If you were investing in Amazon in 2005, you can look back and said, wow, they started out in books, then they went to CDs, then they went into movies, now they're
Starting point is 00:32:30 getting into groceries, and they're succeeding. They have a history of entering new markets, and they have a history of launching new products and services. If a company has established a history of rolling out new products and services, that's a really good indication that they're going to continue doing so into the future. Another thing you can just think about is the very dynamics of the business itself. Obviously, if you're an e-commerce company that's selling things online, it doesn't take a tremendous amount of imagination to be like, what other things could they sell online down the road?
Starting point is 00:33:03 Other businesses, it can be harder to see that kind of optionality. But in general, I think if you look at the company's own history and check to see if they have a history of launching new products and services, that's a really good indication that they're going to launch even more products and services into the future. That kind of begs the question of the leadership of a company, because I imagine that's something you look at as well in the checklist. How much weight do you put into who's actually running the company? The manager and the CEO of a company is really important, as is the culture of the company
Starting point is 00:33:34 and the employees. When you look over long periods of time, it's really the decisions of management teams and the employees that lead to the execution of the business. The execution drives the financial results and the financial results drive the stock price. So the management team and the culture is really important. On my 100-point scale, I assigned about 14 points in total to the management team. When it comes to judging a management team as an outsider, you can't call these people on the phone.
Starting point is 00:34:01 You can't go and visit the company and talk to employees. Some investors do that. So you have to look for shortcuts that indicate that a company has a great management team. A couple of ways that I do that is by just asking, well, who is the CEO of the company? If the CEO is the founder, that's a tremendous sign to me because the founder of a business typically cares much more about the long-term viability of the company than they do anything else. It is nearly impossible to found a company, get it all the way to the public markets, and not to be insanely rich.
Starting point is 00:34:36 Like, everyone that has done that successfully is worth millions or tens of millions of dollars. At that point, they could retire. They could stop working and live on a beach for the rest of the life. If they are choosing to remain the CEO of that company, why would they do that? They must like running the company more than they just want the money from running the company. So if a company is founder-led, that is a really good sign that I give points to. If it can't be the founder, I want to see that the CEO has been at that company for 10 or 20 years, ideally starting at the bottom ranks and working their way up to the business.
Starting point is 00:35:14 So that is another really good sign because, again, that person has likely poured their heart and soul into the business. They likely have friends and family that work at the business with them, and they really care about the long-term health of the business, not necessarily short-term factors. On the flip side, I don't like to invest in companies where the CEO's. was just hired three months ago from some other company and they are put in there to focus on earnings or improve operations. That to me is a bad sign.
Starting point is 00:35:41 So just the history of the CEO is something I look at. Another thing could check is just how much of the stock do they own? This is just called Skin in the Game. You want to know that if the stock goes down, you as a shareholder are going to be hurt, but the CEO is going to be hurt way more than you are. So you want them to own a significant amount of stock. The third thing would be the Glass Door ratings. So Glassdoor is an online tool that you can go to just see what kind of reviews do the employees
Starting point is 00:36:06 give? They can rate the CEO anonymously. And if that CEO gets really high ratings and employees seem to really like looking for the company, that's a great sign. If employees go on there and say, our business is going down, I hate the CEO and the company gets two stars out of five, that's a really bad sign that they're going to have a hard trium attracting talent. Finally, I look at the mission statement of the company.
Starting point is 00:36:29 How good is the company at communicating its mission to both employees and to investors? And then lastly, I look at the company's financial performance. Are they consistently meeting their targets? Are they consistently exceeding Wall Street's estimates? Wall Street's expectations? That tells me that they understand how Wall Street works, and that's a really good sign. So when you look at all five of those factors together, I think they give you a really good sense of is the person that's running this company in it for the long haul, or are they just in it
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Starting point is 00:40:23 thing I'm curious about is your position sizing going to 3% or more, and it begs the question of when to sell, which is a theme I've been wrestling with also lately because there seem to be two schools of thought. One is the market is inefficient, and if you have high conviction in the company, you should just keep building your position as the price becomes more and more attractive. On the flip side, there's also this philosophy that you should cut your losers very early and only add to your winners. So how do you think about selling a stock? Every big invest mistake that I've ever made all have the same word in common.
