New Book Alert: The Long Game is Available
My new book, The Long Game, is available now. The book contains reflections from 30 investors who’ve survived decades of market cycles. You’ll learn how to tune out the noise that makes you second-guess yourself, handle the fear and greed that hurt your decisions, and stick to principles that actually compound wealth over time. Click here to get your copy.
Click Here to Order Now
I first interviewed Ian Cassel in 2015, and then again in 2021. This is our third conversation, and it may be the one I have thought about most since we stopped recording.
Ian runs MicroCapClub and manages money through Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management. And for more than 20 years of microcap investing, he has done it from a quiet corner of rural Pennsylvania, living off his own capital since the age of 28.
If you have read my book The Long Game, you already know a little of how his mind works, because he wrote a chapter in it called Maturation of an Investor.
His new book is out now in India. It is called Stock Picker. I was lucky to get a copy before it released, and I sat down expecting a book about picking stocks. But what I found was closer to a book about the person doing the picking.
That idea runs through our whole conversation, which is that before you study another company, study yourself.
Robert Pirsig wrote in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:
You want to know how to paint a perfect painting? It’s easy. Make yourself perfect and then just paint naturally.
That is my whole conversation with Ian. It is also what I have been trying to do here at Safal Niveshak for over 15 years. Get the investor right, and the investing tends to follow.
Anyways, here are some other ideas we get into:
- Why nobody starts investing with a blank slate, and the childhood scripts we carry into every money decision
- How to tell discipline apart from delusion when you dealing through a brutal market fall
- Why Ian builds rules around his flaws instead of trying to cure them
- Lessons microcaps teach that no other corner of the market can
- How to spot an intelligent fanatic long before the numbers prove you right
- Why even your winners have to be sold, and the trap of holding on forever
- Why he only takes advice from happy people
- What investing is really for, and how he thinks about buying his own freedom
Watch the episode here.
For audio, listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or Amazon Music.
A note, while I’m here. The Long Game—the book this show shares a name with—is out now. It’s a hardcover collection of thirty investing practitioners writing about what the long game has taught them. You can find it here.
Click Here to Order Now
Thank you for being here. These conversations, this writing, this work…none of it makes sense without you on the other side of it.
See you in the next one.
Vishal
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