Only 2.7% Beat the S&P for 20 Years | Ian Cassel on What Elite Stock Pickers Do Differently

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**Matt Zeigler** (0:58)
You're watching Excess Returns, a channel that makes complex investing ideas simple enough to actually use where better questions lead to better decisions. On the show with me today, he's got a new book, Stock Picker, How to Develop the Mindset, the Temperament and Strategy to Outperform Wall Street, the Lessons for Investors of All Sizes and Market Caps Run Deep. On this one, Ian Cassel. Welcome to Excess Returns.

**Ian Cassel** (1:20)
Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure. Appreciate it.

**Matt Zeigler** (1:23)
You did a great job on this book. I'm going to say that in the extra Ernst complementary way.
You know, you did a good, does it feel good? Did this book feel good to get out of your head?

**Ian Cassel** (1:35)
It did. I never really thought I was going to write a book, but something about hitting the age of 40, going over the age of 40, and then having written so many articles and some of them connected more with others than other articles did.
And some of the things had a shelf life to them, my thoughts at that point in time and others didn't. But it felt good to get this out in paper. It was a mix of my personal narrative with some stock picking lessons and some other weird, quirky stories that I could somehow relate back into stock picking. So it was really fun to get this out there. Not to say I was looking to bookend the first half of my investing career, but it felt that way and it was not a relief, but it felt good getting out their own paper in a way that didn't read like an instruction manual or look at me, I'm a guru, now invest exactly like me type of book. It's meant to be find out how to invest like you book more than me.

**Matt Zeigler** (2:37)
You did a good job of it not being A, a checklist.
There's checklists in there, but the book is not a checklist. B, you didn't just give us a bunch of the same old tired and trite business stories or whatever.
People sometimes get in that like Gladwellian trap of being like, I'm going to tell you this amazing story about something that I have no personal attachment to, but I thought was curious. And I looked it up on Wikipedia or whatever. And here you go too. It's like, well, why? Why are you doing this to me? See, you figured out a way to balance like the checklists, the cool stories that you have a personal tie into, and then all this personal narrative, which was really truly endearing to get out of these pages. So thank you for writing this book.

**Ian Cassel** (3:16)
Oh, thank you. Thanks for reading it.

**Matt Zeigler** (3:19)
I want to open with this part.
You start with what is chasing you. There's 300 odd pages here of answering the question.
But for professional investors, we're going to keep this investor education focused for this conversation, just Excess Returns people. Stick with me on this one. Why is what is chasing you such an important question for people to ask?

**Ian Cassel** (3:40)
I think that initial chapter was probably one of the most fun ones for me to write, and even though it leads the book, it's a chapter that couldn't be written until after the journey. And I think we're all chased by different things at different seasons in our life, and it fuels us, our ambitions, our goals, and those types of things. And I had a weird goal at the age of 20, and that was to be a full-time private investor or stock picker, if you will. And that dream is a rather lonely dream.