MI316: THE MAKING OF A VALUE INVESTOR

W/ KYLE GRIEVE

08 January 2024

In this week’s episode, Patrick Donley (@JPatrickDonley) sits down with Kyle Grieve to talk about his transformation into a value investor. They dive into his early investing mistakes, the biggest lessons from his guests on Millennial Investing, how he mitigates risk and what his research process is like, what both fatherhood and jiu jitsui have taught him about investing, and much, much more!

Kyle is a value investor, author, and manager of his family portfolio. While Kyle took up stock investing his main job was working as a smart home integrator and network specialist. Now, Kyle is living his dream of learning how to invest and helping to educate other investors who are a few years behind him experience-wise as co-host of both Millennial Investing and We Study Billionaries. He is also an integral part of the TIP Mastermind Community.

Kyle is passionate about helping others improve their financial sophistication and helping people take their wealth into their own hands.

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IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL LEARN:

  • What Kyle’s journey to value investing looked like.
  • What his early investing mistakes were.
  • The 3 books that made the biggest impact on his investment philosophy.
  • Who Kyle would love to sit down next to on a long flight.
  • What it has been like for him joining The Investor’s Podcast Network team as a host.
  • What Kyle’s writing process is like.
  • Understanding what a “spawner” is.
  • What his biggest lessons from his favorite guests have been.
  • How his investment philosophy has changed from being a podcast host.
  • What the benefits are of being part of the TIP Mastermind community.
  • What Kyle’s favorite investment is right now.
  • What the advantages of investing internationally are.
  • What metrics Chris Mayer looks at to determine future 100-baggers.
  • How Kyle mitigates risk.
  • and much more!

TRANSCRIPT

Disclaimer: The transcript that follows has been generated using artificial intelligence. We strive to be as accurate as possible, but minor errors and slightly off timestamps may be present due to platform differences.

[00:00:00] Kyle Grieve: and then the last thing is that just learning never stops. I’ve been trained jujitsu for 10 years, which isn’t even that long, but I still learn new things like literally every single time I step on the mats. And I think in investing, it’s the same thing. Look at Charlie Munger he was still learning when he was 99 years old and one of the most brilliant people I think on earth.

[00:00:17] Kyle Grieve: It just goes to show you that you can never know everything and you should always be trying to improve because there’s always something out there to help you become a little bit better each and every day.

[00:00:30] Patrick Donley: Hey guys, in this week’s episode, I got to sit down with my cohost, Kyle Grieve, to talk about his transformation into a bonafide, fully convicted value investor. We dive into his early investing mistakes, the biggest lessons from his guests on millennial investing. How he mitigates risk and what his research process is like, what both fatherhood and Brazilian jiu jitsu have taught him about investing, and so much more.

[00:00:52] Patrick Donley: Kyle is a value investor, author, and manager of his family portfolio. He took up stock investing while his main job was working as a smart home integrator and network specialist. Now, Kyle is living his dream of learning how to invest and helping to educate other investors. who are a few years behind him experience wise as co host of both Millennial Investing and We Study Billionaires.

[00:01:12] Patrick Donley: He is also an integral part of the TIP mastermind community. Kyle’s love of learning and investing is evident in this episode. This was a blast for me as he dropped a wealth of knowledge and resources for us to explore for anyone looking to take their investing to the next level. And so without further delay, let’s dive into this week’s episode with Kyle Grieve.

[00:01:37] Intro: You’re listening to Millennial Investing by the Investors Podcast Network. Since 2014, we interviewed successful entrepreneurs, business leaders, and investors to help educate and inspire the millennial generation. Now for your hosts, Patrick Donley.

[00:02:01] Patrick Donley: Hey everybody. Welcome to the Millennial Investing Podcast. I’m your host today, Patrick Donley. And joining me today is my cohost, Kyle Grieve. Kyle, welcome to the show.

[00:02:05] Kyle Grieve: Glad to be here. 

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[00:02:13] Patrick Donley: I’m really happy to talk. 

 We’ve been talking a little bit beforehand, the interview, I’ve been having a great time with you.

[00:02:16] Patrick Donley: So I’m really looking forward to our interview. You are moving on to doing some episodes on We Study Billionaires. So I wanted to give our listeners a chance to get to know you better, learn how you develop your investing philosophy, just get to know you better as a person. So I just want to just dive right in.

[00:02:33] Patrick Donley: And I wanted to talk about like your early years and I wanted to hear your journey into value investing. And just how you got turned on, how the light bulb for value investing clicked for you. 

[00:02:45] Kyle Grieve: I think basically it started with crypto in 2017. Even though I had nothing to do with value investing, it was pure speculating, but I made every mistake that you could possibly make.

[00:02:54] Kyle Grieve: I I shorted, I looked at charts all day. I didn’t spend as much time as I needed learning what I was buying and I made so many mistakes and that was an expensive lesson and so that was back in 2017, 2018 and my experience was so bad back then that essentially I just swore off investing. And then 2020 rolled around and COVID happened.

[00:03:14] Kyle Grieve: And I figured you know what prices are crashing. This might be a good opportunity to buy some price, well priced assets. And I was brand new to investing still though back then. And I didn’t really know what I was doing. And luckily I did find some resources on YouTube and Twitter X that kind of led me down the value investing hole.

[00:03:32] Kyle Grieve: So I was really lucky that I got led back down that way. Cause I could have easily just kind jumped back into what I was doing before. And Just trading and using leverage and doing silly things like that. So when 2020 happened, just like you did, we had Lots of time on our hands. And I spent a lot of that time studying, investing, studying all the usual suspects, Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and reading and reading and really going down the rabbit hole of value investing.

[00:03:58] Kyle Grieve: And I found out I loved it. So that’s how I got into it. It was just a luck that I figured it out that During COVID, there was really well priced assets and a few of my first investments were still not very good ones, but luckily I got rid of them and I moved on from there and I think I’m a lot much better investors today because of it.

[00:04:18] Patrick Donley: Yeah, I think our trading mistakes or investing mistakes are the biggest lessons to learn from. And I had the same experience in 2017, trading alt coins, whatever, and just getting totally burnt. But good lessons to be learned. You mentioned some of the books, you mentioned Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, obviously.

[00:04:35] Patrick Donley: What were some of the investing books that made the biggest impact on you? Like I see the Poor Charlie’s Almanac behind you, and I see a ton of investing books actually behind you that come to mind. What were some of the biggest ones though that made a huge impact on you that really has have influenced how you think about Investing.

[00:04:53] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So there’s tons and tons of books, but I think for what have really impacted me from the start to where I am now, there’s three big ones. One, probably not many people talk about, and that’s invested by Phil and Danielle town. So that was my first book that really did a really good job of showing what value investing is buying underpriced assets, understanding moats.

[00:05:16] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. And the way it’s written is just, it’s really simple. And I really enjoyed reading that. And I’ve read it multiple times and gone through it. And I still use many of the principles from that book and the way I invest today. That probably my number one is the most important thing by Howard Marks, which to me is, it doesn’t really get any better if you want to understand risk.

