We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP736: How the Best Investors Execute w/ Clay Finck
Episode Date: July 11, 2025In this episode, Clay reviews Lee Freeman-Shor's book — The Art of Execution. Freeman-Shor studied 45 of the world's top investors over seven years, revealing why investment success depends far more... on execution than stock picking. Through analysis of nearly 1,000 investments, he discovered that even the best investors are wrong half the time, but their success comes from how they handle both winners and losers. This episode provides essential lessons on the execution strategies that determine long-term investment success. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 06:07 - The three types of investor behaviors when facing losing positions and their outcomes. 08:37 - The psychological biases that trap investors in losing positions for years. 11:48 - Why even the world's best investors are wrong 51% of the time. 38:17 - Why selling winners early is more damaging than holding losers too long. 56:25 - How concentration beats diversification for generating superior long-term returns. 58:42 - Why execution matters more than stock picking for investment success. 01:00:36 - The five-point winner's checklist for executing investment strategies like top performers. And so much more! Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join Clay and a select group of passionate value investors for a retreat in Big Sky, Montana. Learn more here. Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Lee Freeman-Shor’s book: The Art of Execution. Michael Lewis’ book: Moneyball. The Intrinsic Value Podcast. Shawn and Daniel’s episode on Reddit. Related Episode: TIP709: The Art of Long-Term Investing w/ Francois Rochon. Follow Clay on X and LinkedIn. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses in just a few minutes each week through our newsletter, The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. 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. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Hardblock AnchorWatch Cape Intuit Shopify Vanta reMarkable Abundant Mines HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Spotify! 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 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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You're listening to TIP.
Great investing isn't just about finding the right ideas.
It's about how well you execute on them.
In today's episode, we're exploring the art of execution by Lee Freeman Shore,
a book that uncovers what the world's top investors do after they buy a stock
and why that matters far more than you might think.
Freeman Shore studied the trades of dozens of great investors
and what separated the winners from the losers
and how the execution of their investments played a critical.
role in their success. He breaks down investors into tribes, from rabbits who frees when the market
moves against them, to assassins who cut their losses with precision, and connoisseurs who ride
their winners far beyond most people's comfort zones. With that, let's jump right into
today's episode on The Art of Execution by Lee Freeman Shore. Since 2014 and through more
than 180 million downloads. We've studied the financial markets and read the books that influence
self-made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Now for your host, Playfink. Real quick, before we get into the content here, I wanted to mention
that we're getting down to just 10 more spots left for our summit event in Big Sky, Montana.
In late September of 2025, we'll be gathering in the mountains to connect with kindred spirits,
share ideas, have engaging conversations, and enjoy delicious food in a wonderful setting.
Our goal is to create an unforgettable experience for you and help you develop friendships that
will last a lifetime. To learn more and secure one of the last spots, you can go to theinvestorspodcast.com
slash summit. On today's episode, I'll be sharing what I learned from reading The Art of Execution by
Lee Freeman Shore. This book was released in 2015, and at the time, Shore managed over $1 billion in
multi-asset strategies. In 2012, he was ranked as one of the world's top fund managers in CitiWire
1000. I first heard about this book from my friend Ardell Lowe-Groniger, who recently gave a
presentation for our TIP Mastermind community on his learnings from his career in starting
his own investment firm. Artel had mentioned to our group that he's read hundreds of books
on business, investing, finance, and psychology. In one book he recommended during this presentation
was this book by Freeman Shore, so I picked it up and I thought it tied in really well with the
concepts we discuss here on the podcast. From June 2006 through October of 2013, Freeman Shore
studied the trades of 45 of the world's top investors and analyzed how they approached the game
of investing. Interestingly, he had given each of these leading investors between $20 to $150 million
to invest in what he called his best ideas fund. He figured that if he picked the world's
top investors and invested in each of their highest conviction ideas, then surely he would be
well positioned to make a killing.
Well, it ended up that the fund he put together here underperformed the market.
He was shocked by the results to say the least.
Only 49% of the very best investment ideas made money, and even more shocking, was that some
of these legendary investors were only successful 30% of the time.
He had employed some of the world's greatest investment minds on the planet and asked them to
invest in only their very best, highest conviction, money-making ideas, and yet the chances of them
making money were worse than a coin toss. Despite some of these great investors only making money
on one out of three investments, overall, almost all of them did not lose money. In fact, they
ended up making a lot. At this point, it wouldn't be a surprise to many of our listeners that the
gains from the big winners far outweighed the losses from the losers. As Peter Lynch,
said, if you invest $1,000 in the stock, all you can lose is $1,000. But you stand to gain $10,000 or
even $50,000 over time if you're patient. These findings led Freeman Shore down a rabbit hole
of analyzing every single trade these investors made over a seven-year period to try and uncover
their secrets, and in the process, he discovered that stock market investing is not about
being right, per se. Far from it. Success in investing comes down to how great ideas are
executed. He writes here, I have come to understand that if successful property investing is all
about location, location, location, location, success and equity investing is all about execution,
execution, execution. Then he shares this great quote from Thomas Edison, vision without execution
is hallucination. This reminds me of what Thomas Phelps talked about in his book 100 to 1 in the
stock market. Phelps wrote, to make money in stocks, you must have the vision to see them, the courage
to buy them and the patience to hold them. While many value investors like to get enamored with the
numbers and the metrics, much of what the great investors do is peer into what a company could
become years down the line. Just as an example here, investors that looked at Amazon and said it wasn't
profitable and didn't have a viable business model, they couldn't see the vision that Bezos
had for the company 10 to 20 years down the line. Despite the company looking optically expensive,
With the benefit of hindsight, there was a tremendous opportunity there for those who understood
the possibility of what lay ahead.
There's also this belief amongst many that the hidden gyms largely aren't available to the
public, or the information eludes us mere mortals.
Freeman Shore believes that this could not be further from the truth, and that no specialist
knowledge is required to be a great investor.