Starting point is 00:41:03 Sell. Every single time that I've sold a company that has gone on to 5x or 10x or 20x, it has cost me way more in an unlost upside than I gained from selling a stock that then went down a further 50%. Because I've done that several times, and I know people that have sold companies like Netflix, and that was literally a multi-million dollar mistake, when I see things like that and I've learned that the hard way, I have become reluctant to sell. I have a bias towards holding and a biased against selling. So that is my general overview of selling. However, that doesn't mean that I never sell. And there are 11 reasons that I will sell a company. I'll tick through them
Starting point is 00:41:52 really fast. Number one is the most common and the most important. I was wrong. I thought blank about a company. I thought the thesis for owning a company was A. It turns out that thesis was wrong. The company didn't execute like I planned on it. If I'm wrong about a company, I will tuck my tail between my legs, admit defeat, sell, and move on. Number two, if there's accounting a regularities, if I can't trust the numbers, you're dead to me forever. Why would I bother with your stock? Number three, if a company makes a massive acquisition that I don't like. And relative size is important here. So if Google spends $5 billion to buy a company, it's irrelevant. Google is a $1 trillion company, a $5 billion investment is no big deal. If a $5 billion
Starting point is 00:42:40 dollar company, acquires another $5 billion company, that's a big deal. And if I don't like that acquisition, that could be thesis changing. So I will sell if I disagree. Number four would be the thesis is complete and there's no compelling second act. In other words, the company executed against its original mission or its original property line and it hasn't developed a second business that will take growth to the next level. So if a company's organic growth rate all of a sudden starts to fall below, say, 5%, because it's just running out of room to grow, I have no problem declaring victory,
Starting point is 00:43:14 selling that company, and buying something else. Number five, if there's a mass exodus of management or glass door ratings plunge, a.k.a. the culture is really deteriorating. I'll sell. Number six, if the company is too large for me, I'll sell. So, for example, if a really high-quality business, such as MasterCard or Amazon became 15% of my net worth, I would say, that's too much, and I'll start to trim that position. Number seven, if the company's valuation is extreme compared to its opportunity, this is a really tricky one. If I think best case scenario for a company is it grows to be a $200 billion company, and right now that company is trading at a very high valuation and it's worth $100 billion, that is a whole lot of risk I'm taking on for only a potential double.
Starting point is 00:44:01 In that case, I would be willing to trim the company because I don't think the gains are justifying the risk that I'm taking on. Number eight, if I just lost interest in the business, I no longer want to follow it, I'll sell. Number nine, if it gets acquired, I'll sell. Number 10, if I need the money for my personal life, aka the reason we invest in the first place, I will sell. And then finally, for tax loss purposes, if I'm down big on a stock and I just want to take the tax loss on it, I'll sell. Fantastic.
Starting point is 00:44:33 I'm also curious about, you know, you said you're a saver early on. So I'm kind of curious about your position of cash and what that typically looks like compared to your portfolio. Do you keep that in any relative balance that you watch closely or do you not mind so much how much cash you're sitting on in any given time? Yeah, so I keep two cash balances and I keep them separate on purpose. So the first cash balance I keep is just my personal emergency fund. That is six months of expenses that I just keep set aside in a boring checking or
Starting point is 00:45:05 savings account, yes, it's paying me nothing to keep in there, but that's okay. The point of that capital isn't to earn a return. The point of that capital is to help me sleep at night. In case we had serious health setbacks or career setbacks or something like that, I like knowing that that capital is there to get me through a six-month period. So I don't consider that part. I don't consider that capital investable. In my portfolio, I typically keep my cash balance between half a percent and 10%, depending on what kind of opportunities I'm finding in the market and just the general valuations that I see. So if I've gone through a period where some of my companies have gotten bought out or I was just wrong, I have no problem selling those companies and then building up
Starting point is 00:45:50 my cash position. And if I'm not finding anything that's screaming at me that you must buy this today, I have no problem with cash just sitting there and waiting. But overall, I like to keep the vast majority of my money that's for investments, invest it, even when markets are at all-time highs because the market can continue going up and generally does so. So I don't keep a huge cash balance, but I do keep some set aside for opportunities. That emergency fund piece is incredibly prudent, and I know it's a very personal thing, and very relative. It reminds me a little bit of someone like Bill Gates at Microsoft who wanted to have cash reserves that covered payroll for an entire year. Obviously, a very conservative approach. Maybe not so much when you're a company
Starting point is 00:46:32 like Microsoft that's money generating machine, but I digress. I'm curious how you think about the emergency fund a little bit further. Is it for you like a six-month timeline of covering expenses, or how do you kind of measure out what that fund should be? Yeah, I have a formula that I created that's up on my Twitter account. In general, I think it should be, somewhere between three and six months for the average person. And that really depends on your personal situation. If you have a very predictable job and you have no dependence in any way, and you could easily get another job if you lost yours for whatever reason, I would say a three-month emergency fund is perfectly fine. On the flip side, if you are working in a volatile industry that's