[00:05:34] Kyle Grieve: And the whole book is really good. But if you just read it, the few chapters he has on risk it’s something that I think should be done every year. And I do read the book every year and it does a really good job of keeping you grounded and making sure that just because you’re doing really well in the market and everything’s going up, that’s great, but you need to be careful.

[00:05:52] Kyle Grieve: And so I think reading that book does a really good job of telling you why you need to be careful, how you need to be careful. And it’s just a really good reminder. And then The third one is one that everyone knows, which is the intelligent investor. And that one is based purely off chapters eight and 20, which I reread on a very regular basis.

[00:06:10] Kyle Grieve: And some of the key concepts from just those two chapters are margin of safety, the importance of quality, the Mr. Market analogy, The business owner’s mindset and investing for speculation. So I think that book does an incredible job of explaining why all those things are so important. And all of those points are how I still invest today.

[00:06:29] Patrick Donley: Yeah, those are three good ones. Howard Marks one for sure is one of my favorites as well. You’re in Vancouver, and I wanted to ask you if you were sitting on a flight from Vancouver flying to New York, aside from Buffett and some of these other guys, and you had to sit next to a specific value investor, I don’t know what the flight is, five hours or whatever, who would you love to sit next to?

[00:06:50] Kyle Grieve: I’ll skip out on the obvious ones, and there’s probably two people, number one would be Monish Pabrai, and number two would be Lee Liu, and they’re both friends, so it would be cool to be sandwiched in between the two of them, but I think Monish Pabrai is outside of Buffett, and Munger have probably taught me the most, I mean he has so much content out there on YouTube.

[00:07:09] Kyle Grieve: And you can just, you can spend days listening to all of his interviews that he’s done and get an incredible education. And the thing I really like about Monish is that he adapts he’s had periods where it’s all qualities, had periods where it’s all value and now he’s back to that quality mindset, but he does a really good job of adapting.

[00:07:28] Kyle Grieve: He does a really good job of learning. He does a good job of saying where, when he’s wrong. And these are all attributes that I think are really important and make you a better person and a better investor over a long period of time. So yeah, I guess I would probably say Monish Pabrai, hopefully I’ll get to interview him at some point.

[00:07:45] Patrick Donley: That would be amazing. He’s got, you mentioned the content that he has on YouTube. He’s got some lectures. that he does, I think, at least once a year with students at Boston College that are just outstanding. He’s a super entertaining speaker, very dynamic, charismatic guy for our listeners that aren’t familiar with him.

[00:08:05] Patrick Donley: Monish Prabhbhai is his name and he was running like a, he was like a computer consultant, basically, running his own company and was at an airport, I think, and picked up one up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch and whatever, the light bulb went off and he wrote a letter, I believe, you tell me, I may be wrong, but didn’t he write to Buffett and structured his own partnership?

[00:08:26] Patrick Donley: Exactly. Like he’s really into cloning. And so I think he’s, he just cloned Buffett and how he and Charlie Munger invest. and how they structured their own partnership. 

[00:08:37] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, as far as I know, he wrote Buffett first, I think, asking to work for him for free. And then, yes, I believe he structured his fund in the exact same way as the original Buffett partnerships.

[00:08:48] Kyle Grieve: And speaking of videos obviously there’s so many good ones, but there’s one that I think you have to listen to, which is the one on Coca Cola. His knowledge of Coca Cola is crazy. That’s Monish Pabrai. And if you just listen to that, you’ll get such a good understanding of the Coca Cola brand, the business and its competitive advantages.

[00:09:06] Kyle Grieve: And it’s incredibly well done. 

[00:09:09] Patrick Donley: Yeah. All of these guys are just like perpetual learners. They continually read like like you, you’ve got the bookshelves in the back. Monish has got like thousands of books that he’s read and he’s, these guys just are like. Massive learners, which I really admire about them.

[00:09:26] Patrick Donley: You mentioned Li Liu too. He was in the Tiananmen square. Like he was a student organizer or protester during, in China, during the Tiananmen square incidents or whatever you want to call it, came to the United States, I think he got three degrees at Columbia university, law degree and MBA. And I forget what else, but he did it like.

[00:09:45] Patrick Donley: He’s massively intelligent. Tell me why you like Lee Lou. Like a few little things about him that you like. 

[00:09:53] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So the things I like about Lee Lou is that, like you said his backstory is just unprecedented. I can’t, there’s no one in the investing world that I know of with that has the same backstory.

[00:10:04] Kyle Grieve: It’s just incredible. And not only did he get those three degrees, but I don’t even think he spoke English when he came here. So it’s just, it’s incredible. And so the reason I like him so much is just. Basically he’s stuck to being a really quality investor, but I really enjoyed learning his story, especially in university, how he essentially just utilized his student loan float to start off and how well he did.

[00:10:25] Kyle Grieve: And he only has a few lectures on, on YouTube, but man, they are really good. And. It’s the same kind of thing with reading Howard Marks book. You can probably listen to his lectures on a yearly basis and you’ll go get smarter and smarter every single time you listen to it. So yeah, I really like his breakdowns.

[00:10:43] Kyle Grieve: I like how he simplifies things. I like how he just thinks about investing. And I really enjoyed in his one. I think he had one with Bruce Greenwald, where he talked about Timberland shoes and all the due diligence he did with just learning about the company. And it’s just, Man, like that would be hard to do in real life unless you had the resources to do, but it just goes to show you how much work some of these investors do and how in depth you really need to understand a business in order to really take advantage of owning it.

[00:11:12] Patrick Donley: Yeah. That lecture that he did in Bruce Greenwald’s class at Columbia is a masterclass on investing. And he’s actually really funny. Like he almost rips the students for, he’ll ask him questions like as a professor almost. They don’t know the answers or they’re just and he just, but it is an incredible lecture that he gave.

[00:11:34] Patrick Donley: And like you said, there’s a couple of them on there that are definitely worth watching. Those are two of my favorites too, Monish and Lee Liu. I wanted to switch gears a little bit. You’ve joined TIP, you’ve become a podcast host. I wanna just hear what your experience has been like becoming a podcast host.

[00:11:51] Patrick Donley: Were you into podcasts, like prior to joining TIP, were you was like hosting something that you had wanted to do or you had imagined doing? Or just talk to me a little bit about joining and becoming a host. 

[00:12:04] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, it’s been a really cool journey. I listened to podcasts a lot ’cause there’s just such a good way of learning things and.

[00:12:11] Kyle Grieve: I think the first podcast let’s do again, we’re probably crypto related podcasts. And then once I started getting interested in investing, I listened to a lot of investing related podcasts, but I never really thought of myself getting into the podcast game. So I originally started writing about investing because I wanted to learn more about it.

[00:12:29] Kyle Grieve: And I think the best way to learn something is to try to teach it to others. And so that’s what my focus was on writing and improving my writing. And I never thought about. Taking the podcast route just, it just didn’t really enter my mind podcasting, it’s really just another vehicle to voice your thoughts to your audience.

[00:12:49] Kyle Grieve: It’s not that dissimilar from writing. It’s just obviously you’re talking to it in a camera rather than writing down. And so even before I joined TIP, I really loved We Study Billionaires and Rich or Wise or Happier. There are so many good learning lessons from all of those. And yeah, I just got lucky with getting picked up by TIP and it just worked out that I was the right fit for them and they’re the right fit for me.