So Freeman Shore found that the key to successfully executing great ideas in making big gains
comes down to the actions you take after you've invested in an idea and find yourself holding
a winner or a loser. For that reason, he split the book into two parts, one for when you're holding
what you thought was a winning stock that ends up being a loser, and the second for when you buy
into a great idea and it ends up working in your favor. So let's start with part one here,
which covers what the world's greatest investors do in losing situations. I'm sure that pretty
much every listener has been in the situation where they've lost a lot of money, and there's
massive uncertainty and negativity surrounding their investment, and I'll be the first to say here
that I certainly have. In this part, he has three different tribes of investors that he outlines,
and he refers to them as the rabbits, assassins, and hunters. Rabbits refers to those investors
who lost a lot of money and ended up being fired by Freeman Shore, while the assassins and
hunters were able to turn their losing situations into winning ones and adopted different methods
to get them out of the hole. So the rabbits were the least successful group of investors that
Freeman Shore had invested with. He keeps the names of the investors anonymous for the book for obvious
reasons, but many of these investors are well-known and celebrated figures on Wall Street.
While most people aren't able to get access to such high profiles, Freeman Shore was able
to get access to them because he had invested eight figures to get access.
One of the rabbits invested in Vike Communications, a UK-based company that specialized in software
that allowed users to make telephone calls and text messages over the internet using their
mobile phones, computer, or normal landlines.
Very big things were expected for this company because it basically meant that users
could more or less make international phone calls for free.
This seemed like a huge deal that could just revolutionize global communications.
The investor bought shares in Vyke Communications in October of 2007 at 2.1 pounds per share,
which unfortunately was practically the share price's peak.
Once the share price started to fall, the investor purchased more shares, which is what you
should do when you're sticking with the stock for the right reasons.
As the stock continued to fall, the investor continued to stick with it, but refused to put more
money to work.
Two and a half years later in July of 2010, the investor decided to sell his entire position.
He was down a whopping 99% selling at 0.02 pounds. Ouch.
Unfortunately, I also know this feeling as I lost around 99% of my capital on my very first
investment that I made when I was 18. My lesson from that was not to take stock tips from your
good friend's uncle who's a stockbroker and presumably knows what he's talking about.
If we assumed an average return of 8% in the market going forward, it would have taken
this investor 60 years to make all his money back, which in aggregate,
would require a 9,900% return just to break even.
Freeman Shore writes here,
The rabbits often dug tunnels that were so deep,
they never saw the light of day again.
Why do they make this mistake so many times?
I've used a slightly jockey name for this investing tribe,
but the fact is their flaws were very human, end quote.
He then goes into the 10 key factors that led to these types of investment mistakes.
The first one refers to research that Amos Diverski and Daniel Kahneman shared,
which can be referred to as the framing bias or anchoring heuristic. Essentially, the mistake
with a company like Vike was that the investor had a story in their head that they were anchored to.
Despite the stock continuing to drop and huge red flags being present, the investor was anchored
to the blue sky story and always viewed the stock as attractive. They think,
the stock may be down, but the thesis is not broken, so the price will eventually turn around.
The key lesson here is that when something happens that you did not anticipate, which has negatively
impacted the investment thesis or story, then it's critical to update your views in light of that
new evidence. In the case of Vyke, the new disturbing evidence that arose was dismissed,
and they were lucky to get any money out at all because in 2011, the firm was delisted and eventually
went bust. Related to this is the primacy error, which describes the way that first
impressions have a lasting and disproportional effect on a person. A classic example of primacy
error in real life is love at first sight. It's also demonstrated by newly hatched ducklings.
The first living thing that a newly hatched duckling sees immediately after hatching,
they take to be their mother. With the rabbits, first impressions were often everything. As a result,
they thought it was no big deal when they first started to lose money on the name. The investor who bought
Vike was so in love with where they thought the firm was going. It took them two and a half years
of watching the stock decline to finally change their mind on the company's future. When a business
is underperforming and the stock is falling, I think it can be easy to trick ourselves into thinking
that the tithes are just about to turn. When a business that's executing on all cylinders
becomes a company that's faltering, then it might take quite a bit of time for that business
to turn things around if they ever do.
Another interesting bias he shares is the endowment effect.
Let's imagine a scenario where you buy an ounce of gold today for $3,000 just to use
round numbers, and let's say that tomorrow I offer to purchase that from you for $2,000.
I think most people would kindly decline that offer.
However, would your response change if I opened up the newspaper and showed you that the price
of gold had crashed overnight to $1,000?
Most people probably still would not take the $2,000 I offered them, primarily because they now
have a vested interest so they believe that their bar is worth more than the price being offered.
This is known as the endowment bias.
If the market price really did crash to $1,000 and I asked you what you would take for your
gold, the response would still likely be $3,000 or more, since that's the price you paid,
and now that's the price you're anchored to.
Freeman Shore found that based on his own experience of man,
managing a team of investors, large losses that happen over a short duration are almost impossible
to accept, especially when they're substantial.
It's easier to hold on to a losing position than realize the loss by selling.
Rabbits were far too concerned with the price that they had paid and largely wouldn't seriously
consider selling until the price had exceeded what they originally paid for the stock.
Investing is sure a humbling game to play once you realize that even the greatest minds
on the planet can be totally wrong and off the mark. Freeman Shores findings suggest that you should
expect to be wrong at least half the time. Even the very best investment minds are. Another bias he
points to is this self-attribution bias, which is when we blame others or external factors for our
misfortunes, but take full credit when things go well. It's one of the key reasons that investors
don't learn from past mistakes, but just keep on repeating them. He writes here,
it never ceased to amaze me how many times the same two villains popped up in the stories told by rabbits
harboring a losing position. It's either Mr. Market or the market is just being stupid, or is
sidekick Mr. Unlucky. Or it wasn't my fault. I was unlucky because of XYZ reason that no one could
have foreseen. No one wants to admit that they were wrong. It's more comfortable to seek out information
that confirms our existing beliefs rather than disproves it.
One of the things that Freemature found in his research was that when the going gets tough,
it's common for the leader or manager to outsource responsibility.
Many times, they'll include more people in the process because when there's more people involved,
they can relax because, you know, they're not the sole person that's going to be blamed if things go badly.
You can, of course, imagine seeing this at top investment firms that utilize investment committees,
where the group makes decisions together.
Or you can see it within companies
where the board members don't want to make the big decisions
so they hire financial consultants or external advisors
to help them make the decision for them.
Another interesting point here that he shares
that I hadn't really considered before
is that many managers are less inclined
to walk away from a large losing investment
than a small losing investment.
