Don’t compare yourself to others. You aren’t running their race. You are running your race.
Terry Smith, founder and CIO of Fundsmith, compares successful investing to the Tour De France.
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The most prestigious cycle tour is the Tour de France. Been run for over a 100 years. It’s never been won by somebody who won every stage. And it’s never going to be won by somebody who won every stage.
In fact, on a number of occasions it was won by riders who never won a single stage. The first time they ever stood on the podium was when they were getting the race prize.
It’s cool to see 53 year old Steve Stricker tied for 2nd going into the third round of the Phoenix Open
Here is a cool story about him
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In 1997, a 30 year old Steve Stricker was paired for the first time with the 21-year old phenom Tiger Woods.
2/ After the round, Stricker would tell his wife (also his caddie) he was thinking about quitting the game. When he played Tiger he saw a person he couldn’t beat.
3/ How could he compete against someone that could drive the ball 50-yards longer, straighter, have shorter, better iron shots, better putts, etc.
Stricker points to that round of golf with Tiger as the start of a 10-year slump that would result in him losing his tour card.
Forbes estimates that Beanie Baby creator Ty Warner’ net worth is $2.7 Billion. This is an amazing achievement considering a bulk of it was earned during a 3-year time frame selling a $5 per unit stuffed animal.
The fact that Ty Warner’s Beanie Babies were able, without the benefit of a single ad, to outpace the combined annual profits of the largest toymakers in the world for even a few years is unprecedented.
Frank Perdue took Perdue Farms, a small local company his father started, and grew it into a multi-billion-dollar business.
Mitzi Perdue tells this amazing story about her late husband:
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1) Frank had a tremendous head for figures. He treated numbers the way a doctor would treat an MRI: numbers enabled him to see and understand what was going on deep inside the business, plus numbers were a very quick way of detecting if something was going wrong.
2) I need to share something that happened when Frank was 85, maybe half a year before his passing. We were visiting Massachusetts General Hospital to assess how he was handling the Parkinson’s disease that was soon to take him.
You don’t hear much about full-time private investors because publicity doesn’t benefit them. In fact, publicity hurts them. Full-time private investors like the fact that even family and friends don’t quite know what they do for a living.
They like the fact that they’ve built up an extensive knowledge level in a niche of the market where it doesn’t benefit them to arm-wave their successes.
Microcap investors are mainly retail investors. Some of the best microcap investors I know are small business owners. They understand the complexity, volatility, and nuances of running a small business. Microcap isn’t an institutional asset class, it’s an entrepreneurial one.
Most "financial professionals" think you're dumb for investing in these small companies, but that is only because they can only buy them after they go up 10x, are 70% institutional held, and have 10 analysts covering them.
The financial machine loves lemmings.
The haters will say microcaps are sleazy slimy uninvestable companies. Yes, plenty of those. But a lot less than VC. The nice thing is most file audited financials with the SEC, and if you know how to read financial statements you can cut out a lot of the risk.