Starting point is 00:47:16 on the decline, if it would be extremely hard for you to get another job, if your house has one source of income and you have several kids that you need to support, even if something disastrous has happened, I would go much more towards a six-month emergency fund. Personally, I am a conservative person financially, especially with my personal finances. For that, I keep closer to a six-month emergency fund. That just helps me feel good and sleep good at night. You know, you strike me as someone who has taken the entire journey, maybe not the entire journey, I shouldn't say that much, but you've developed your own authentic style through, you know, after studying all of the classic text. And it reminds me of when I went to the Van Gogh Museum one time, something that stuck
Starting point is 00:48:03 with me there was that Van Gogh started out painting landscapes and still lifes. And when I looked at those landscapes and still lifes, they were the best I've ever seen. I mean, they were literally like as good or better as of any other artists. And it's kind of where you start out or where he started out as an artist. And then he just ventured off and became Van Gogh and did his own style. I think it's important for investors to do that for themselves and not just stick to some classic text just because it says so. And I'm saying all this because Buffett himself has evolved to some degree, but he has said
Starting point is 00:48:36 that he's still like 85% Benjamin Graham and 15% Phil Fisher. So the question that's coming to my mind is looking at your style today and how quantitative if you are, could you break it down in a similar way saying, well, I'm kind of this, I'm kind of that. Now here's where I'm sitting from all the people I've studied along the way. I have been influenced by dozens of investors along the way. But if you kind of force me to say, okay, who are the people that have influenced your style the most? I can name three. Number one would be David Gardner, who is the co-founder of the Motley Fool. His investing style is called rule breaking, where he essentially looks for fast-growing, high-quality companies
Starting point is 00:49:17 that could literally 10, 50, 100x, buy them early, hold them longer than anybody else, and you'll swing and miss a whole ton. But on the off chance, you find the next Amazon or the find the next Netflix, which he did in 1997 and 2002, respectively, or 2003, whenever Netflix came public, the gains from those stock picks dwarf, all. All of the losses combined. All of them. And if you look at his style, he is someone that looks at valuation, but will buy even in the spite of an insanely high evaluation.
Starting point is 00:49:52 So he has influenced my style greatly. Another one is a Motley Fool member named Tom Engel. He's an unknown investor to a lot of people, but he has been living off his portfolio for more than 30 years. And his style is to buy great companies at better and better prices, better and better value points over time. So he takes valuation very seriously, but he tries to find companies that he thinks can grow for 10, 20, 30 years.
Starting point is 00:50:24 And then he tries to add to that company again and again and again at better and better valuations over time. That style really resonates with me. He's some of that's influenced me a lot. And then the final would be a guy named Jeff Fisher, who is also from. The Motley Fool. He's one of their portfolio managers on their professional side. He runs like their hedge fund. His style is to exclusively invest in the highest quality businesses that he could find. He's more cut along the lines of a GARP investor where he demands everything. You have to have
Starting point is 00:50:54 have great economics. You have to have a wide moat. You have to have a great management team. You have to have a great Tam. You have to have a history of beating Wall Street's exhumates. You have to be low risk. You have to have a great balance. Everything. He demands everything. But when he finds those, he's willing to buy them and own them for a long period of time. And he has a phenomenal track record. There are literally dozens of other people that I've picked up snippets from here and there. But if you forced me to say, I would say those three influenced me the most. Awesome.
Starting point is 00:51:23 And one of the other things I'm also curious about, given your checklist approach, is what has most recently gotten you excited? What is the company that has scored maybe the highest that you're doing? research on, maybe even right now, that you're excited to get up in the morning and grab your coffee and getting to work on. Well, the companies that score the best on my checklist, they're generally high-quality businesses, but I don't get extremely excited about them. For example, I'm really bullish on Adobe Systems. It checks nearly every box that I look for in a great investment. So I have a lot of my capital. That's a major position for me.
Starting point is 00:52:04 But that's not a company that like super excites me. That's more of a, I'm going to buy this thing, and I'm pretty sure it's going to beat the market over long periods of time. I get the most excited when I find small companies that I think could 10 or 20 or 30x, and they check a lot of the boxes that I'm looking for when they're still small, but I understand up front that they are highly risky. So a company that really has my attention right now and has for a company. Since I discovered it, almost two years ago, is a tiny little company that's worth less than a
Starting point is 00:52:34 billion dollars called Semler Scientific. Similar Scientific trades over the counter. So know that up front, this is a very ill-liquid stock. So really do your research on it because the price can move around drastically. But Semler is focused on helping physicians to diagnose peripheral artery disease. So that is when there's a blockage in the arteries of the arms and the legs. This is an incredibly common medical condition, and it is significantly undiagnosed. The reason is it's a pain in the butt to diagnose this disease using traditional methods.