[00:13:10] Kyle Grieve: And so far, it’s been an incredible experience and I’m really enjoying just improving at podcasting and understanding how to be good at it and getting better at interviewing people and The research process of podcasting is probably my favorite because I get to just look back on my bookshelf and be like, I love that book.

[00:13:27] Kyle Grieve: Let’s see if I can talk to that author. And a lot of times they say yes, and it’s incredible because I can read their books that have already taught me so much. And if there’s maybe something, a couple of questions I have, then I can pose them to the author and I often get incredible answers. So I feel very lucky to be part of TIP and to have this job.

[00:13:46] Patrick Donley: Yeah, I feel the same way. You’re obviously a learner and it’s like we get paid to learn every day and talk to super interesting people that if you had to pay for their time it would be pretty costly. But yeah, it’s a super fortunate position we’re in. You mentioned the writing did, where were you doing that?

[00:14:04] Patrick Donley: Was that on Twitter or talk to me a little bit about the writing process and are you continuing to do that? I know you’ve got a big Twitter following. 

[00:14:12] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. Yeah. I initially wanted to start a blog, so I started one on Wix, and it didn’t really go anywhere, but I remember one day I actually wrote this one article about Monish Pabrai, it was when he released his video about spawners, and so I wrote a really, a summary about it, I shared it on Twitter, and he shared it, and I got like a, I like, quadrupled my subscribers on Wix, so that was my first introduction to seeing how a social network can really You know, drive growth of your audience.

[00:14:41] Kyle Grieve: And after that, I moved to, I ended up moving to Substack just because I just think the platform’s way better. And so yeah, I basically wrote on Substack and I did it once a week, every week for a little over a year before I was picked up by TIP. And then I, during that same time, I was also writing on Twitter quite often at least basically two or three times a day.

[00:15:01] Kyle Grieve: So I would use both Substack and Twitter to improve my writing and also to. use data to figure out what I want to write about. So that was a really cool. experience. And now, so my subsec had to shut down when I joined TIP, but I still write for our investing community pretty often. So I’m doing the same kind of things, trying to find interesting ideas and interesting topics to talk about and writing for the TIP community.

[00:15:25] Kyle Grieve: And then also with writing, I’m still on, on X all the time, writing stuff and just sharing my ideas and thoughts. Writing’s definitely a big part of what I’m doing still, even though I’m known as a podcaster now, yeah. I’ve followed you probably before you joined TIP You had some really great stuff.

[00:15:42] Patrick Donley: Same with Clay. Like I followed Clay before he joined TIP, so it’s just interesting. It’s like attracts like in a lot of ways. So you mentioned Spawners and Manishh, papa’s idea of spawners. Can you explain that a little bit for our listeners that aren’t familiar with that idea? 

[00:15:57] Kyle Grieve: Absolutely.

[00:15:57] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. Monish came up with this spawner framework and it’s basically specific businesses that can create new businesses. He gives tons and tons of examples in China, there’s Tencent and Alibaba that have multiple different segments in the U S things that everyone’s going to be familiar with the things like Amazon, Google, Microsoft these are businesses that are It’s like a conglomerate.

[00:16:23] Kyle Grieve: Obviously it has this core business and then it spawns off other smaller businesses. And so if you look at Amazon it’s going to spawn off other smaller businesses that don’t end up being anything like if Amazon had a phone for a while, the Amazon fire phone, and that completely fizzled out.

[00:16:40] Kyle Grieve: So it tried to spawn that out. It it’s attempting to try innovate and use interesting new ideas. And a lot of them fail, but some of them. end up being big winners. Amazon web services is a great, is probably the best example. I don’t think they probably had any idea that it would turn out to what it is today, but yeah, so that’s what a spawner is.

[00:17:00] Kyle Grieve: It’s a business that has its core concepts and there’s multiple different abilities and ways to spawn, whether that’s through acquisition or through incubating things on your own. But yeah, so spawners, they have a lot of value, but I think the thing that I’ve learned about spawners is that.

[00:17:16] Kyle Grieve: They do have a lot of value, but they can also be very difficult for the market to understand. And for instance, Alibaba if you look at the sum of the parts, and I used to be an owner of it. I’m not anymore. But if you look at the sum of the parts, it’s clearly an undervalued business, but it just seems to be really hard for the market to see the same thing.

[00:17:34] Kyle Grieve: And that’s why the valuation just doesn’t seem to be moving. So while I really think the spawner framework is interesting. And it’s something I’ve used in the past and I’ll continue looking at it in the future. It’s not something that I think is necessary or isn’t really a core tenet of my investing philosophy, but it’s definitely very interesting to research.

[00:17:52] Kyle Grieve: And I think it’s it’s definitely a video worth watching is Spawner Framework. 

[00:17:57] Patrick Donley: You’ve had some great guests on Millennial Investing already. I wanted to hear about some of your favorites so far and some of the biggest takeaways that you’ve learned from some of these guests. 

[00:18:07] Kyle Grieve: I’ve had tons of great guests and so I picked out a couple of them.

[00:18:10] Kyle Grieve: So Lawrence Cunningham was just an incredible guest. I think one of the biggest takeaways I got from him was just the power of trust and how it can impact a business. So he spoke a lot about how Berkshire uses it. He, so he wrote a book called Margin of Trust, which is all about Berkshire Hathaway and basically how Warren Buffett has created this culture of trust and how he relies on it basically to run the entire business.

[00:18:33] Kyle Grieve: So it’s definitely not something, I think that’s used by a lot of businesses, but it is used by some businesses and the businesses that seem to be doing it. seem to be creating a lot of shareholder value. Obviously Berkshire is a great example, but if you look at some of the other serial acquirers, and sorry, I’m just going to go right into Chris Mayer.

[00:18:54] Kyle Grieve: Because Chris Mayer and I talked about serial acquirers. And so one of the cool takeaways from him was just the power of decentralization. And so I think decentralization and trust are basically embedded into one idea because in order to decentralize you have to entrust other people or other organizations to do the right thing.

[00:19:14] Kyle Grieve: A couple real good examples would be like Constellation Software is a great example. It’s this giant machine that just produces cash continuously at seemingly ridiculous high rates and everyone thinks it’s going to slow down and it just doesn’t slow down. It’s a decentralized business.

[00:19:32] Kyle Grieve: Everyone knows what they need to do and they’re all incentivized to do it. Their CEO, Robert Leonard, he can take his hands off and not end up having to do very much work and the machine just keeps running because of how well it’s run up and because he’s fostered this decentralized system that relies on trust.

[00:19:50] Kyle Grieve: And then another guest I had, he just blew my mind, was Robert Hagstrom, who’s written a ton of books. And there are tons and tons of takeaways from talking with him, but one I really liked with him, so I, he worked with Bill Miller for a while, and I wanted to learn what were some of your biggest lessons you took away from Bill Miller?

[00:20:06] Kyle Grieve: And so he discussed this one that he calls, he didn’t really have a name for it, but essentially what it was when you find a business, you need to find ways to describe it. So he said, Bill Miller would give them this lesson where, okay, you find a business, tell me all the different ways you can describe it.