It might be really easy to say I was wrong
by selling a 1% position at a 20%
loss, but if you put 20% of your portfolio into one stock and all of a sudden it's down 50%,
you're probably much more likely to think that that stock's now trading at a huge discount.
He refers to this as the denomination effect.
Another way to frame it is that we find it far easier to spend lower denomination dollar
bills than higher dollar bills.
So we might go out and buy $5 coffee 20 times and feel nothing because we're spending
these smaller amounts, but spending $100 all in one swoop can be a bit painful for someone
who likes to save money. The same concept can be applied to our portfolios.
All right, so what could the rabbits have done differently to prevent these catastrophes?
Framus Shores suggests always having a plan. Investing is all about probabilities,
and odds are that there are stocks in your portfolio that are going to be losers. He recommends
having a plan for what you would do if a stock you own falls by 20 percent,
20% or 50% for example. When faced with the painful loss-making position, most people do nothing.
I've had two stocks that I've sold myself over the past year. That would be Evolution A-B and Technion.
I didn't sell because I was necessarily bearish on either of them, but I felt that I had potentially
missed the mark on the quality of these businesses. It would have been easy for me to say that
eventually these stocks will recover. But the market was telling me otherwise. I allocated that capital
to names like Topicus, Lumein, and Booking Holdings, which the market has so far rewarded me for
over the past six to nine months, which is a very short time period. And I think the keyword there
is so far. I feel like this next point is a bit controversial or contrarian. Freeman Shore,
he claims that when you find yourself holding a loser, you should do one of two things. You
should either sell out completely or significantly increase your stake. He writes here,
If the stock price is down after your investment, the market is telling you that you were wrong.
If you really believe you were right to invest in that company, then you were clearly wrong in the
timing. The sooner you acknowledge you have made a mistake and take steps to deal with it,
the better your odds of achieving a successful outcome.
Ask yourself the key question I now ask all of my investors.
If I had a blank piece of paper and were looking to invest today, would I buy into that stock
given what I know now. If your answer to the above question is no or maybe, then you should sell it.
If you conclude that you would not buy the shares today, but find that you cannot push the sell
button, be aware that this is because of endowment bias and not a logical investment thesis.
Sell, end quote. So I personally don't believe that we should follow this advice at all times.
I see many great investors simply hold onto a stock during a drawdown, and it isn't always necessary.
to add, especially if you already have a substantial position already built.
Freeman Shore also points out the importance of humility.
The rabbits were incredibly smart.
Many of them had MBAs, CFAs, and other letters after their name that suggested they had
an analytical advantage over the rest of the market.
Believing that you're smarter than the market can lead to overconfidence, which can be a really
dangerous mindset.
The first reason for this is that it assumes that the market is made up of buyers and
sellers who are not equally smart. And second, knowing more often leads a person to missing the
forest for the trees. History is riddled with poor forecasts and predictions made by smart people.
For example, in 1998, Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman stated, the growth of the internet
will slow drastically. By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the internet's impact on
the economy has been no greater than the fax machines. Sometimes,
it can be easy to say that the market has it wrong when we see a declining stock price,
but sometimes the crowd can be surprisingly wise. In fact, the market can even be right,
even though everyone who makes up that market is individually wrong. So let me explain a bit
by what I mean by that. Michael Mobison did an experiment in 2007 with his 73 Columbia Business
School students. He had a jar full of jelly beans and asked his students to guess how many
beans were in the jar. Answers ranged all the way from 250 to 4,100. The average of all the guesses
was 1,151, and the actual number in the jar was 1,116. Despite the average only being 3% off the mark,
only two of the 73 students gave guesses that were closer to the real number than the average.
So it's really interesting here that your typical student was far off the mark in the estimate
of how many beans were in the jar, but the average was still really close to what the real
value was.
So how that might translate to the stock market is most people can be totally wrong about
a stock, but the stock price that the market is offering you can still be relatively close
to its underlying intrinsic value.
Another point that Freeman gets to here is that you don't have to make your money
back the way you lost it.
For a stock you bought at $100, that's now $50, it's easy to say that you made a mistake
and you'll wait until you break even before getting out.
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Once you realize that your original investment thesis is no longer intact, then it's likely best
to just move on and earn higher returns elsewhere. Minimizing our losses is essential. Of the 946
investments that he analyzed, 2% had lost more than 80%, and 14% lost more than 40%. So once you're down
a substantial amount, then it takes these massive gains just to get back to even. If you're down 50%,
you need a 100% gain to break even. If you're down 80%, you need a 400% gain to break even.
and so on and so forth. The other thing about stocks that are down significantly is that the big
comebacks are rare. Some investors, when they're down 90%, might think that it's just dead money
and they might as well just let it ride. Of course, there are examples of these comebacks,
but we shouldn't bank on them without a good reason for it. I would say that the major takeaway
is just to be open to changing your mind when you find yourself holding a losing investment.
In many cases, if a stock drops by 50%, the market's telling you that you're wrong and you need
to have a pretty good reason for continuing to hold shares.
If the business's fundamentals seem to be pretty strong still, then you may consider adding
to your position, and if the thesis has substantially changed, then it might be time to consider
getting out.
Many times I've referenced here on the show, the case study of meta in 2022.
In November of 22, shares were down below $100 a share, and this represented a seven,
75% decline from its previous high, and believe it or not, Meta traded for less than 10 times
earnings at that time.
There were, of course, some good reasons for that.
The company experienced a revenue decline on the year for the first time ever.
Zuckerberg seemed pretty adamant on investing tens of billions of dollars into the Metaverse,
which showed practically no promise of delivering a return for shareholders.
Apple introduced some privacy changes that reduced Meta's ability to track users across
apps, which impairs their ad targeting and measurement, costs were out of control, and they
had a declining user growth and user engagement in light of the rapid rise of TikTok.
It felt like anything that could go wrong for meta was going wrong at that specific point in time.
Fast forward to June 2025 here. Shares of meta are just shy of $700 a share representing
nearly a 700% rise from the low in November of 22. Zuckerberg reined in cost to increase
profitability. They laid off over 20,000 employees and slowed hiring, signaling to shareholders
that they were being more disciplined in their capital allocation decisions. Meta overcame the Apple
privacy changes with the help of their AI models that improved ad performance, driving higher
ROI for advertisers. Ad revenue in 2023 increased by 16% after that decline they saw at the prior year.