Starting point is 00:53:13 What Semler did is they created a little clip that goes on your finger or your toes, and it measures the flow of blood to each of your extremities. And it produces a report on a computer within five minutes that shows you how much blood is flowing to each of your extremities. In the case that blood is not flowing to one of them, your doctor can then take action. Can you prescribe drugs? Maybe you prescribe surgery. And this can prevent people from having heart attacks, prevent people from having strokes. Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer worldwide. So some which technology makes something that is hard to diagnose, easy to diagnose. What fascinates me about this business is their business model.
Starting point is 00:53:55 Yes, they make this little hardware clip that goes on your fingers and toes, but they don't care about that. They just want the doctor to have that. The way this company makes money is by selling the reports that come with it. So that takes a one-type hardware purchase and turns it into a repeat purchase business. And the economics of this small company are just fantastic. Last quarter, this company grew its revenue 125% to $14 million. So again, very, very small still.
Starting point is 00:54:22 However, the company is so extraordinarily efficient that it turned that $14 million in revenue into almost $7 million in profit. And that's after-tax profit. So that's a net profit margin that this company has done of over 40%. And if you look at the technology, there's lots of reasons to believe that they can grow at an above average rate for a long period of time. Now, there's plenty of risks that are worth noting here. This company has a few major customers that are out there.
Starting point is 00:54:52 As I said, it trades over the counter, so its stock is very illiquid. But this is a company that every time I look at the earnings report, I just want to learn more about this business. You recently released a chart on Twitter that I really loved, and it was basically breaking down five different stages of a company. So I'm curious, when you talk about similar, where do you think they kind of fall, given that they're such a small company today, maybe walk us through the five stages, where you think maybe someone similar sits and how we should think about valuation along the way? So, Semler is a bit of an outlier here because it's right now in the hypergrowth phase. And when a company is in hyper growth, it is usually not profitable or its profits are very small. So in Semler's case, it is growing rapidly the top line and it's growing rapidly the bottom line.
Starting point is 00:55:43 That's kind of a weird dynamic. So for a company like Semler, I think the PE ratio is usable because this company is fully optimized for profits. One mistake that I see investors making over and over again, and I made the same mistake myself for years, is once they learn about the PE ratio, they think it's universally applicable to every company all the time. And that is just a big mistake. If you were on the clock 20 years ago and look at some great growth stocks, they had PE ratios that were 500, a thousand, 2000. And if the only thing you know is you'll have to buy a when the P.E ratio is below 20, you'll automatically pass. I made this mistake myself with a company called Salesforce.com.
Starting point is 00:56:28 Back in 2006, the company I was working for adopted Salesforce.com. And I was like, this software is incredible. And if this software went down, our commercial team would literally be useless. Like, it is that important to us. But I looked at the stock and it had a hundred P.E. ratio. And I said, well, too expensive, can't buy it. And the stock is up 20-fold from when I passed on it because the P.E. ratio was too high. The reason the P.E. ratio was so high is the company was rapidly in reinvesting in itself to grow its sales team, to build out its research and development team, to expand internationally. All those things cost money. Because the company is still in hypergrowth phase, it is not optimized for profits. It's optimized for
Starting point is 00:57:12 growth. When a company is optimized for growth, its profit margins is often very, very small. So let's pretend that a company brought in $100 in revenue. Maybe it's only keeping a dollar of that as profit. Whereas if the business is fully optimized for profits, it could probably keep $10 or $15, or even $20 as profit. That means that the earnings of a company are temporarily understated significantly because it's reinvesting so aggressively. Therefore, the price to earnings ratio is significantly overstated. And that's why, if you look back at some great growth companies, they often trade at four or five thousand times earnings. That earnings that you're looking at is artificially low, which makes the PE ratio artificially high. Once I understood that,
Starting point is 00:58:03 You realize that a PE ratio is only useful if a company is mature and fully optimized for profits. Then the earnings is a stable number that you can use to deduce the value of a business. So in general, when it comes to looking at high growth companies, you have to know if the PE ratio is useful or it's useless. And you can figure that out by thinking about what stage of growth the company is in. You know, I recently interviewed researcher and author Jim Collins, and one of my favorite principles of his, and I've been thinking about it a lot lately, is this idea of the 20-mile
Starting point is 00:58:37 March. So according to Jim, the greatest companies have something he calls a 20-mile march, and the easiest way to think about this, imagine two people riding bikes across America. The first person rides 20 miles every single day without fail. So through sunshine, snow, rain, they power through and get their 20 miles in. The second person starts strong with 40 miles in the first day, but then they tire out, so they only write 10, maybe the second day. Then a storm comes in, and they said, okay, I'll sit out for the day, but then I'll make up for it tomorrow with 50 miles. And you can probably tell how this ends, but essentially the consistent 20-mileer wins the race.
