I Studied Every 100-Bagger Stock in History. Here's What I Found | Chris Mayer

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**Tobias Carlisle** (1:01)
And I believe we are live. This is Value After Hours. I'm Tobias Carlisle, joined as always by Jake Taylor. Our special guest today is Chris Mayer.
He's a portfolio manager, author of 100 Baggers, and author of a new book, The Investor's Odyssey. Welcome, Chris. How are you?

**Jake Taylor** (1:19)
I'm doing well.

**Chris Mayer** (1:20)
Thank you for having me on, guys. It's good to be with you.

**Tobias Carlisle** (1:23)
Tell us a little bit about-

**Jake Taylor** (1:24)
Remiss for not having Chris on earlier at this point. It feels like an unforced error on our part.

**Tobias Carlisle** (1:33)
Tell us a little bit about the new book.

**Chris Mayer** (1:36)
Well, sure. I wrote 100 Baggers, and then after that, I've done, of course, a lot more thinking about long-term investing and what it's all about. So I've put this book together, and I think the core, there's a story I tell in the beginning that inspired a lot of thinking in it, and that was that there was one year when I was heading to the Berkshire meeting in Omaha, and I sat next to this woman. She was bumped from business class, and there was an empty seat next to me. She was placed next to me. At the time, we got chatting with her, and turns out she's like one of the original investors in Berkshire, and she's been to every meeting, and she knew Buffett, and she had just invested with him, and basically left the money there, and she became very wealthy, and then she lives in Nantucket, and she's giving away chairs to her grandchildren. And I thought to myself, wow, she basically made one decision, which is to buy this stock and just left it alone. And she's got a track record that beats most every active manager anywhere on the planet. So it got me thinking about, well, what's a good investor?
We say someone is a good investor. What does that mean, really? So I started thinking about that and using her story a little bit to unpack that journey. And then I was thinking, well, if long-term investing is like a journey. And we were talking a little bit about before we got in the air that I had read the latest translation of The Odyssey last year that came out, one by Daniel Mendelssohn. And so that was in my head as well while I was writing this and sort of inspired thoughts about how all the obstacles to holding on to a stock for a very long period of time and reminiscent of Odysseus and his journey and all the temptations, all the travails he has. So I used that too as a kind of organizing metaphor for the book, you just kind of talk about this journey. So it was fun to write, it was fun to put together. And yeah, I hope people like it.

**Tobias Carlisle** (3:37)
You refer a little bit in the title to the avoiding the siren call. What's the secret there?

**Chris Mayer** (3:46)
Well, I mean, the sirens kind of metaphorically for anything that is calling us off the course of holding on to our investments. So all the media that we have to put up with as investors all the time wants us to take action. That's sort of the bias, right? It means every financial program or show or newsletter or whatever always makes it makes it want to seem that whatever is happening now is really important and you have to do something about it now. There's all these headlines about things that are happening.
So those are the things you have to sort of ignore. If you're going to own a business for a very long time, it's a lot about ignoring the things that don't really have much to do with your business over the long period of time. And so that's really a good metaphor for the sirens.

**Tobias Carlisle** (4:40)
What's the secret to ignoring it?

**Chris Mayer** (4:44)
Yeah, there's a lot of, I mean, there's no secret per se. I think a lot of it's common sensical. And I go through some of them.