😅 At least one meme stock is down and out: AMC.

Shares in AMC are down about 99.3% since their peak during the 2021 meme stock mania. In 2021, AMC’s stock had risen 2,850%. But there have since been plenty of big losses and bag holders.

Today, we're sharing our interview with Kyle Grieve, our esteemed podcast host and investor. We discuss investing, markets, lessons, life, and more. Spoiler: He doesn’t recommend meme stocks.

All this, and more, in just 5 minutes to read.

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What Else We’re Into

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📖 READ: Practicing a “punch card approach” to investing

Trivia

Kyle Grieve: Empowering Retail Investors

The Thinking Investor

We have a treat today as we share our interview with Kyle Grieve, a value investor, author, and manager of his family portfolio.

Kyle joined The Investor’s Podcast Network last summer after taking up stock investing while working as a smart home integrator and network specialist. Today, he’s living his dream as he learns how to invest, interviews seasoned investors, and helps educate others.

Without further ado, here’s our interview with Kyle, edited lightly for clarity and brevity.

What is your first memory of money?

I remember asking my mom if $5 was a lot of money when I was about 5 years old. She told me it wasn’t for an adult. But for a child, you could buy all sorts of cool things. It’s funny how responsibility and perception change how much joy we can elicit from money as we age.

Tell us about your road to being fascinated with the investing world.

In 2017, I began investing in cryptocurrencies. I fell deep down the rabbit hole and swallowed a lot of hopium. I diversified into all sorts of crappy coins that did well because it was pretty easy to make money at this point. But I started getting greedy and learned about how to read charts and use leverage. So I would leverage my trades 10x-100x on Bitmex, and I lost nearly everything I made. I was down 97% from the peak to the trough.

After that, I just figured all my crypto was worth $0 and swore it off as an expensive experience. Fast-forward to 2020 and COVID-19, and for some reason, I figured some stocks might be well-priced after reading about the massive drops after the lockdowns were announced. Since then, I’ve spent thousands of hours learning about investing, businesses, and research, and here we are today.

I have an obsessive personality. But with investing, you’ll never know everything. So it’s like a video game where you can repeatedly win but never reach the final boss. Along the way, you pick up things that make you more intelligent and generate wealth. It’s a pretty good proposition to me.

What is your favorite part of doing the podcast?

Researching my guests is my favorite part. I learn so much new wisdom. It’s a dream job because I already love reading. I read incredibly good books or research highly successful investors, and then I can ask them questions to fill in any blanks.

What are some of your favorite interviews?

It’s getting hard to choose. This year, my favorite was interviewing Annie Duke. She taught me a lot about my own process and discussed topics that were not intuitive. My biggest takeaway from her was the creation of pre-commitment criteria. These criteria are used to determine whether to stay “invested” in an idea or stock. I have already begun implementing this.

What are a few of your favorite books?

The Most Important Thing by Howard Marks is a book that I think every investor should read yearly. It’s hard to find a better book on risk.

What I Learned About Investing From Darwin by Pulak Prasad was incredible. This is a must-read if you want to learn how to use biological mental models to invest successfully.

Poor Charlie’s Almanack by Peter Kaufman. The reason is simple: You will get smarter whenever you open this book.

Who are your investing role models, if you have any?

Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and Mohnish Pabrai. 90% of what I know about investing was from those three guys. While none of them are perfect, they all bring strengths to the table that anybody can use to get smarter, wealthier, and enjoy life.

What is your investing motto, if you have one?

Quality will guide me, but I can succeed along the quality spectrum.

How much prep goes into an interview?

A lot. If the guest has a book, I’ll read the entire book and take notes on interesting insights. That can be anywhere from 30 to 100 notes. I then look at all my notes to find the things my audience will find most interesting. It usually takes 10-20 hours. But it’s a fulfilling process.

What are a few of your favorite stories from the show?

I enjoyed chatting with Hamilton Helmer, who wrote 7 Powers. He shared some great stories on what he thinks about Netflix today. He still thinks it’s a robust business.

I learned a lot about meditation and stoicism from Vitaliy Katsenelson. He did a wonderful job sharing stories from his day-to-day life and integrating them into meditation and stoicism. I enjoyed how he separates his time and what takes the most priority in his life.

Another great story I learned was from Robert Hagstrom about his time working with Bill Miller. He discussed how Bill would have him describe a business in as many different ways as possible. This is a valuable exercise because if you identify a company with a different model from everyone else in the market, you can make one life-changing investment that can carry you to great things. Bill Miller did this with Amazon.