Starting point is 00:59:15 And I think the important piece of this is the governance of the 20-mile marker, meaning, say, the first bicyclist stops at 20 miles, even if you're He's feeling great, right? So even if the sun is shining, I've got my 20 miles in, I'm going to stop. That kind of discipline and governance is really important. And some of the principles you've laid out today are reminding me of that, starting with a 0.5% allocation, not letting it go over 3%, etc. I'm kind of curious if this resonates with you. And maybe if you find any of these other 20 mile marches in your own life, either personally
Starting point is 00:59:52 or professionally. Well, kudos for interviewing Jim Collins. He is one of my favorite writers and business thinkers of all time. I just absolutely love all the work that he has done. And yeah, this is a principle that I absolutely love. And anybody who is in the content creation game, whether they're making a podcast, they have a blog, they're on social media, this should really hammer home for them. Because it's really easy to start a blog, to start a YouTube channel, start a podcast,
Starting point is 01:00:20 and get really excited about it. And you produce a ton of content in the first month, two months, maybe three months, and then it becomes a grind. And all of a sudden, you start running out of ideas, and your postings become inconsistent. And that's especially true. If you're not getting that feedback from people early on, like if you're doing a lot of work, but you're just not getting an audience, it can be really disheartening. So I personally have a checklist that I make for myself every day where I say,
Starting point is 01:00:50 say, here's my exercise goal for the day. Here's my posting goal for the day. Here's my work goal for the day. Here's what I'm going to be eating for the day. And I really try and outsource my thinking about what I'm going to do on any given day to a piece of paper. In general, I'm just a huge fan of writing things down. Write them down and make rules for yourself. You can make good rules for yourself when you're in a calm mood, when you're thinking clearly, when you can think about the long term. If you're in the day to day, and this is especially true if you're investing, if you have no rules for yourself and you're feeling tired and a stock you own is down and you're not in a good mood, it's easy to make mistakes. I know because I've made just about every
Starting point is 01:01:36 mistake that you can possibly make. So I'm a huge fan of writing things down for yourself, making rules, and then once you have made the rules for yourself, those rules become the boss of you. So, yes, I really resonate with this concept of having consistent goals for yourself and executing them daily. I try and execute health goals, food goals, relationship goals, and investing goals daily. But I do have a habit of overdoing things, I will say. I am probably guilty of going 50 miles and then 10 and then 30. So I probably should get better about being consistent 20 and stopping. That is a key part of it, is having a stop. But overall, I would say I'm fairly good at being consistent with the things that I do. I love it. Brian, this has been a true
Starting point is 01:02:22 pleasure. I've really enjoyed chatting with you today. Before I let you go, I definitely want to make sure you have an opportunity to hand off to our audience where they can learn more about you, follow along with what you're up to and any work you want to inform them about. I'm most active on Twitter. That is my primary social media outlet. So I'm at Brian Ferraldi. B-R-I-N-F-E-R-O-L-D-I. And I'm also putting a lot of time into my YouTube channel, which is also Brian Feraldi. And on that channel, we take stocks that are recommended from the audience, and I put them through my checklist in real time.
Starting point is 01:02:55 So if you're interested in learning about my checklist and how I find the information, you can subscribe there. Fantastic. Well, Brian, we should do this a lot more often. I really appreciate you coming on the show. Thank you. I would be happy to, Trey. I had a lot of fun.
Starting point is 01:03:08 All right, everybody. That's all we had for you today. Before I let you go, if you're interested in filtering down from a wide universe of stocks to see what might be the best performing in the future, I highly encourage you to also check out the investors podcast.com or simply Google TIP Finance initiative pop right up. Brian and I began our dialogue on Twitter, so I highly encourage you to follow me and we can get in touch that way as well. And with that, be smart, be safe, and we'll see you again next time. Thank you for listening to TIP.
Starting point is 01:03:37 Make sure to subscribe to Millennial Investing by the Investors' podcast network and learn how to achieve financial independence. To access our show notes, transcripts or courses, go to theinvestorspodcast.com. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decision consult a professional, this show is copyrighted by the Investors Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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