[00:20:22] Kyle Grieve: And the reason that was so important was because you can look at one business and describe it in many different ways, but there’s only going to be one way that’s the most accurate. And if you can figure out what that way is, the market might not see it in the exact same way. And that means that you can unlock tons and tons of great opportunities.

[00:20:38] Kyle Grieve: So I really like that mental model. I haven’t quite implemented it too much yet myself, but it’s something I definitely want to do. And I think if anything, it’s just a really interesting mental exercise. 

[00:20:48] Patrick Donley: You had mentioned Constellation software. Wasn’t that how you and Clay first got connected with each other?

[00:20:54] Patrick Donley: He had done maybe a Podcast on Constellation Software really went in depth into the company and talk to me a little bit about that, how you and Clay got connected over Constellation Software and your love for the company. 

[00:21:05] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, he did that really good podcast about Constellation Software and Robert Leonard and I was able to just share his work.

[00:21:12] Kyle Grieve: He reached out and asked me to have a listen to it and see what I thought about it and I shared his work and I write about Constellation because I love the business and I also own one of the spinoff companies and Yeah, basically that definitely when you have someone else who loves a stock, just like you do, it’s it’s easy to become good friends.

[00:21:28] Kyle Grieve: And so I think that definitely contributed to strengthening our relationship and him understanding that I have a appreciation for high quality businesses. 

[00:21:38] Patrick Donley: So through these interviews that you’ve done on the podcast, how has your time at TIP changed your investing philosophy or maybe not?

[00:21:48] Patrick Donley: Have you stuck to your guns on how you think about value investing or Has listening to some of these people and really having them share their wisdom changed how you invest? 

[00:21:59] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, so I definitely, I spend a lot of time on my own investing philosophy, but I’ve definitely made some changes and one of the bigger ones has just been looking at smaller and smaller businesses.

[00:22:11] Kyle Grieve: So even before the podcast, I was already interested in very small businesses. And if you read Chris Mayer’s hunter bagger books and other look at other studies of hunter baggers, it’s littered with small businesses. That always was really interesting to me. And then when I spoke with Paul Andreola, he was my first actual guest ever on the podcast.

[00:22:30] Kyle Grieve: It really opened my mind to the possibilities out there and the mispricings and inefficiencies in the smaller markets. So I’ve spent a lot of time since August looking at that’s changed my investment philosophy a little bit. But overall I’m still looking for high quality businesses that I can hopefully hold for a really long period of time.

[00:22:52] Kyle Grieve: And one thing that I learned from actually being part of the TIP investment community when we had Gautam Bhed on, he talked about how obviously holding onto a business for a long period of time forever is the holy grail. But in reality, You It’s really hard to do, even if that’s what your intent is to find businesses that you can hold.

[00:23:11] Kyle Grieve: So he said that he uses his two to three year timestamp and then reassesses. And so I felt that makes a lot of sense to me because a lot of the businesses that I bought even a year later, and these are big cap companies, things change rapidly. And you can’t really just hold on to your previous hypothesis if the facts are showing you that you were wrong.

[00:23:32] Kyle Grieve: So I really think I’ve tightened my outlook to try to find businesses that are going to do really well in the next few years, but also have that optionality to do really well as well in long time into the future. And then. It’s really sped up my growth as well, especially with sharing ideas.

[00:23:50] Kyle Grieve: So like you mentioned previously I like writing on X and I’ve got a decent size audience and I can’t tell you how many people just reach out to me and tell me interesting ideas or I’ll ask a thread in a Twitter question. I’ll just say, Hey what’s name one business that you think is going to do really well over the next year or whatever.

[00:24:08] Kyle Grieve: And I’ll get like a hundred answers and it’s really cool because I can go through those and try to find a couple interesting names or I’ll get people in my direct messages messaging me or through the TIP investment community now I got a ton of people who have tons and tons of really interesting names and I can also reach out to and talk to in detail.

[00:24:26] Kyle Grieve: If you really want to get a good influx of names, that’s a really good way is to just be social because people will share them for you. But yeah, so I think the. TIP has definitely expedited my learning process. Cause like you said we’re basically paid to learn. So I learn a lot and I’m just refining, I think, my current process even more.

[00:24:46] Patrick Donley: So you had mentioned the TIP mastermind community. I’m not part of it not necessarily a stock guy. I’ve got some stocks and I, that actually was my first love was stock investing, but tell me a little bit about the mastermind community, what that entails, what it looks like, what you 

[00:24:59] Kyle Grieve: guys are up to there.

[00:25:01] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So the mastermind community has been. It’s been awesome. It’s probably my favorite part of the job, actually, because it’s obviously way smaller than Twitter or X. We’re at around, say, 90 people, but the quality is super, super high. It’s all people who love investing and care a lot about it and spend a lot of time.

[00:25:21] Kyle Grieve: Not only investing, but also learning and becoming better at investing and just learning and all the aspects of life. And we have a crazy amount of really successful business people on there as well. So it’s been a really cool way to network with other people who are really interested in investing, really interested in learning, really interested just in business and learning from each other, sharing ideas, sharing strategies bringing on amazing guests like Gautam Bade Chris Mayer, Tobias Carlisle, and peppering them with questions.

[00:25:49] Kyle Grieve: And it’s been really good. I definitely underestimated how impactful it would be. I had no idea, but it’s been a really cool part of my investing journey. And I’ve met a lot of really interesting people and made a lot of friends. And we had a, an event in New York. That was awesome. It was really fun to get to socialize with these people in person.

[00:26:06] Kyle Grieve: We’re going to do another one in Omaha for Berkshire. And yeah, so that’s a little bit about the community and it’s still growing at a nice pace and We’re we’re continuing to keep the quality really high and keep the group nice and small so that the members can get to know each other really well.

[00:26:21] Patrick Donley: How does it work? What’s the cost of it? How often do you guys meet? Are you doing Zoom calls? What does, if I join the community what do I get from it? 

[00:26:31] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, so right now, I believe we’re charging 197 per month or I think it’s 1, 197 for a year. And basically, so for that you basically get access to the community.

[00:26:44] Kyle Grieve: That means you get access to me, Clay, and Stig a lot of the time. We do weekly videos sometimes more than one weekly. And that’s, no matter where you are, you get access to that. So it’s on Zoom. And they’re all replayed, so if you miss it, you can watch it whenever you want. We have, we’re trying to get basically a cool guest every month.

[00:27:03] Kyle Grieve: Like I mentioned, we’ve had Gautam Bade, Chris Mayer. Tobias Carlyle, Paul Andriola, we got Ian Castle coming in January. So tons of really interesting investors who are doing things at a really high level and you get inside access to you’re not going to find really anywhere else. And then we do things like share ideas with the community, whether that’s sharing stock pitches, sharing strategies, there’s a huge element of learning.

[00:27:25] Kyle Grieve: So we have a whole like book club that we talk about a new book every month. And that’s either hosted by Clay or me. So we’ve done Joys of Compounding. We did the Nick Sleep Letters. We just did the book that’s going to be my first episode on We Study Billionaires, which is what I learned about investing from Darwin.

