The Intellectual Investor

How would a value investor like Warren Buffett look at today's crazy markets? What stocks would he buy? And what would he say about today's much-loved or much-hated companies? Featured in FT, Fortune, Barron's, and many others, Vitaliy Katsenelson's often contrarian articles on value investing, classical music, and life in general have already generated something of a cult following. You can now listen to his articles (old & new) read aloud by a professional narrator. Enjoy!

You are not as smart as you think you are - Ep 295 07/10/2026

You are not as smart as you think you are - Ep 295 Lately, I've been getting this powerful feeling that everything I touch turns to gold. Every time I buy a stock, it goes up. Did I finally figure out the stock market game? Did I find a secret way to follow Will Rogers' advice: Buy stocks that go up, and if they don't go up, don't buy them? No. I didn't get much smarter. I was simply a willing participant in the latest cyclical bull market. A bull market makes you feel smarter than you are, the same way a bear market makes you feel dumber than you are. This piece is a small excerpt from my first book, Active Value Investing (2007), which I later rewrote into The Little Book of Sideways Markets. I still stand by every word, but the older, more mature Vitaliy has some additional thoughts to share at the end. I walk through why feeling smart makes you do the opposite of what you should be doing, and my favorite trick for reminding myself how dumb I am (it involves pulling out an old annual report on a stock I lost a boatload of money in). I discuss the four-letter word R-I-S-K, the "buy and forget to sell" investor a bull market quietly creates, and why every sell looks dumb in the moment. I talk about selling discipline, valuation targets, and why my objective is never to buy at the bottom or sell at the top. In the additional thoughts, I get into the discomfort of making rational decisions against the grain of the tribe, and what evolutionary programming has to do with it. The full piece is at investor.fm. _________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy's FREE weekly newsletter: 📚 Vitaliy's books: Soul in the Game - The Little Book of Sideways Markets - Active Value Investing - 🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website - _________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: View IMA's regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com. /episode/index/show/intellectualinvestor/id/42016520

Guy and I - Ep 294 06/16/2026

Guy and I - Ep 294 My dear friend Guy Spier did an almost hour-long interview with CNBC's Becky Quick. It is an interview I wish had never happened, or, if it did, for a different reason. Guy has been diagnosed with glioblastoma (GBM), one of the deadliest cancers. In January, Guy returned money to his investors, closed his fund, and wrote a must-read letter. I first heard of Guy at Charlie Munger's Daily Journal meeting, when a friend pointed to his silhouette and whispered his name with a deference that made me take note. Our friendship actually began a few years later in Trani, Italy, where my brother Alex met Guy first, both of them skipping the Value Investing Seminar to wander the streets. One of the first things Guy said to me was that he envied the relationship I had with Alex. Who starts a conversation like that? Guy does. He operates on a different wavelength. In this piece I write about what I learned watching Guy in action: his inaugural VALUEx conference in Zurich, our CFA European Tour through Frankfurt and London, Bizet's Pearl Fishers at the Zurich Opera House with his wife Lori, and the small moments that made me want to be more like him. I also share what Guy's letter did to my son Jonah, who interned at Aquamarine and stayed in Guy's home, and what Guy's diagnosis has clarified for me about kindness, borrowed time, and the obituaries we are all already living. The full piece, along with links to Guy's letter and the Becky Quick interview, is at investor.fm. _________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Guy's interview with Becky Quick Guy's letter to his investors The pianist Maria João Pires performing Photos _________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy's FREE weekly newsletter: 📚 Vitaliy's books: Soul in the Game - The Little Book of Sideways Markets - Active Value Investing - 🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website - _________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: View IMA's regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com. /episode/index/show/intellectualinvestor/id/41655420