And most importantly, the narrative completely changed. The PE ratio of meta went from around
8 to 37 in less than a year. That's over a 360% increase in the share price just from multiple
expansion. Unless you believe that meta's business model was broken and in the midst of a permanent
decline, then it likely wouldn't have been wise to sell shares in light of that decline.
I think the case is clear that meta's moat is pretty strong and they're able to at least
sustain their existing business for a number of years, ignoring any potential for future growth,
being able to weather through drawdowns of great companies, I think is an essential skill set.
It can be incredibly difficult to separate the signal from the noise and determine whether
the business's long-term success is in jeopardy or not.
I like to give a business some sort of leash for underperforming in terms of its fundamentals.
Every stock is bound to eventually have a bad quarter.
And let's say if a stock has, say, six underperforming quarters in a row, for example,
then that might be time for me to consider moving on.
And maybe the company simply wasn't as good as I initially assessed it to be.
The other thing to realize is that it's totally normal for a stock to suffer through a decline.
If we assume that investors value a company based on its future cash flows, you can play around
with the DCF model and quickly see that you can get a 30 to 50% difference in the business's
intrinsic value just by slightly tweaking some of your assumptions.
So as the daily news flow comes through when the company releases their quarterly updates
with some decent volatility in the results, you're going to see these occasional 20 to 30% declines
in about any business.
We just don't know exactly when they'll occur and how severe those declines will be.
Having the ability to sit through drawdowns can give an investor an immense advantage.
Peter Lynch once said the key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.
During Lynch's time running the Fidelity Magellan Fund, he delivered average annual returns
of 29% per year over 13 years and experienced three drawdowns of 20% or more for his fund.
The inevitability of drawdowns also highlights the importance of knowing what you own and having
conviction in where a business is heading.
When you know a company has a durable and competitive advantage, a strong balance sheet, and a
proven track record of generating shareholder value, you're far more likely to stay the course
when others are selling in fear.
It's also empowering to know that volatility and drawdowns,
are the price of admission to earning superior returns.
Many people simply can't stomach the volatility of the stock market,
which presents an opportunity for those who know what they own
and can effectively navigate through those drawdowns.
This brings us to the discussion of the assassins
and the art of killing losses.
This chapter fell a bit more like taking a trader's approach to investing
than that of a long-term value-oriented investor,
but some of the principles can still apply, I think.
The assassins did an excellent job of limiting their losses and not letting their emotions get the
best of them by relying on a framework that drove their decisions. So this ties into the earlier
point of having a plan in place once you enter a position. It can be easy to have a position
going against you and to simply change your thesis on that investment. For example, perhaps
you bought into a high-quality gross stock. All of a sudden, it's turned into a turnaround play
with many underperforming segments.
Another point he has here that I liked is one of the things that I think good investors do well
is to only make big decisions when they're in a good emotional state.
So if you're exhausted, overly stressed, or just not in a good state of mind,
then it's probably best to avoid making big decisions because it's just much more difficult
to think rationally.
This is exactly when you're prone to be making a big mistake is when you're not feeling
well and you're making these decisions based on your emotions. On the topic of drawdowns and
re-evaluating positions, I think it's also important to think about why the market is selling off
a certain name. So at times, there are these exogenous factors that essentially bring the entire
market down. So think about March 2020 during COVID or the Great Financial Crisis. Essentially,
anything that was publicly traded was being sold off because of this liquidity shock and the
tremendous amount of uncertainty that was in the market. During these times, I think it's especially
important not to panic sell because history tells us that stocks have always recovered from such
exogenous shocks. Now, when it isn't this type of shock, we need to take a real close look. So through
mid-June 2025, the S&P 500 and NASDAQ are roughly flat on the year. So if you own a stock that's
down, say, 30%, then it's likely due to the business itself or the industry they're in. One,
A well-followed example is LVMH, which is currently down over 50% from its high a couple years ago.
I don't have a strong view personally on the company, but many believe that it's a well-run
business with very good management.
Growth is slowed after the boost they had post-COVID, and revenues even saw a decline in
2024.
It appears that LVMH is suffering from softer demand in China, which represents around 30%
of their business, and they reported that sales in Asia excluding Japan dropped
over 10%. So LVMH seems to be in this situation that they have a number of things simply not going
their way. There's this weakness in China, the uncertainty around tariffs, and then investors just
might be a bit concerned about the succession plans as Bernard Arnault is now 76 years old.
According to Finchat, LVMH is at an EV to EBIT ratio of 13. That's the lowest that metric has
been since 2016, and it's even lower than the drawdown in March 2020.
And one caveat I'll add here is that the company's implemented some price increases, and I think
this might put pressure on their growth that they're going to see in the future. So, you know,
not all multiples are created equal. Just because this multiple is lower than March 2020,
doesn't necessarily mean that today's price is a bargain. So if they overdid the price increases
and earnings end up declining, then investors might find that the multiples you're saying today
could potentially be high. Again, I'm no expert on the luxury industry, but those are just
my general thoughts. Freeman Shore, he shared some research on how investors behave after selling a loser.
Research from Mike Thaler and Eric Johnson suggested that once a person has sold a losing investment,
their behavior can potentially turn a bit risk-seeking, which they refer to as the break-even
effect. Some professionals might feel that they need to turn their losing situation around
or else they face potentially being fired. When you sell out of a losing position, you're really
making two decisions. First is, of course, that that stock is no longer a good idea to have money in,
and second, your money would earn a better return being invested elsewhere, which is referred to
as your opportunity cost. But the lack of another compelling opportunity should not prevent
us from exiting a poor investment, as we always have the choice of temporarily holding cash
before we get it allocated elsewhere. Selling a position can really be a difficult experience
for many, even if you feel like you know you should not be holding that business.
Research from Connemann and Tversky found that the pain experience from losing $50
is far worse than the joy we experience from winning $50.
This means that we can find it easy and pleasurable to sell a winning stock and difficult
and painful to sell out of a losing stock.
And the idea of the potential for regret if the stock rallies after we sold can really
paralyze us into inaction and indecision.
This brings us to discuss hunters, who are the investors that found themselves in losing situations,
but instead of selling out of their position, they double down and bought more shares.