[00:27:42] Kyle Grieve: And then, yeah, and then people will just write about Tons and tons of different learnings that they’ve gotten from different books. So it’s really a place to learn with other like minded people. And the reason I like it so much is that it’s hard to find people who are as enthusiastic about investing as I am in my day to day life.

[00:27:59] Kyle Grieve: Most people aren’t interested in it and that’s just the way it is. And that’s okay. But it’s nice to have an outlet to be able to share your thoughts about investing with other people and yeah, you can go on Twitter and do it for free. And that’s great, but the experience isn’t that good and the quality on Twitter is pretty hit or miss.

[00:28:18] Kyle Grieve: We do a really good job of trying to maintain the quality of our members and also just fostering relationships. So we have tons and tons of people who have sold their businesses or are. retired and managing their own money and people who have really good insights. Like for instance, I was researching this business Hammond Power Supply.

[00:28:38] Kyle Grieve: And so they’re on the electrical grid and I wanted to learn more. And I just threw the idea out there. And one of the people mentioned that he worked for one of their competitors. So I hopped on a call with them and grilled them with a whole bunch of questions. And it was really cool to get that insider information because that’s information I under there’s no chance I would have gotten that if I wasn’t part of the community.

[00:28:55] Kyle Grieve: So there’s all sorts of people with really diverse backgrounds. A lot, there’s also professional investors in there as well. So it’s pretty cool to be able to get a professional view and see what the pros are doing and how they think as well. So yeah, that’s what you get. And so far people have found a lot of value in the community.

[00:29:12] Patrick Donley: Yeah, that’s super cool. And there is something to be said, like you mentioned about Clay and you guys have this shared, you become like kindred spirits over a stock. It’s funny how that happens. It’s oh, you think like me too. And it’s just, it’s definitely an interesting thing that happens with people.

[00:29:29] Patrick Donley: I wanted to talk a little bit about investing love stories. Like I want to hear about in your portfolio right now, what’s one investment right now that you’re super fond of and why it holds a special place in your heart? 

[00:29:42] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So it’s funny cause a good investing is like being a robot, right?

[00:29:47] Kyle Grieve: We’re supposed to be unemotional the fact is that a little bit of emotion is, I think is okay. As long as you don’t allow it to consume you. So for me, the oldest holding I have in my portfolio is Aritzia. So it’s a business that most people aren’t familiar with, but essentially it’s a retail brand for Mainly for females and it’s actually based out of Vancouver where I’m from.

[00:30:11] Kyle Grieve: So part of the reason I love it so much is that it’s a business that I’m pretty familiar with and not many other people are because it started in Vancouver. So back when I was in my early twenties, I used to see girls wearing their stuff all the time and I had no idea what it was. But I’m like, man, like I’ve seen like five girls wearing that exact same thing in the last week.

[00:30:31] Kyle Grieve: And then I’d go and ask my girlfriend or whatever, what it was, and she would say, Oh, that’s Aritzia. And yeah, everyone has it. It’s Aritzia. And so I, I started understanding the strength of the brand, at least in Vancouver then, because everyone was wearing it. Everyone loved it. It looked good.

[00:30:46] Kyle Grieve: The quality was good. And so I feel that kind of gave me some unique insight into the strength of the brand. That’s hard to fathom, especially if you’re a guy, because you’re not going to be wearing their stuff. That’s a pet stock I would consider. And it’s a stock that lately hasn’t been doing very well, but I feel the fundamentals will shine through and they’re going through some short term issues right now.

[00:31:07] Kyle Grieve: And the stock price has been punished, but it’s one that I’m hoping I can hold for a long period of time and continues to perform really well. 

[00:31:14] Patrick Donley: You and Clay had covered a Polish company and I wanted to hear more about that. Like, how did you get turned onto that company? I forget the name of it.

[00:31:22] Patrick Donley: Dino Polska. Dino Polska. Yeah. So tell me about that. Is that part of your portfolio? How do you look internationally at companies? 

[00:31:31] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So that is part of my portfolio. I do look internationally actually. So I’m based in Canada, but I actually don’t own any U S stocks currently. I have in the past.

[00:31:41] Kyle Grieve: And that has nothing to do with the US market. I think the US market is the best in the world. That’s just the way it’s played out. And also the US market, given the fact that it is the best market in the world, is also the most known market in the world, which often means that valuations are a lot higher in it.

[00:31:54] Kyle Grieve: But Dino is a business I completely found from Chris Mayer. Chris Mayer and I DM back and forth. We share a lot of stocks in common and he’s helped me with just finding ideas. I hopped on there one time, asked him, Hey, are there any interesting businesses I should look at? And he listed a couple and one was Dino Polska.

[00:32:13] Kyle Grieve: When I looked at Dino Polska, I was absolutely blown away. The business is incredible. And it’s one of these typical Chris Mayer businesses where it’s just growing at a really steady rate, has a good competitive advantage. The only problem is that it’s definitely not cheap.

[00:32:30] Kyle Grieve: And even though it’s in Poland, which is a market most people don’t really think about, there’s actually quite a few. Pretty high quality businesses in Poland and Dino Polska is one of them and it had its time where it got crushed a little bit and so you could have picked it up at a really nice prices.

[00:32:45] Kyle Grieve: But yeah, so international investing, I love it. It’s, it can be a little bit harder to understand things just given different cultures, different geographies, different regulations. But I own a number of businesses that aren’t based in North America and I don’t see that stopping anytime soon.

[00:32:59] Kyle Grieve: And the thing that’s cool about international is that There are just, there’s a lot of times there’s less eyes on them and with the popularity of X and everything it’s hard to find something that no one knows about, but if you can find something that very few people know about, there’s a lot of advantages than that.

[00:33:14] Kyle Grieve: So I really like international businesses and especially like international businesses that are on the smaller side or less well known. 

[00:33:21] Patrick Donley: I wanted to touch on Chris Mayer and the whole idea of a hundred bagger. What are some of the metrics, the concepts that he’s looking at to figure out if a company becomes a hundred bagger or not?

[00:33:32] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, so he has a couple things. So one of my biggest takeaways from that book was just simply his twin engines concept, which essentially is if you want to look at a hundred bagger, one really good way of doing it is to find number one, a cheap entry multiple. If you buy something for a price earnings of five and it grows to a price to earnings ratio of 20, if four X’s right then and there without any changing in its earnings.

[00:33:58] Kyle Grieve: But if you can change the earnings, if the earnings also increase you can get these businesses where the earnings maybe doubles or triples, but when you multiply that also by the earnings, the change in the multiple that you pay for it, you get just magic and you can make a lot of money.

[00:34:15] Kyle Grieve: So that was one concept. And then one thing that he also made very clear in the book is the importance of returns on equity. So the reason that’s so important is that basically if you have a business that can earn 20 percent returns on equity and let’s say has no debt and reinvest all of its profits back into the business, it should theoretically grow at 20 percent forever.

[00:34:39] Kyle Grieve: It’s pretty impossible to grow, to have 20 percent ROE forever there’s some businesses I’ve been doing it for a really long period of time. So if you could find a business that has a really good return on equity. Which is basically just net income over shareholders equity, and then pair that with the ability to reinvest in itself, you can find really high quality businesses that can continue compounding their business, and that’s the holy grail, if you can find that, it’s hard to find, it’s really hard to find, because a lot of times you’ll find these businesses that do have a high return on equity, But they can’t reinvest in themselves.

