How Would The Greats Like Buffet, Lynch, & Templeton Invest In Today's Market? | Pieter Slegers

**Pieter Slegers** (0:00)
As Buffet said, times better to buy wonderful companies at a fair price over fair companies at a wonderful price. And we are doing that using three easy steps. So one, you want great companies, wonderful companies. The second step is you want those great companies to be led by excellent managers, and managers will preferably have skin in the game, who are invested in it themselves. And then the third point is, well, you want those wonderful companies led by excellent managers to be trading at fair valuation levels. So those are the three steps that you are using.
If you go one step further, you will see that we always use six criteria to find those kind of companies. And what I think is very important to underline, very important to understand is that each of the six criteria we are going to use, objectively seen, rationally seen, they outperform the market in the long term. And by combining those criteria, we are trying to build our watchlist. And based on that watchlist, then we are going to try and build a portfolio or the 18 companies that we have in the portfolio.
Obvious next question then is, well, which are those six criteria? I think when I briefly go over them, it becomes very clear or it's very intuitive why they outperform.

**Adam Taggart** (1:35)
Hi folks, Adam Taggart here. You can see that I'm traveling, but I wanted to make sure you still got a video today. Today's video is with Pieter Slegers, and I actually filmed it a couple of weeks ago. And then given sort of reacting to the unprecedented, unpredictable developments of the war in Iran, I had to run a bunch of other content that was much more timely in nature. This discussion with Pieter is much more evergreen. These insights will be just as true, I believe, 50 years from now as they are today.
So we're now finally running this video. I think you're really going to enjoy it.
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm Thoughtful Money founder and your host, Adam Taggart. Welcome you here for what will be a special conversation on how the greats invest and how we can apply that to today's somewhat challenging investing environment. We are very fortunate to be rejoined by Pieter Slegers. He is the proprietor of several different super successful sub-stacks now, compounding quality, compounding dividends. He's also just launched a new service, which I'm sure we'll talk about in just a little bit. But Pieter, those who saw his first appearance on this channel, is best known for is really studying and processing the investment approach of the true greats, the Warren Buffets, the Pieter Lynches, the Benjamin Grahams, the John Templetons, and distilling that down into a replicable framework that investors can use to stand on the shoulders of those giants. In his regular publications, he basically is super transparent about the decisions that he's making in his own portfolio, and he has a model portfolio in both of those publications that I mentioned, that you can follow along as an investor. So as I mentioned, it's a pretty challenging environment. Peter, thank you so much for joining us, and I'm really looking forward to your advice on how people should navigate the somewhat chaotic time we have right now in the markets.

**Pieter Slegers** (3:35)
Thank you very much for having me, Adam. I think you're doing an amazing job with the podcast, so it's always an honor to be here.

**Adam Taggart** (3:42)
Well, thank you. And that is a high praise because folks, those substack publications I mentioned, are amongst the top in the world in the financial space. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I believe they're both in the top 10 of the most popular financial substacks literally in the world. So, Peter, you have been crushing it in the financial media space, again, very well earned and well deserved.

**Pieter Slegers** (4:06)
No, thank you very much. Once again, the other way around, that's too much honor for me, Adam. I think you're just having fun, and it's a joy that other people seem to like it and want to read or research.

**Adam Taggart** (4:19)
Well, thanks. It's really wonderful to see somebody be so successful, but enjoy so much what they do and help so many people along the way. So, okay, enough with the mutual back padding here. So, Peter, we can start wherever you like, but I know the big thing I'd like to hear from you in this discussion is, with your approach of really studying the greats and doing your absolute level best to put into practice their methodology, I think those methodologies actually are the most valuable during the times of the greatest uncertainty. A lot of times when emotions are swirling and people are thinking, oh my gosh, is the market rolling over? I believed in these stocks. I thought they were good stocks, but now I'm not so sure because they've been battered down with the rest of the market.