Stock Picking Is a Temperament Game | Ian Cassel

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

It's football season, and you can now get almost anything you need for game day, delivered with Uber Eats. What do we mean by almost? Well, you can't get a running back delivered, but you can get baby back ribs delivered. A strong defense? No, a strong deodorant? Yes. The six pack of abs? No, six pack of beer? Yes. Get almost, almost anything for game day, delivered with Uber Eats, official on demand food delivery partner of the NFL. Order now. Alcohol 21 Plus and in select cities. Product availability varies by Regency. Check out for details.

SPEAKER_2 (0:30)

Propel Fitness Water with Gatorade Electrolytes, Zero Sugar and Vitamins. Propel hydrates better than water to help you get the most out of your workout and get back to your best self. What propels you?

Propel with Gatorade Electrolytes.

Tobias Carlisle (0:46)

This is Value After Hours. I'm Tobias Carlisle, joined as always by my co-host Jake Taylor. Special guest today, one of our faves, Ian Cassel. He's back. He's got a brand new book, Stock Picker. How are you, Ian? Good to see you.

Ian Cassel (0:57)

Thanks for having me back on. It's always a pleasure.

Tobias Carlisle (1:02)

We were having an interesting conversation just before we came on that. We should probably continue it because I think it's a, you're talking about the challenges of staying relevant as a microcap site, which you've done very well over an extended period of time.

And we were talking about, we were lamenting the difficulty of getting to the Value Investing Club, which seems to favor long, complex theses over the quality of the idea. And you had an interesting solution to that. Yeah.

Ian Cassel (1:38)

I think what preempted that was we're in the process of rebuilding our microcap club community. It's taken probably nine months to get to here. We're relaunching at the end of this month. And we've been on the same platform for the last 15 years. And as anything, when you're on something for 15 years, you get confined to the limits of that platform. And also, you just end up trying new things, adding new things, and the site just gets more and more cluttered over the years. And so it's been fun to just tear it all apart and rebuild it for the next 15 years.

And I think in today's day and age, especially in the last 15 years, there's the onslaught of substacks and discords and everything. People being able to build their own personal brand quicker and monetizing it is something that community sites kind of run into. And historically, well, and I still do, I view Microcap Club as a giant recruitment engine. I kind of have viewed us historically as, I want to be whoever the number one football team is in college right now. But I want to be Alabama football. And I kind of view our community like that. And it's all about recruitment. We want to get the best recruits that are out there. And they want to play for our team because of our legacy of winning.

We have some really good players on there and they feel like they can win as part of our community. So I've always looked at it that way. And so the number one KPI I've looked at since inception isn't the number of paid subscribers we have. It's actually the number of new applications that come in from new applicants wanting to become members. And the cool thing is that's been hitting new highs even the last couple of years. And that might be a product of a bull market. But we get 25 to 30 new applications a month. And so the thing that I've been thinking about on the incentive side, and we haven't announced anything yet, but I'll be announcing that probably in another six months, is figuring out some ways to keep those young recruits longer on our platform. Because what usually happens is people build up a reputation and they leave. That they go and they launch something somewhere else, and they can leave for a variety of reasons. Maybe they took a job somewhere that doesn't allow them to post on a forum anymore. But it could be just them wanting to launch their personal brand, which they should.

I did the same thing 15 years ago. And, you know, how to keep those people on the on the site longer. So I felt really from day one on the Micro Cap Club side, that I don't pick sides in regards to flavors of investing. You know, and that's one thing that I think we are different in addition to focusing on Micro Cap, different from a place like Value Investors Club. Like I don't have my snobby nose up at anything that's not value or perceived as value. You know, I want every flavor of investing to be represented on our community, because quite honestly, every flavor of investing has GOAT investors that invest in that flavor.