[00:35:15] Kyle Grieve: So they eventually they’ll have to they basically pay a dividend. And if they pay that dividend and obviously it reduces the amount of money that they can put back into the business, which reduces the effects of compounding. 

[00:35:26] Patrick Donley: I wanted to talk a little bit about how you construct your portfolio.

[00:35:30] Patrick Donley: I want to hear like, how many stocks would you typically hold in your portfolio? And then a little bit about risk management there’s that famous Warren Buffett saying about the first rule of investing is don’t lose money. Second rule is don’t forget rule number one. So I want to hear a little bit about how you mitigate risks when you construct your own portfolio and just how you size it.

[00:35:52] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, so risk is huge. And I think that if you don’t think about it very often, you’re putting yourself at a massive disadvantage because investing is emotional and If you let your emotions consume you, it’s really easy to forget completely about risk. And that’s why I think Howard Marks’s book is so important.

[00:36:12] Kyle Grieve: So for me, there’s a couple of things I do to mitigate risks. Number one is I try not to buy things that are ridiculously priced. I’m sure I’ll buy something that looks expensive. If the market’s trading at a P of. 20. And I buy something at a P of 30, then yeah that’s an expensive business, but certain businesses are so good and it’s very small, but there are certain businesses that are so good that you can pay up for them and still get a really good return.

[00:36:39] Kyle Grieve: But the key part there is being right about the business. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand the business, understand its competitive advantages, understand its total available market. and understanding how much market share it can take in the future and its ability to maintain its profits and its ability to stave off competitors.

[00:36:57] Kyle Grieve: So that’s one way. And then the other way essentially is just through portfolio sizing. So I’m definitely more concentrated. So But there’s some people who take it to extremes, like Charlie Munger. And I think Charlie Munger can do this because he was so brilliant. And I don’t think I’m anywhere close to as brilliant as him.

[00:37:15] Kyle Grieve: He had four stocks in the Daily Journal, I think. Something 

[00:37:17] Kyle Grieve: like that. Yeah. Yeah. He’s super concentrated. And I try not to concentrate quite as much, but the way I look at it is I want to have as much of my money in my winning stocks as possible. That’s what everyone says they want, but in reality, what they do is they’ll have a stock that’s a winner and they basically shave off part of their winnings and then put those winnings into other stocks.

[00:37:41] Kyle Grieve: But I just don’t see it that way. In my opinion, if I have a stock that’s doing really well, I don’t want to stop it from doing really well. Paul Andreola, when I had him on, he had a really good analogy. He said if you have Wayne Gretzky on your hockey team, if you’re trying to win games, are you going to take them off the ice or are you going to put them on the ice as much as possible?

[00:37:59] Kyle Grieve: And the answer is quite obvious. You’re going to play your winners as much as possible. So I want as much exposure to my winners as much as possible. And so what that means is that yes, I may have winners that where their levels of concentration are higher. Like for instance, for me, my highest level concentration position is evolution a B and that’s around 20%.

[00:38:17] Kyle Grieve: But I sleep fine with that because this business is incredible and it’s continuing to grow at high rates and I don’t think there’s a chance for me to lose too much on it at this point in time. So I just leave it as is. So that’s my other way I mitigate risk. And then another thing I like doing also is, I think it has to do with how much intensity you use to research a business.

[00:38:39] Kyle Grieve: So if you’re in investing for the long period of time, your biggest risk is not understanding a business, which, and then that’s what I’m in for is to invest for long periods. So if you can really try to focus on finding businesses that are simple and that you can honestly understand, and that’s the hard part, cause you can tell yourself you understand something, but.

[00:38:56] Kyle Grieve: Until you, you lose a bunch of money and realize that there are a whole bunch of risks that you never accounted for, then that’s when you can admit to yourself that you don’t understand. I’ve really been focusing on finding businesses that I can understand really well and that are really simple because another part of that simple versus complex equation is that simple businesses are also easier for the market to understand.

[00:39:17] Kyle Grieve: And if you have this super complex idea, if the market doesn’t understand it now, there’s A reasonably good chance that it’s not going to understand it in five years from now. So you might you might get these businesses that are chronically underpriced. So that’s why it’s nice having just really simple ideas, simple businesses that hopefully carry lower risks and that the market can understand really easily.

[00:39:36] Kyle Grieve: So I think doing those kinds of things has really helped me mitigate risk. It’s very 

[00:39:40] Patrick Donley: Buffett esque to stick with simple stuff. So I wanted to go behind the scenes. Like when you are researching a potential investment, I want to hear a little more in depth about what your process is like.

[00:39:51] Patrick Donley: What are the things that when you’re looking at a company, you say, boom, this is it. I’m definitely going to take a position in this company. 

[00:39:58] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So it’s definitely a long process and I draw it out on purpose because I feel like rushing into a position is a horrible idea because you open yourself up to all sorts of risks and mistakes in the analytical process that.

[00:40:12] Kyle Grieve: You wouldn’t make if you just take your time. So my general process is first I have to get the idea. So where do I get the idea? Like I mentioned I get tons of ideas from X from my direct messages from the mastermind community. That’s my primary resource. So after that I’ll look at a business quantitatively.

[00:40:31] Kyle Grieve: So what I’ll do, I have my own kind of little system I like to use where I’ll open up this service called FinChat and I’ll put the name in and I’ll look at metrics like revenue growth, net income growth. operating cashflow growth, free cashflow growth, returns on invested capital, and it’s a return on invested capital, conservative financing, what the insider ownership is.

[00:40:51] Kyle Grieve: And I’m looking for specific benchmarks. And if the business doesn’t meet the benchmarks on one or two maybe I’ll keep going. But if it doesn’t meet it on 50% it’s just a pass. And I can do that in about. less than five minutes. So it’s really easy for me to say no to an idea.

[00:41:06] Kyle Grieve: A lot of times businesses will pass through that. And that’s where the real work starts to begin. So after that, I’ll begin by just looking at the quarterly annual reports, reading them, reading the Q and A’s. I might check out Seeking Alpha to see what other analysts say. I know a lot of people say you shouldn’t do that.

[00:41:26] Kyle Grieve: But in my opinion, looking at other analysts is just a shortcut because While you may or may not agree or disagree with what they’re saying, it can really open your eyes to maybe some of the risks that you’re not looking at. And then also you can always reach out to them and grill them for questions on the business if you don’t understand it.

[00:41:44] Kyle Grieve: And then after that, also looking at competition. A lot of times these businesses won’t tell you who their competition is, but sometimes they do and then sometimes you just need to figure it out yourself. It’s usually not that difficult. You just look at what products they’re selling and try to find other products that are similar and go from there.

[00:41:57] Kyle Grieve: And then I’ll compare numbers. So generally speaking if the business is past my first hurdle of being really good quantitatively, it usually means that it’s got some sort of special sauce. So I want to see why it has a special sauce. And I want to see it quantitatively compared to other businesses in the industry.

[00:42:14] Kyle Grieve: Because a lot of times you might find a business that looks half decent, then you look at the industry and everything looks good. So in that case They probably don’t have any type of advantage. And yeah, and then I spent a lot of time looking at management. So things that really matter to me are how many shares do they own?