As I alluded to earlier, once a stock has a big drawdown, statistically, it doesn't have a great
chance of recovering and making new highs, so it's a bold decision to double down on a stock
that's down, say, 30 or 50%.
These types of moves are typical of a contrarian value investor.
They see a future that the market largely disagrees with, and they're able to find these market
inefficiencies.
In taking this approach to buying discounted assets, you have to be very patient because it
can take some time for the market to appreciate that underlying value.
Peter Lynch once stated, I'm accustomed to hanging around with a stock when the price is going
nowhere.
Most of the money I make is in the third or fourth year that I've owned something.
I like to think about how certain stocks attract a certain shareholder base.
If the company has growth rates in excess of 40% for a number of years, that is going to attract
a lot of growth investors, which elevates the share price, and as the shares gain momentum,
this will inevitably attract momentum investors, and many value investors will get out when the valuation
gets a bit ridiculous.
When that growth slows, the shares start to sell off, and it might enter a secular downtrend
if that growth continues to stall.
Once the stock falls below a certain point, the momentum investors are probably the first
ones out, and if the 40% growth metrics simply aren't there anymore, then the growth
investors will be next to jump ship, causing a further decline in the share price before
the shares hit some sort of floor and value investors create that new base in the share price.
There are cases where Warren Buffett would have been considered a hunter by buying beaten-down
shares.
The most classic example is him buying American Express.
American Express was a textbook case study of being greedy when others are fearful and buying a good
business when the market unfairly punishes the share price.
American Express went through the Salad Oil scandal in 1963, where the company was liable
to pay tens of millions of dollars in the scandal, which sent the share price plummeting.
But Amex's cash cow was totally unrelated to the scandal, so just to make sure that the cash cow
wasn't really impacted in the minds of consumers, Buffett went around and did this scuttlebutt
by visiting businesses to see what their view was on Amex in light of that scandal, and all of
his research suggested that not only was their core business in a really good position,
who was actually accelerating.
Despite the core business firing on all cylinders, the stock traded at less than half the market
multiple and at a double-digit growth in revenues and earnings over the previous decade.
Buffett made this stock a 14% position in his partnership, and the shares compounded at over
30% per year over the next five years before he exited that position. So there could be a number
of things at play as to why a manager wouldn't add to something if it's at a better value than when they
initially entered the position. The first could be that they simply don't have the cash to do so,
and they aren't interested in selling their existing positions. Another reason that's more
fascinating is that they don't want to introduce career risk. If a manager were to bet big on a name
and double down and be wrong, then that could really hurt their reputation as an investor,
and it could potentially lead to investor outflows, forcing them to sell at potentially inopportune
moments. Michael Lewis's book, Moneyball also highlighted the prevalence of career risk on Wall Street.
With all of the peer pressure that can be present, loss aversion can be amplified for investment
professionals. The pain of being the one investor who went bust and is publicly humiliated
is much greater than the joy of having the best investment returns.
This incentive can lead managers to pick a strategy that is least likely to fail rather than
doing what they actually believe is best for their investor base.
Viewing things through this lens, it can make sense why many managers aren't excited to add
to their big positions that are down substantially.
This brings us to part two of the book, which covers how these great investors handled the winners
in their portfolios whose share prices had in their own.
So in this part, Freeman Shore gets into what he refers to as the Raiders and the connoisseurs.
Raiders are those that bought a winning stock but sold out too early, and connoisseurs are
those that bought a winning stock and rode their winners.
Starting with the Raiders, the Raiders are the stock market equivalent of Golden Age adventurers.
Having penetrated through the dense jungle, found the lost temple or buried treasure,
they filled their pockets with all their ancient coins and gems they can find, then turn their tail
and ran. Unlike Golden Age adventurers, they are rarely chased by angry locals or rivals. The only
boulders rolling after them are in their imaginations, and they are terrified of getting caught and losing
everything. Since our winners can offer hugely asymmetric payoffs, Freeman Shore does not suggest
behaving in the way that the Raiders did. One of the investors he invested money with had an
incredible hit rate on his investments, making money on 70% of his bets. However, he hadn't made
any money for his investors because he would constantly let go of his winners on a small gain of
10 or 20%. I recently had lunch with the fund manager who had bought Copart back in the 2000s,
and he ended up selling it in 2011 because he thought it was getting a bit expensive. Since then,
Copart's shares are up by more than 20x. And then another example I'll share here is this year
I interviewed Francois Vers Sean. In his letters, he writes for his partners each year. He shares
what he refers to as Podium of Errors, where he highlights the mistakes that he's made over
his career. His gold medal for 2024 was Cintas. While he never purchased shares in Cintas,
it was a company that he understood the business, he understood its competitive advantages
perfectly, and it was a pitch right in the middle of his sweet spot. But when he analyzed
the company in 2016 after a major acquisition, he determined that the stock was a little bit
too expensive for his taste at 26 times earnings. Since then, the shares of the company,
company have compounded at 25% per year, netting a gain of over 700% for investors over the past
nine or so years.
Although it can be tough to watch a company on your radar continue to run while you don't
own it, it's even more tough when it's a company that you knew well, but decided not
to capitalize on the opportunity.
Similarly, Freeman Shore found time and time again that selling a great business early
was a mistake.
Furthermore, because of this failure to hold winners, the Raiders would inevitably run
some large losses in due course that would wipe out the small gains that they had proudly locked
in. He writes here, I quote,
The most successful investors I worked with all had one thing in common. They had a couple
big winners in their portfolio. Any approach that does not embrace the possibility of winning
big is doomed, end quote. It's easy to see why some investors can be quick to lock in gains
on winners like the Raiders did. Freeman's Shor lists a number of reasons for this.
First, selling for a profit just feels good.
When we win, testosterone and dopamine are produced, and these hormones produce a feel-good response.
So once you do it once, we'll want to do it again and again.
We need to be in touch with our emotions as investors and recognize that just because we have
an emotional pull towards taking a specific action doesn't mean we should follow our instincts
in that direction.
Since it feels good to take a profit, holding on to a winning stock is like practicing delay
gratification. We're delaying that feeling of taking a profit one day after another each time we
decide to hold onto a stock. So in a way, holding our winners is similar to choosing a healthier
meal over pizza and ice cream and taking a walk instead of lounging on the couch all day.
