The Intellectual Investor

Vitaliy was recently going through a new client’s portfolio and found it full of the likes of Coca-Cola and Campbell Soup - pseudo-bond substitutes. Each one is a stable and mature company. Your mother-in-law would be proud if you worked for any one of them. But their days of growth are in the rearview mirror. In this podcast, Vitaliy explains a key distinction in investing: the difference between a good company and a good investment.

Santa Fe and Vitaliy's family go way back to the early 90s. It all started with his father, Naum, and his stepmother. Naum had his paintings exhibited in a gallery on Santa Fe’s famous Canyon Road. A few times a year, the Katsenelsons would load up paintings in a minivan and drive them to Santa Fe. Now, Vitaliy takes his kids there every year, in what has become a sacred tradition.

Tesla’s market cap just crossed $300 billion. It’s the largest car maker in the world, even larger than Toyota, which produced almost nine million cars in 2019 and had a market cap of $200 billion. In this podcast, Vitaliy hypothesizes that Tesla's market cap has traveled through a wormhole from the future to the present, and why $300 billion is a tenuous valuation, even for the world leader in electric vehicle manufacturing.

Vitaliy had the pleasure to sit down with the Reformed Broker himself, Josh Brown on his podcast The Compound. What follows is their conversation, in which they discuss why the price you pay for a stock always matters, no matter how good the quality, and then they go through some historical examples. Vitaliy hopes you enjoy it!

In investing, one of the most important traits an investor can have is intellectual flexibility. Buffett, for example, is very dispassionate about what he owns; he has the ability to change his mind. In the early part of 2020, he was the largest shareholder of US airline stocks, and was actively buying more, only to sell them a few weeks later. This quarter, Vitaliy did something similar with a company his firm, IMA, admires. In this podcast, Vitaliy explains what that company was, and why it matters.

In this mini-podcast, Vitaliy shares a personal story that illustrates how profound even a tiny shift in perspective can be.

Vitaliy was on PBS NewsHour talking about Uber Eats and the food delivery business. When he told his six-year-old daughter Mia Sarah about it, she shrugged and said she’d be more impressed if he was on PBS Kids. The five-minute recorded interview was cut down to literally four seconds, so here are Vitaliy's further thoughts on both the Uber Eats and Ridesharing businesses.

In the 1960s and 1970s Nifty 50 stocks were one-rule stocks – and the rule was, buy! They were bought, and bought, and bought. They were great companies and paying attention to how much you paid for them was irrelevant. Until. In this podcast, Vitaliy draws on history to show what happens when investors only pay attention to a company's quality at the expense of price.

Vitaliy can definitely see how we are always trying to numb our minds. We constantly need the mental organ entertained and well-numbed with external stimuli. It seems that whenever we are left with ourselves, that is, with our minds, we reach out for our favorite portable numbing device and happily lose ourselves in Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, or YouTube. We spend little or no time with ourselves.

In the game of chess, serious players carefully study opening systems – the moves early in the game that help determine who wins. Because chess always starts with pieces in the same arrangement, opening moves can become somewhat routine. In this podcast, Vitaliy compares the stock market to a game of chess in which the opening pieces are totally jumbled across the board. Investing today is similar to a chess game in which the objective is the same, but the setup is totally unfamiliar.

In April 2018, Vitaliy met with one of his best investment friends, John Mauldin. John has been an inspiration to Vitaliy both personally and professionally, but no more so in the context of writing. John writes at Mauldin Economics, one of the web's the most widely read and successful investment letters. In this podcast, Vitaliy shares how John was able to inspire him to both write better, and be a better human being.

The average stock out there (that is, the market overall) is very, very expensive. At this point it almost doesn’t matter which valuation metric you use; they all point to the fact that stocks were only more expensive during the dot-com bubble. In many ways, knowing what to avoid is just as important as knowing what to buy. In this podcast, Vitaliy takes you through the risks in today's market, and shares his view on what NOT to buy.

Retail stocks have been annihilated recently, despite the economy eking out growth. The fundamentals of the retail business look horrible: Sales are stagnating and profitability is getting worse with every passing quarter. Jeff Bezos and Amazon get most of the credit, but this credit is misplaced. In this podcast, Vitaliy shares the truth behind the demise of retail.

People often ask Vitaliy about his writing process, when he finds time to write, and how he manages to do investment research. In this podcast, Vitaliy walks the listener through his process -- from getting up at 4:30 in the morning, to researching and valuing companies, to talking to clients. For a day in the life of Vitaliy Katsenelson, give this podcast a listen.

Vitaliy was slated to give a speech at a conference in Omaha, a day before the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. He was more nervous than usual. Usually, Vitaliy needs a looming deadline to build the pressure to unleash creativity. Two days before, he wrote a nine page speech titled “How to Stay Rational in Irrational World.” On the day of the speech, there were maybe 200 people in attendance. Vitaliy stepped up to the mic to begin. Then the lights went out.