[00:42:29] Kyle Grieve: Did they get the shares via options or did they buy them on the open market? How much percent of their net worth is in the business? How have they done with previous businesses they’ve worked at? How have they done on strategies that are currently in the business? Are they open to ask answering difficult questions or do they just deflect or blame others for it?

[00:42:51] Kyle Grieve: So yeah, that’s my investing process. And then other things I’ll do is talk to other owners of the business. It’s easy to search a ticker on X and reach out to someone and ask them a couple of questions. And oftentimes you can get really good answers. I’ve started talking to management a little bit now.

[00:43:05] Kyle Grieve: It’s definitely something I want to get better at that can be really beneficial. Obviously you have to take with what they say with a grain of salt because they’re all promoters and they’re good salesmen. But if you have the right questions, you can get some really interesting information that can help you with your decision making.

[00:43:18] Kyle Grieve: And then after that this whole process, unfortunately I don’t have eight to 12 hours a day to take on it. So this can take weeks or months just for one idea. And then after that, I’ll start evaluating the business. A lot of people, myself included, I think, make the mistake of valuing a business first.

[00:43:34] Kyle Grieve: So they’ll be like, oh, okay, this business is really cheap, let’s go ahead and buy it or whatever. But the problem with this is you do that, you just skipped all the work I just talked about. And if you’re intending to hold the business for a long period of time, all this work is what helps you identify risks and really understand the business.

[00:43:50] Kyle Grieve: And I don’t think you can really evaluate a business without understanding it. Because I am looking at higher quality businesses, a lot of the time, the valuations are just, unfortunately, they don’t make sense. So I end up having to wait, but I think that this is a really good way of doing it.

[00:44:06] Kyle Grieve: And so another thing also is that a lot of times you might not fully understand a business say 90%, but I don’t think you need to get up to that point to make, to enter into position. So you can do you can make it a a smaller, make it one or 2 percent to start off with, and then keep doing more and more research.

[00:44:24] Kyle Grieve: You should still have a very good base of what you know. And then as you understand the business better, develop conviction in the business, see that they’re executing on things and you can start adding to the position size. 

[00:44:35] Patrick Donley: You’ve mentioned Guadam Bade and one of his ideas is keeping a trading journal.

[00:44:40] Patrick Donley: Is that something that you do? Is that part of your toolbox? I want to hear about your toolbox, like your tech toolbox. Talk to me about you obviously like to write. So I’m curious if you also journal about your investing mistakes and wins, things like that. 

[00:44:54] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So Back in probably October, I did buy myself just a physical journal and when I first started, I was doing it every day, but then I realized that my prompts or things that I was writing about were repetitive.

[00:45:09] Kyle Grieve: So I’m trying to figure out how to word things and everything like that. But I still journal regularly. I just read Gautam Bade’s book, which essentially are, it’s a peek into his journals. You’re in this bear market in India from, I think it was 2017 till 2020. His second book, right? Yeah, his second book.

[00:45:28] Kyle Grieve: It was really good. And it had some really interesting insights onto what he looks at. And I think, For me, the strength of journaling is really understanding where my emotions are because I can identify where my emotions are and write it down and then go back and look back at other periods of time and see, and obviously I don’t have a big history so this is going to be into the future where I’ll look back, but I can go back and see where I’m going wrong, but I think it’s also a good way to tell you yourself as a signal where your emotions are because a lot of the mistakes we make are based on emotion, and if we can try to identify what those emotions are, then we can also try to hopefully minimize mistakes based off of those emotions.

[00:46:07] Kyle Grieve: Yeah, a lot of the, some of the prompts that he wrote in his book were very macro oriented, and while I think macro is definitely important I don’t really try to be too much of a macro guy personally. I’m really interested in just in specific businesses, so now what I’m doing is I’m trying to focus on prompts.

[00:46:25] Kyle Grieve: that ask me what businesses that I own are my most bullish on? What am I least bullish on? What are developments that I’m paying attention to or KPIs I’m looking at? And then I’m also not exactly investing related, but another thing I’m really been working on is trying to be better at using multidisciplinary and thinking.

[00:46:47] Kyle Grieve: So what I’m trying to do is use my journal. I write in it what mental model I want to learn for the next week. And then each day I try to apply that mental model to different areas in my life, whether that’s investing, a business, family, parenting, relationships, just life in general. And so every day I’m trying to use one mental model on various things.

[00:47:06] Kyle Grieve: And then, so I’m trying to basically make using thinking in different mental models a habit. And that’s, it’s been working really well for me. It’s a lot of work and it’s upkeep. But it’s been working well, and I think if I continue doing this for many years, I’ll hopefully become a fraction as good as Charlie Munger was at it.

[00:47:22] Patrick Donley: Yeah, so you mentioned mental models, and you’ve got the book behind you. Is that where you’re pulling the, there’s a chapter in there that’s all about mental models. Is that where you’re pulling the, when you’re taking a look at mental models, is that what you’re looking at? 

[00:47:35] Kyle Grieve: I get them from a variety of sources.

[00:47:37] Kyle Grieve: So I think you’re talking about Charlie Munger’s, the psychological misjudgments. So yeah, I’ll, I’ve definitely gone through that. multiple times. I probably need to keep going through that to really internalize each and every single one. But yes, that so that’s one source. Another source that I’ve been using a lot is actually the great mental models, which is a three part series written by Farnham Street.

[00:47:56] Kyle Grieve: It’s really good. It does. It has 15 to 20 pages for a whole bunch of different models does a really good job of showing You know, what kind of like the definition and then giving you like a case study that could be completely far out there. They make sense. So I use that as a guide and then I’ll read about it, try to understand a little better.

[00:48:14] Kyle Grieve: But I think the most important part is really internalizing it, thinking about it and using it because you can get this list of mental models. But if you don’t actually use them on a regular basis, it doesn’t really end up helping you very much. 

[00:48:27] Patrick Donley: I wanted to shift gears a little bit and talk a little bit more about your personal life.

[00:48:32] Patrick Donley: You’ve become a father recently. I know you’re a brown belt in Jiu Jitsu. So I wanted to talk a little bit about both of those. Like first off, like how has fatherhood changed your investment philosophy? 

[00:48:44] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So being a father has helped me a lot. I think the most with efficiency. A lot of the time I have now, I want to spend with my son.

[00:48:53] Kyle Grieve: And before that, I I didn’t have my son. So I spend it on other things such as whatever, investing or jujitsu. But now that I want to spend more and more time with him, I really have to focus on my time efficiency and using it in as intelligent a way as possible. So I’ve gotten a lot better at saying no, especially with investing stuff.

[00:49:14] Kyle Grieve: You might get A hundred ideas shot at you and maybe one of them is decent. And so I think it’s really important to understand how to identify that one idea because you can waste a lot of time in investing. And if you don’t have some sort of system to use your time more efficiently, then it’s really easy to just.

[00:49:33] Kyle Grieve: To waste time. And so having my son has really taught me the importance of that because there’s only so much time in the day and I want to spend a good portion of that with him. And then the other thing that he’s taught me a lot about is compounding and it’s more compounding knowledge because every day, It’s like he learned something new and I’m not going to be one of these parents who thinks his kid’s a special snowflake.