Second, buying and holding is frankly a boring endeavor. It's more fun to make moves in your
portfolio and think you're being smart by taking a small profit in one name to allocate to
another opportunity. Chris Mayer outlines the importance of having a long holding period in his book,
100 baggers, as the typical 100 bagger took 20 to 25 years to pan out. As I outlined in my episode
last week, I believe one major edge that an individual investor can have is simply patience. We live in a
world where people are obsessed with the short term. What's the market going to do this year?
What do you think of the tariff announcements? Where's interest rates going to go? The list goes on.
People are bored and they want something to happen, which leads them to tinker with their portfolios.
Philosopher Blaise Pascal stated, all men's miseries derive from not being able to sit quiet in a room alone, end quote.
Many people would admit that stock, XYZ, will produce much more earnings five years from now.
Yet they're still selling or even avoid the stock now because they expect a poor quarter coming up or some other short-term problem.
or worse yet, they're worried about general market concerns or these macroeconomic headwinds.
Since so many people are bored and are looking for excitement, it's no wonder that many
investors are interested in the current hot industry, new IPO, or the latest technology trend.
They aren't necessarily looking for the best risk-adjusted returns, but for something that
will help temporarily cure their boredom.
As an antidote to boredom, it's probably better to pick up a hobby like golf or traveling
rather than filling the time with forecasting macro or constantly making portfolio changes.
Freeman Shore recommends generally hanging on to your big winners because they're just so rare.
The successful investors he studied all had a couple of big winners while ensuring that the bad
ideas did not materially hurt them. Having a process that prevents you from winning big
because you take profits once the stock is up 20% means that you could potentially be the person
who gives away a winning lottery ticket. Our gut instinct might tell you.
us to do the exact opposite of what these successful investors do, which is to sell our winners
too early and hang on to our losers with the hope of them bouncing back.
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As Peter Lynch once put it, some people automatically sell the winners and hold on to the losers,
which is about as sensible as pulling the flowers and watering the weeds. If we follow the notion
that winners tend to keep on winning, then selling a stock that is up to buy a new stock is like
rolling the dice once more, as we know that only 49% of top investors' good ideas would go
want to make money. The odds of these investors picking a big winner is much, much lower than that
49% metric. Freeman Shore also touched on the perverse incentives that can be present in the
active management industry. The main theme is them making an investment decision for a non-investment
reason. For example, if a manager is awarded a bonus based on one year or a three-year performance,
then they may be keen to sell a stock that is run up to ensure that they get that bonus at the end of the
year. Or if the fund has recently outperformed the index, then they may be keen to sell the stocks
that have run up with the expectation that those loftier valuations will have difficulty
maintaining that same performance. And, you know, that's a reasonable assumption, but it's such
a short-term decision in nature. Managers can especially get trapped in the comparison game,
of focusing on their fund's performance relative to their peers or to the index, since this is
the primary selling point in attracting fresh capital. So the manager that sells a stock that's up
30% on the year might get a pat on the back because they're outperforming the index that year.
They receive a nice bonus at the end of the year, but they might actually be doing their
investors a massive disservice in the long run. With all of this discussion on short term
versus long term thinking, many of our listeners are probably familiar with the famous marshmallow
test. In the test, a marshmallow is placed in front of a young child and is told that if
If they don't eat the marshmallow in the next 30 minutes, they'll be rewarded with an additional
marshmallow.
The researchers then left the child alone in a room with the marshmallow sitting in front of them
with no distractions such as TV or music.
In just a few minutes, most children tended to get fidgety, and in most cases, the child
would succumb to the temptation, and shortly thereafter, downs the marshmallow.
But let's face it, half an hour in a room with no toys must feel like 30 years to someone
that age.
Freeman Shore writes, the point of this test is
that it demonstrates a phenomenon known as intertemporal choice. If something is offering us immediate
pleasure, such as taking profits, we struggle to see the pain it will cause in the future. We become
near-sighted and sacrificed potentially large long-term gains for small, short-term ones.
Raiders cannot help but eat the whole marshmallow, end quote. And this brings us to the final
type of investor outlined in the book. This is the connoisseurs. The connoisseurs are the last and most
successful investment tribe discussed in the book. They treated every investment like a vintage of
wine. If it was off, they got rid of it immediately, but if it was good, they knew that it would
only get better with age. When it came to the marshmallow test, the connoisseurs would have been
the ones who resisted the urge to eat the marshmallow. One of the funny points that Freeman Shore
makes in the book is that connoisseurs aren't any smarter than any other investors. In fact,
they had a worse hit rate on average. Their secret sauce was that when they did find the occasional
winner, they won big. As Freeman's Shore puts it, they rode their winners far beyond most
people's comfort zone. He shared a few more points here that he picked up from the connoisseurs.
They tended to look for businesses that they viewed as low negative surprise companies. This is an
excellent point that Joseph Shroposhenik actually brought up on the show a few weeks ago.
you want to be able to have a clear view of where a business is likely to be a few years down the
road. So it needs to be somewhat predictable and it needs to keep you out of what Joseph
referred to as bad situations. When you buy an unprofitable business or an over-indebted business
or a company that's clearly very cyclical or unpredictable, you increase the odds of eventually
finding yourself in very, very bad situations. When you find a company with a good management team,
a mode to protect their existing business, at least for the intermediate term, and you have a strong
balance sheet, then you can be reasonably confident that earnings will be higher five years from now.
You tend to prevent yourself from getting into those bad situations.
Perhaps there are times where the entry evaluation is a bit high or earnings don't grow quite as fast as you'd like,
but it's better to see a minus 20% return in this situation than getting minus 80% after chasing
the next hot, unprofitable tech company that's nearly impossible to predict.
The second point he makes here is to look for big potential upside.
So I equate this to finding companies with a long runway to grow.
So if we look at a company like Coca-Cola, for example, their international revenue really
hasn't grown much in recent years as global soda consumption is in a decline.
So their core business and their growth is largely dependent on price increases.
