The Grant Williams Podcast Ep. 133 - Ian Cassel

Grant Williams (0:10)

Before we get going, here's the bit where I remind you that nothing we discussed should be considered as investment advice. This conversation is for informational and hopefully entertainment purposes only. So while we hope you find it both informative and entertaining, please do your own research or speak to a financial advisor before putting a dime of your money into these crazy markets.

You're about to listen to a special preview edition of The Grant Williams Podcast featuring my very special guest, MicroCap expert and now author, Ian Cassel, the author of the terrific new book, Stock Picker. The book is full of fantastic stories and will really shed some light on a part of the market that is wildly misunderstood, can be incredibly interesting, educational and painful all in the same time, but is well worth taking a look at if you have the right sort of disposition to it. Every episode of The Grant Williams Podcast, including The End Game, Super Terrific Happy Hour, The Narrative Game, This Week In Doom, Shifts Happen, Kaos Theory and The Hundred Year Pivot is available to Copper and Silver Tier subscribers at my website grantwilliams.com. Copper Tier subscribers get access to all the podcasts, while members of the Silver Tier get both the podcast and my monthly newsletter Things That Make You Go Hmmm. So, if you enjoy what you hear at the show and you'd like more high-quality content like it, then please make your way over to grantwilliams.com and join our exciting community today. And now, on with the show.

Ian, welcome to the podcast. I'm so glad we found a reason to do this. I've spoken with you on your podcast a while ago, and we've now got a brilliant excuse to have you join me. So, thanks for doing that.

Ian Cassel (1:58)

I enjoyed having you on ours and really a pleasure to be with you and your audience as well.

Grant Williams (2:02)

We're going to talk about your book today, Stock Picker. And you very kindly sent me a copy, which I devoured. And when I read the book, it wasn't what I was expecting. I was expecting a How To Pick Stocks Mania. I was curious to read a book like that written by you because of the area of the market that you focus on, which we'll get into shortly.

What I found was to me, as I said to you, the Holy Grail. It's a memoir with a method and a framework built into it, which to me, I just think is wonderful because there are so many great stories in this book. And your own story is rich in little episodes that have taught you things and I found fascinating to read. So I'm hoping we can get into a lot of that stuff today and tease out some of those stories and then get into some of the methods at the back of the book. So as I said, thanks for sending me the book. Thanks for doing this. And I guess what I'd love to start is to start with your story for the people that aren't familiar with you. Because again, you have a fascinating story and a fascinating relationship and a fascinating path into finance, right? Which is atypical, let's put it that way. So without me putting words in your mouth, why don't we kick off with that?

Ian Cassel (3:06)

Well, thank you. I never thought I would write a book, but something about hitting in my 40s. You know, when a book end the first half of my career, if God gives me grace to stay alive a little bit longer, it's something I wanted to put out there. And like you, I've written articles over the years, and there's some articles that people connect with more than others. And there's some things that you wrote 10 or 20 years ago that you don't believe in anymore. And then there's some that have a shelf life. And so it was fun to put this book together in a way that was genuine to me, that made it personal as well with my personal narrative and going out some stock picking lessons that would be applicable not only to MicroCap Investing, but hopefully other people and whether they're experienced or beginners. So anyway, I appreciate that. Yeah, I mean, my upbringing was in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. And so Lancaster, Pennsylvania is southeastern Pennsylvania. It's about an hour and a half drive west of Philadelphia.

And it's a very rural, blue collar, Bible belt, kind of conservative type of atmosphere there. And so my parents, they were very conservative Christians. They were borderline between Brethren and Mennonite. And actually our county itself is probably the number one industry is Amish people. If you don't know what Amish people are, we actually have the largest Amish community, I think in the world in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. It's what we're known for. It's the number one and number two industry in the county is people coming from all over the world to come and stare at the Amish people there while they milk cows or build furniture or everything in between. And so it's just a unique place. And there's about half a million people in the county, about 40,000 of them are Amish. And you can literally drive through the whole county and not see a single Amish person. But that's what we're known for. And so growing up in that environment, my parents had a strong faith. My dad was a small business owner. And when I mean small, I mean really small. It was him working, my mom doing the books. And my upbringing was probably about as American as apple pie. We didn't really have too much hardship on the relationship level. My parents loved each other every day. They were married. They loved us kids. They let us know all that good stuff in between. So it was a very good upbringing. I think there's certain things looking back and reflecting on kind of the way I was brought up and even the environment. I think it did impact my investing later on, but where I was lucky enough to have parents that they had saved for me in a certain amount of money. And when I was a sophomore in high school, and this would have been 1996, so right at the start of the.com technology bubble, they sat me down and said, we have $20,000 we have saved for you, and we're just going to hand this over to you. And quite honestly, they didn't care whether I used it for college or whether I used it to buy a car because they had hoped that I would work for the family business. They didn't really hope that I did go to college.