[00:49:57] Kyle Grieve: I know most kids go through it, but it doesn’t really matter. It’s just the rate of learning that babies go through is just it’s like almost incomprehensible. Like just little things he does one day, he wasn’t doing it a week ago. And it’s just man, this kid is learning so much at such a fast pace.

[00:50:14] Kyle Grieve: And so it really got me thinking. It’s just as humans, we learn so much at a young age and we’ll never learn as much as probably my son’s learning right now, but I think a lot of people close themselves off to the learning process, usually whether that’s in their late teens or early twenties after they finished school.

[00:50:31] Kyle Grieve: And you learn whatever you learn and that’s it. And then you just live the rest of your life out. And, but it just goes to show With my son, it’s just like over a couple months period, it’s just he’s a whole new person. And if he can do that while compounding all these different things that he’s learning each and every day why can’t adults do it?

[00:50:48] Kyle Grieve: Granted it’s going to be at a slower pace and that’s completely expected, but it just really shows that the power of compounding. works and it does have big results. And even though you might not see them on a day to day basis over a long period of time can make rapid changes in your knowledge.

[00:51:05] Patrick Donley: That’s awesome. Yeah, those are good points. I think the other thing too with kids is like it totally lowers your time preference right now. You’re thinking out 2030 years rather than before when it’s just you. It’s your time preference is really high. I wanted to hear about jujitsu too.

[00:51:21] Patrick Donley: You’re a brown belt. Talk to me about how you got into jujitsu. And I know there’s gotta be ways that you’ve applied what you’re doing on the mat to investing. 

[00:51:30] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So jujitsu has been a huge part of my life for. That’s like the last decade or so. I absolutely love it. And jujitsu’s cool because yeah, you obviously have your coach who teaches you, but just with the blow up of internet, there’s been a lot of really high level jujitsu players who share their coaching online through videos.

[00:51:50] Kyle Grieve: A lot of my time was just spent researching what other really good people were doing, and then trying to apply those lessons to my own game. And essentially, I started thinking of Jiu Jitsu as these small kind of games that you can play against your opponent and it’s really cool because you can get really good at one game of Jiu Jitsu and be reasonably new.

[00:52:13] Kyle Grieve: You could maybe be like a white belt who’s been training for a year or a blue belt or whatever, which is the next level up. And if you’re really good at one game, you might even be able to beat someone who’s a black belt because if they’re playing your miniature game and they’re not as good as you at it, you have a huge advantage.

[00:52:28] Kyle Grieve: So that alone has taught me so much about investing and that’s because basically in jujitsu, you can find out what your strengths are and you can focus your entire game into amplifying what your strengths are while basically ignoring your weaknesses. And so in investing, it’s similar. Obviously there’s weaknesses that you have to address, otherwise you’re just going to get killed.

[00:52:50] Kyle Grieve: So I broke down a couple of them in investing. So obviously know your strengths and you should amplify them. So what that kind of comes down to for me in investing is knowing what you know and what you don’t know. So spend time researching businesses that you know, and you can understand and that you might have a, an advantage of because other people will have that same advantage.

[00:53:09] Kyle Grieve: And that’s really important because when you’re Not focusing on your strengths. You open yourself up to risk. And so that brings up my second point, which is understand your weaknesses. So you obviously there’s some weaknesses that you need to address, but a lot of times you can just focus on what your strengths are and use your strengths to avoid your weaknesses.

[00:53:30] Kyle Grieve: So In investing, I think that’s you have to have a decent overall game, but if you know you have a weakness in whatever that is, a specific geography, maybe a specific industry it might just require the humility to admit that, okay, I don’t understand that area. I’m just not going to bother with it.

[00:53:47] Kyle Grieve: I’ll skip it. I know that like Warren Buffett, he’s always said that airline socks are crap and then he bought a bunch of them and he says he calls himself an airaholic, which I found hilarious. And it just goes to show you that there’s there’s industries that maybe no one understands, but you personally don’t understand well, and you should just stay away from them and just focus on what your strengths are.

[00:54:08] Kyle Grieve: Another thing that’s really important is to do what is fun. Research, whether that’s in jujitsu, I like doing moves and things that I find really enjoyable and fun and are athletic and other people might find them, they don’t like them. So same thing in investing find ideas that you find interesting.

[00:54:24] Kyle Grieve: Don’t just find things that are a slog to get through. One of the easiest ways to, I think, to filter a business is if you read an annual report or you read about their products and you’re just you’re starting to fall asleep. That’s probably a good example that it’s not something that belongs in your portfolio.

[00:54:39] Kyle Grieve: And then the last thing is that Just learning never stops. I’ve been trained jujitsu for 10 years, which isn’t even that long, but I still learn new things like literally every single time I step on the mats. And I think in investing, it’s the same thing. Look at Charlie Munger he was still learning and he was 99 years old and one of the most brilliant people I think on earth.

[00:54:58] Kyle Grieve: And It just goes to show you that you can never know everything and you should always be trying to improve because there’s always something out there to help you become a little bit better each and every day. 

[00:55:10] Patrick Donley: This is a great place to put a pin in this interview. This has been really fun, Kyle. I really appreciate your time, your thoughts, your insights here.

[00:55:17] Patrick Donley: For our listeners that want to learn more about you, find out maybe about the Mastermind community, find you on Twitter. Tell us some ways to get in touch. 

[00:55:25] Kyle Grieve: Yeah. So if you want to find me on Twitter, my handle is irrationalMRKTS. Markets was taken. So it’s irrationalMRKTS. If you want to find out about podcasts, I have episodes already on millennial investing.

[00:55:41] Kyle Grieve: So that’s the investorspodcast. com slash millennial dash investing. And then I will be on the We Study Billionaires feed as well. And if you want to learn more about the mastermind group, we have a waitlist and that’s at theinvestors. com slash mastermind. And we have an intake about every quarter or so.

[00:55:58] Kyle Grieve: So if you’re interested, just hop on the waitlist and me or Clay will reach out to you. 

[00:56:02] Patrick Donley: And then as a teaser, your first We Study Billionaires episode is about? 

[00:56:07] Kyle Grieve: It’s about a book. So it’s going to be a solo episode. It’s just going to be me talking about all the lessons I learned from what I learned about investing from Darwin by Pulak Prasad, which was probably one of my favorite books I read this year.

[00:56:17] Kyle Grieve: I think you’ll get a lot out of that one. 

[00:56:20] Patrick Donley: Cool. I’m looking forward to it. Kyle, thanks so much for your time. I appreciate it. 

[00:56:23] Kyle Grieve: Thanks for having me.

[00:56:25] Patrick Donley: Okay, folks, that’s all I had for today’s episode. I hope you enjoyed the show and I’ll see you back here real soon.

[00:56:31 Outro: Thank you for listening to TIP. Make sure to subscribe to We Study Billionaires by The Investor’s Podcast Network. Every Wednesday, we teach you about Bitcoin, and every Saturday, we study billionaires and the financial markets. 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 Investor’s Podcast Network. Written permission must be granted before syndication or rebroadcasting.

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