So we can't really expect a lot of growth going forward from a company.
like Coca-Cola. Additionally, they also pay a pretty sizable dividend, and this indicates that management
really isn't looking to have invested a lot into future growth. And then I look at other big companies
like Amazon and Tesla, for example. I see enormous potential for growth in these companies,
so they don't pay a dividend. They're reinvesting significantly in the business, hoping to be much
bigger 10 or 20 years down the road. And I don't own shares in these companies. I'm just sharing
some high-level examples in here. As a result, the potential upside, I think, for Amazon and
Tesla is significantly higher than, say, a Coca-Cola. All right, third point here, connoisseurs
were also very concentrated in building their portfolio. So, you know, when they were confident
in an idea, they built up big positions. They could end up with 50% of their total assets
invested in just two stocks. And it was those stocks that would make them so successful.
And then the last point here, of course, they would let their winners run. In the
book, Freeman Shore shares a few case studies of stocks that were held for a period of around
three years, which I wouldn't really characterize as a super long-term investment. The big money
really comes years down the line. So if we look at a stock like Costco, for example, it's up
just over 100% in the last three years, and it's up over 2,000% in the last 20 years. So $10,000
invested three years ago would be worth just over $20,000. But that same $10,000 invested 20 years ago,
it would be worth over 200,000. So depending on your rate of compounding, oftentimes the real magic
starts to happen after year 10 or so. And the sum that you end up with will be substantially
larger than your initial investment. And that doesn't even consider the opportunities to add to
your investments along the way. However, as Hendrick Bessimbinder highlighted here on the show,
just a small portion of stocks are able to compound at above average rates for 20 plus years.
The Pareto principle shares that 80% of the results are derived from 20% of the inputs,
but in the stock market, it's more like 100% of the results are derived from just 4% of the inputs.
So from my perspective, if I know I'm not holding a really great company,
then I just want to get rid of it as soon as possible.
Now, there's this widespread belief in the investment industry that more stocks in your portfolio
will lead to less risk.
So first off, they tend to not bet big when they find a great idea.
And when the stock runs up, they either trim it, they think it's the prudent thing to do from a risk management perspective, or they might even have regulatory limits that prohibit a position from getting too large in the portfolio.
This regulatory limit puts a very narrow view on the world.
You could own 100 stocks that are all very risky, and some might perceive that as safe because you own 100 stocks.
On the other hand, one could argue that a one stock portfolio that just includes Berkshire Hathaway
is, you know, very low risk, assuming you have a 10-plus-year time horizon, and you still
be pretty diversified because you have all these different types of companies that Berkshire has exposure
to.
So more stocks does not always mean less risk.
Freeman Shore also points to another study that outlined the benefits of concentration
for active managers.
Professors from Harvard in the London School of Economics, they analyzed the stock picks
of active managers from 1991 through 2005.
And instead of looking at the overall returns to the managers,
they looked at how the manager's top positions performed.
And they actually found that when you grouped together the top positions of every manager
in the study, the aggregate portfolio ended up doing pretty well, and the lowest weighted
positions significantly underperforms.
So that actually goes contrary to what Freeman Shore talked about at the beginning of the book
where a lot of these managers didn't know where their best ideas come from.
And intuitively, I think that it makes sense that these great investors' best ideas did do well.
So I was once chatting with an active manager about the positions he held.
He held two software names that were very similar businesses.
So the first name was his top position, really great company.
It was growing really fast.
It's just a core holding of his he's had for a long time.
And then the second name was just a regular holding.
It was a regular weight assigned in the portfolio.
and I had asked him about his thoughts on the smaller weighting because I was a bit confused
why he owned it, given that it's a similar business, but it's compounding at a lower rate.
So presumably the return is going to be lower, given that the valuations were fairly
similar.
So he simply said that he has regulatory limits on that top position, and he just couldn't
find anything better than that.
If that investor were managing his own capital with no restrictions, then he likely would
have made that top position significantly larger because he saw it as low risk, high returns,
but the dynamic is different when you manage money for outside shareholders and you have
these regulators watching you. So it goes to show that there are totally rational reasons as to why
a manager would invest differently for outside investors than they would go about investing their
own money. And in no surprise, his top position is also a key driver of his great performance and
his fund. So being more concentrated would have really played to his benefit and potentially even
not brought about any more risk at all in the portfolio. The study you've referenced also suggested
that professional investors can have a reputable skill set in picking stocks, but one of the
problems they've run into is having the ability to pick a portfolio of good stocks, you know,
say 20 of them that have a high probability of delivering market beating returns. So perhaps the
best managers can find one, two, or three ideas per year, and maybe have a handful of good ideas
at any one time. Then owning a portfolio of 20 to 25 stocks can prove pretty troublesome.
Freeman Shore does share some cautionary tales to trying to be a connoisseur, though. Being a connoisseur
can be the most popular thing to do in bull markets when everyone's making money. This is
when concentration can hurt you. Imagine buying Microsoft in the late 99, or, you, or
or many tech stocks in 2021.
A bulk of a bull market's returns come in the final third of the cycle, which is when
the most number of investors are going to get lurid in and become the most greedy.
It's also very easy to fall for groupthink.
When a handful of reputable investors own a stock, and it seems to just keep going up,
then we might trick ourselves into being in a safe situation when it's actually most dangerous.
High momentum to the upside can give us the illusion that we're doing the right thing when entering
a trade.
If you're worried about a trade or investment going too far and want to hedge your bets, you
could potentially trim your position over time, especially when you feel that the stock
is getting a bit of ahead of itself relative to the fundamentals.
Bubbles today are still a widespread phenomenon, and we really won't be able to tell if we're
participating in one or not until after it's already burst and the speculators have been washed
out. Getting to the conclusion of the book here, in working with many of the best investors in the world,
Freeman Shore discovered that their success ultimately came down to execution. He has a brief
five-point winner's checklist at the end of the book that I can share here. First, focus on your
best ideas only. Odds are that you're better off investing more into your best or second-best
idea rather than your 50th best idea. Second, position size matters. This ties right into the first point.
He encourages those who want to outperform not to over-diversify.
Third, be greedy when you're winning.
Run your winners.
You need to embrace the possibility of winning big, embrace the right tail, the statistical
long shots of the distribution curve.
Stop trying to make a quick 10 to 20% and give your investments the possibility of growing
into 10-baggers.
Fourth, materially adapt when you're losing.
Either add meaningfully to an existing investment or sell out.
Both give you the possibility of changing the ultimate outcome.
You can turn a loser into a winner.
Expect to find yourself in a losing situation.
Have a plan to materially adapt and stick to it.
And finally, fifth, only invest in liquid stocks.
