Success Secrets of Warren Buffet, Peter Lynch & The Other Great Investors | Pieter Slegers

**Pieter Slegers** (0:00)
To me, investing is saying no as soon as possible, meaning today you have 60,000, roughly 60,000 listed stocks. I think we can all agree that nobody is able to analyze them all. And today, I try to make it a sport to find the reason to say no within 60 seconds. And the funny thing is in 98% of the company examples, you can do that.

**Adam Taggart** (0:32)
Welcome to Thoughtful Money. I'm its founder and your host, Adam Taggart. We spent a lot of time on this channel hearing how experts think the financial markets will react to recent developments. But history's most successful investors, the Warren Buffets, the Benjamin Grahams, the Peter Lynch's and the John Templetons, they didn't concern themselves much with what was happening in the short term. Instead, they focused on doing the following, buying wonderful companies led by outstanding managers trading at fair valuation multiples. And then they held on to them, sometimes for decades. Today's guest, Peter Slegers, has made it his career's mission to understand and apply the core success principles and best practices of the world's greatest investors and then help regular investors like you and me ride their coattails. His sub-stack, Compounding Quality, is currently the number five highest earning financial sub-stack in the world. And today, we've got the good fortune of hearing his synthesis of what makes a successful investor. Peter, thanks so much for joining us today, all the way from Belgium.

**Pieter Slegers** (1:36)
Thanks for having me, Adam. It's a true honor to be here.

**Adam Taggart** (1:39)
Well, thank you. You and I have been in touch several times over the past year. I'm so glad we finally got a chance to make this happen. I think people are going to find this discussion really interesting, Peter, because as I said in the intro, you've made it your life's work to study the greats, and then to emulate them and put their best practices into practice in the compounding quality portfolio. I know a lot of people are probably very eager to say, okay, great, what should I be doing? What do the greats do? Why don't we start there?
It's a short question. I'm sure it's a tough answer, but what makes a successful investor in your mind from all of your research?

**Pieter Slegers** (2:22)
It's a great question, and it's an easy one to ask and maybe a harder one to answer.
Well, I think there are a few important things when you talk about investing and what makes a successful investor a successful or really successful investor, and probably the most important thing, the one thing that is really important is just discipline. Stay very disciplined about what you do, because regarding investing, there are multiple roads that lead to Rome. Well, in your intro, you talked about Warren Buffet, obviously, and also Peter Lynch, for example. Well, Peter Lynch was someone with Magalan, was really successful and owned over 100 stocks. And then you add on the other end, Warren Buffet was very concentrated and made all this money via 14 companies, basically. So it's important to pick a strategy that suits you as an investor and stick to that strategy rigorously. Well, for me, that's quality investing. So trying to invest in the best companies in the world and do that at a fair price. And what I also do at Compound Equality is I try to invest some of those best investors in the world. And there's one question that I always ask. Well, what is the biggest investment mistake you ever made? And it's always one out of those two answers that come out of it. One is, well, selling your winners too soon. So for example, just imagine when you sold Starbucks in 1994 or sold Apple in 2005 2005 Well, you only need one Starbucks or one Apple and have owned it for 20 years to basically do tremendously well. And that will probably offset all your bad investments. So that's one big investment mistake, selling your winners too soon. And the other one is indeed knowing that certain companies are great business, understanding that business, but not buying it basically. So, for example, to talk about Warren Buffet again, well, he was friends with Bill Gates. He saw him regularly and he knew it was a great business, but he never invested in Microsoft. So when he would have done that 15 years ago, 20 years ago, obviously the results will be tremendous. And in general, last point I want to add on this one is you have three kinds of of advantages you can have as an investor. You can have an informational advantage, an analytical advantage or behavioral advantage. Now, when we look at the markets today and when we look at investing today, an informational advantage is very hard because there is a lot of information available on the internet. When we compare the situation today to the situation in the Benjamin Graham time, for example, well, 100 years ago, there was very little information. You need to buy books or go to the library to find the annual report of companies. Nowadays, everything is available. So I would say it's very hard to get an informational advantage. Second kind of advantage you can have is an analytical advantage. So for example, do your homework better than other people, make better investment cases. Well, my two cents there would be the larger the company, the more efficient the market. So I also worked in the industry and when we look at the big tech companies, for example, everyone is looking at them. So it's very hard to get an analytical advantage there. But one advantage we can have and one advantage that definitely retail or individual investors can have is a behavioral advantage. The advantage you have as a retail investor versus a professional investor is you don't need to give guidance to clients when you are underperforming for a quarter. It doesn't matter too much. What matters is that one, you reach your own goals in the long term and two, that you stay disciplined and stay the course. So identifying your own investment strategy and stick to that in a very disciplined way and obviously pick a strategy that works in the long term. I think that's the most important thing and that's how you can actually beat the market, which is obviously the goal of every person who invests in individual stocks.