Any business lessons that stand out?

Understand the incentives of every business you own. Management will chase those incentives, so if the incentives do not benefit shareholders, stay clear.

Business is brutal. Only the best survive, and even they will eventually go the way of the dinosaur. So, you must be willing to walk a fine line between holding great businesses and letting something go if you think the business model is permanently impaired.

The “never-sell” mentality is unhealthy for your finances. I want businesses like GEICO and See’s Candies, but my chances are much lower if Buffett is only hitting on 3-4% of his bets. Be willing to let go of ideas where the facts are telling you that your hypothesis is wrong.

What do you hope the audience derives from your work?

Wisdom. The emphasis is on becoming a better investor, but there are many roads that lead to Rome. My content helps my audience think more clearly about investing, opens their eyes to the different ways they can invest successfully, and gives them usable mental models they can use immediately after listening to my episodes. My goal is to learn as much from successful people as possible and normalize being successful. And then I just share those lessons with my audience as we learn together.

What can you say about a high-level overview of how you personally invest?

The simple way to think of it:

1. Buy businesses that are likely to grow earnings at high rates for many years into the future

2. Buy stocks with competitive advantages

3. Buy businesses run by excellent management, with skin in the game, and who are aligned with shareholders

4. Wait around and let the business keep progressing

It’s simple, but not easy to execute. Investors love getting cute and are always hunting for the next idea. The trick is not to sacrifice your current ideas, which you understand well, for an inferior idea you do not understand. I’ve been guilty of this, and I try to do my best to keep conviction in my ideas, while also trying to poke holes in my thinking.

What’s the biggest investing mistake you made?

Investing in China. I spent a lot of time researching the country, and I thought I had a decent grasp of it. But I don’t. Not only was the time I spent wasted, but I also lost a lot of money in the process. It was an expensive lesson, but it’s a lesson I will never forget.

At what point do you sell stocks, if ever?

The goal is never to sell a stock, but the reality is that finding a business that deserves to stay in my portfolio forever is incredibly rare. I will hold stocks as long as the business's fundamentals continue to improve. If they worsen, I cut ties and redeploy the capital elsewhere. My top positions by weighting are the ones that are advancing the best in terms of fundamentals. I don’t trim these positions to add to my positions that aren’t performing as well.

How much cash do you like to hold, if any?

Right now, I am holding quite a bit at 10.5%. I use a strategy to generate returns on my cash and am actively deploying it. I’ll also opportunistically add to my current position on pullbacks on companies I already own.

How often do you check your brokerage account?

Once or twice a month to ensure my cash shows up in my account and to deploy that cash into my ideas. I use Yahoo Finance daily as it’s a simple dashboard to keep me updated on any news relevant to my holdings.

Do you read daily financial news, or do you find it too noisy? How do you block out the noise?

I don’t read or watch financial news regularly. I follow all my businesses closely and like staying updated on new filings or relevant info. But most of that is not found in popular news.

What is the mastermind community for those who don’t know, and how meaningful has it been?

The Mastermind Community is a group of investors who want a place to socialize, share ideas and strategies, and make life-long relationships with other investors. It isn’t easy to find people to talk about investing in most people's networks, the Mastermind Community fills that void. I’ve made a bunch of excellent friends and we are all here to learn from each other and draw from diverse backgrounds to help improve ourselves in all areas of life.

Do you think you’ll ever retire, or just keep studying the best and reading and sharing that information?

I’ll retire one day, and I’ll probably continue sharing my thoughts. But maybe in a less structured way.

What are your favorite hobbies outside of investing? 

Being with family, reading, Jiu Jitsu, lifting heavy weights, walking, thinking.

Is there a dream guest you'd love to have on your podcast?

Warren Buffett.

How do you see the future of podcasting evolving in the next few years?

I think it will continue expanding, but that's a double-edged sword. It has low barriers to entry, so it will become saturated with lower-quality content. Unfortunately, that means that attention will be more dispersed across podcasts. So, I think the quality of our episodes and TIP's history with its audience is a competitive advantage. 

What has been the most rewarding part of hosting your podcast?

I've gotten to know many investors and writers who have taught me so much. It’s such a cool concept to be able to look at my bookshelf and think to myself, “That author wrote one of the most impactful books I’ve ever read. Let’s see if I can talk to him or her about it.” I never dreamt I’d have that ability, but here we are.

Dive deeper

For more information, follow Kyle on X (formerly Twitter), and check out some of his recent podcast episodes here, here, and here.

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