Make sure any publicly listed investment is liquid enough to enable you to execute your
idea.
And there's really nothing worse than knowing what to do, wanting to do it, but being
unable to do it.
So what he's really getting at here is that if a stock's illiquid,
You might not be able to buy it or sell it as you please.
So you might as well avoid such stocks that have a chance of giving you that issue.
One of my other big takeaways from the book was that although we can know that a select few
stocks are going to drive the majority of our returns, we really have no way of knowing which
stocks those are going to be in advance.
I had a discussion with my co-host, Dick Broderson, the other day, about his biggest winners.
Some stocks he's bet big on and they've been flops.
others have been huge multi-baggers. A couple of his positions are up 7x or 9x from their cost
basis, but the thing is, he had high conviction going into both his winners and his losers.
So he, just like everyone else, didn't know which investments were going to be the big winners,
but once the market validated his initial thesis, he held onto his positions so they could
become multi-baggers, 7x or 9x. And he was also open to changing his mind if the market was
telling him that he was just dead wrong. Before we close out the episode, I wanted to briefly discuss
the great work that my colleagues, Sean O'Malley and Daniel Malka, are doing over at the
Intrinsic Value Podcast. Each week, Sean and Daniel, they break down a company's business model,
competitive advantages, and valuation. And it's by far one of the best resources I found for
company breakdowns. So I'll actually be having Sean on the podcast here in a couple weeks to discuss
a few of the names they've added to the intrinsic value portfolio. And just this morning, I was going
for a walk to start the day and I was listening to their episode on Reddit. When Reddit initially
IPOed in 2024, my mind immediately thought, well, here comes yet another unprofitable tech company
that will continuously dilute shareholders. However, Sean and Daniel are really as sharp as they
come from an investment perspective. So I wanted to hear them out on the idea and hear their thoughts.
And additionally, I'm actually a user of meta's advertising platform, and I've been pretty pleasantly
surprised by just how good meta is at sending my small business customers for my brother and I for
our e-commerce store. And I figured that if Reddit could somehow also crack the code on advertising,
then there's likely some solid potential upside for investors. After listening to Sean and Daniels
episode and taking a look at the company's most recent earnings reports, my opinion on them
from an investment perspective has changed, you know, a good amount. Just to throw some numbers
at you here. So in the most recent quarter, Q1 of 25, revenues increased by 61% year over
year. Revenues came in at 392 million on the quarter. Daily active users were up 31% year
over a year to 108 million. Gross margins came in at over 90%. Free cash flow came in at a positive
126 million, giving them a 32% free cash flow margin. So after 20 years of unprofitability, they
seem to be well on their way to becoming a dominant social media company that's very
profitable. When you look at a company like Snapchat, another social media company, they IPOed in
2017, and they're still deeply unprofitable today over eight years later. In Reddit, they only
have a fourth of the revenue that Snapchat has. So I was just really impressed by how well Reddit
has executed recently, and they're generating a lot of free cash flow alongside 60% growth in their
top line revenue. And interestingly, Sam Altman, the co-founder and CEO of OpenAI,
he's invested in Reddit for over 10 years he's been invested in. And this might make Reddit more of a
beneficiary to the improvements we're seeing in AI. Another interesting stat I found was that Reddit is
the sixth most searched term on Google. And to Sean and Daniels credit, they initially passed on the
stock because the valuation was a bit high a few months back. It was over $100 a share. As the valuation
came down and declined, they ended up adding it to their portfolio at $87 per share. And then the stock
swiftly rebounded to over $140 per share. So they have a nice gain on that position.
And there are a few things that are pretty interesting to me about Reddit that I'll briefly
highlight here.
The first is really the potential with their advertising business.
So this is really the core of how they generate revenue.
When we look at the United States, their average revenue per user is around $6 in the most
recent quarter, and that metric is up 30% in the past year alone.
Meta, on the other hand, they generate an average revenue per user of $17 per user here
in the U.S.
And that really showcases that Reddit still potentially has some room to monetize their user base,
although I wouldn't really expect them quite to get to the level that meta's at,
because presumably they just don't have the data that meta has on their users.
Additionally, the AI models are really key in delivering these results for advertisers,
and these models are just getting better and better.
So businesses are incentivized to spend more on advertising as these models get better,
and they're getting more bang for their buck with their advertising spend.
I'm also somewhat of an active user of Reddit.
Sean, he explains that there are really two types of Reddit users.
You have those that go to Google, they search a question and just add Reddit at the end of the query.
And then you have users who just scroll what Reddit's feed or they're on the app just scrolling
through the app.
And I fall into the first category, the former.
For example, I was looking up someone to get golf lessons from here in Lincoln and I got
an excellent recommendation from Reddit.
So Reddit's great for answering all sorts of very same.
specific questions, whether it be something local or something within a very specific niche or
industry or whatnot. In scrolling through Reddit from time to time, I've just been really
unimpressed by their advertisements. For one, I found the ads to be largely irrelevant. I just don't
think the ads are that good. I just don't think they're very compelling. And, you know,
this could be seen as both a positive and a negative. So if the ads don't look all that great
today relative to Facebook's, for example, then perhaps that in itself hurts the investment case.
But on the other hand, it might mean that there's substantial room for improvement with
the delivery, the targeting of the ads, and thus drastically increasing the average revenue
per user.
And just to put things into perspective here, in the trailing 12 months, Reddit produced over
$1.4 billion in revenue, most of which came from advertising.
And today, the digital advertising market is estimated to be $700 billion.
So Reddit is just minuscule in this massive and growing market.
Anyways, I just wanted to share some of my high-level thoughts on Reddit.
If you haven't checked out the Intrinsic Value Podcast, I would highly recommend it.
It's a great way to just learn more about many companies you already know and love,
Amazon, Visa, Nintendo, a lot of great names that they've covered.
Given that analyzing stocks can just be so time intensive, it's nice to have this
resource that's 16 to 90 minutes that gives just an excellent overview.
of whether it'd be interesting to dive in deeper or not.
All right, so that wraps up today's episode
on The Art of Execution by Lee Freeman Shore.
I enjoyed giving this book a read
since it touched on a few different concepts
that I haven't seen in other books.
So with that, we'll close out the episode there.
Thank you for your time and attention today,
and I hope to see you again next week.
Thank you for listening to TIP.
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