This Is Your Captain Speaking - Buckle Up - Ep 293 06/09/2026

This Is Your Captain Speaking - Buckle Up - Ep 293 I am on the flight from Denver to San Francisco with my twelve-year-old daughter when I write this letter to IMA clients about the craziness I am seeing in the markets. The turbulence on the flight gave me the pilot analogy. The rest came from what I see in valuations. This market is starting to feel incredibly bubbly, approaching circa 1999. The similarities are eerie. Intel and Corning, darlings of 1999, are at multidecade highs at nosebleed valuations. Walmart is trading at 50 times earnings again, the same multiple that produced no returns for shareholders from 1999 to 2014. And Nvidia, the most valuable company in the world, trades at 30 times 2026 earnings while SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI prepare to go public, all losing money, collectively throwing close to a trillion dollars at AI data centers. I walk through why the capital cycle in semiconductors looks like the railroads in 1800s Britain and telecom in 1999, what it means that Meta and Google have gone from buying back their own stock to issuing it, and why three IPOs plus two secondary offerings may put a bow on this year's AI rally. I share why we have been trimming positions, buying smaller, and owning businesses that march to their own drummer. I quote a line from Jean-Marie Eveillard that has stayed with me since the late 90s. And I explain why our returns are likely to underperform the neighbors for the foreseeable future, and why we are not going to do anything about it. Read the full letter at investor.fm. _________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: What AI, Tariffs, and Global Uncertainty Mean for Your Portfolio Charts: Living and Investing with Intention Performance information _________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy's FREE weekly newsletter: 📚 Vitaliy's books: Soul in the Game - The Little Book of Sideways Markets - Active Value Investing - 🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website - _________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: View IMA's regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com. /episode/index/show/intellectualinvestor/id/41577910

Fiddler on the Roof and Value Investing - Ep 292 06/05/2026

Fiddler on the Roof and Value Investing - Ep 292 It was 2006, my fifth year teaching a graduate investment class at the University of Colorado at Denver, and I had stopped preparing for lectures. One day I opened the syllabus and found discounted cash flow analysis on the menu. I started with: "Imagine you are a farmer about to buy a cow. How much would you pay for that cow?" A few days later, on a Saturday morning, I was sitting in my basement working on the valuation chapter of my first book, Active Value Investing. I was stuck. Valuation can be a very dry and boring topic. After staring at a blank screen for hours, I started listening to Barbra Streisand's "Papa, Can You Hear Me?" from Yentl on YouTube. An hour later I was deep into Fiddler on the Roof, listening to "If I Were a Rich Man." And then something happened. I walk through how my subconscious melded Tevye with that cow lecture, and how I ended up writing a chapter about a Jewish farmer buying a cow named Golde, smack in the middle of a finance book filled with seventy-five charts and tables. It became my favorite chapter by a mile. From there I get into what almost two decades of writing have taught me: why I show up for an hour or two every morning without word-count goals, why the subconscious is where the magic happens, why storytelling beats sterile facts, and why Steve Jobs was right that you can only connect the dots looking backward. Also, a quiet tribute to my Eastern European ancestors, who were not so different from Tevye. The full essay is at investor.fm. _________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Barbra Streisand's "Papa, Can You Hear Me?" Tevye was a Rich Man chapter _________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy's FREE weekly newsletter: 📚 Vitaliy's books: Soul in the Game - The Little Book of Sideways Markets - Active Value Investing - 🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website - _________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: View IMA's regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com. /episode/index/show/intellectualinvestor/id/41547820

What to Do When a Stock Drops 25% - Ep 291 05/28/2026

What to Do When a Stock Drops 25% - Ep 291 A client emails me: stock XYZ has declined 25%, is the thesis broken? It's a fair question, and the honest answer is one I want to walk through carefully, because the same client letter brought a second question wearing different clothes: how do you tell the difference between patience and stubbornness when a position isn't working? Both questions get at something I think about constantly: how to hold a position through doubt without either flinching at noise or hardening into ego. Daily liquidity in the stock market is both a feature and a bug, and most of the job of being a long-term investor is learning to take the feature without getting hurt by the bug. I work through why I don't try to interpret daily price movements anymore, and why trying to make sense of them is like looking for deep meaning in the poetry of inmates of an insane asylum. I talk about reading the press release and listening to the earnings call before I look at the stock price, so "the market" (a computer, a day trader in his mom's basement, or a fund manager with braces to pay for) doesn't tell me what to think about a company's performance. Then I take on the harder question. I lay out what separates patience from stubbornness, why one investor is in scientist mode and the other is engulfed by ego, and why the line between hero and anti-hero is thinner than most of us want to admit. I borrow from Soul in the Game along the way. The full piece is at investor.fm. _________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy's FREE weekly newsletter: 📚 Vitaliy's books: Soul in the Game - The Little Book of Sideways Markets - Active Value Investing - 🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website - _________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: View IMA's regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com. /episode/index/show/intellectualinvestor/id/41441260

Greg Abel Takes Over Berkshire Hathaway: My Thoughts After Omaha 2026 - Ep 290 05/21/2026

What the Iran War Reveals About the Dollar, Gold, and the End of US Exceptionalism - Ep 289 05/14/2026

What the Iran War Reveals About the Dollar, Gold, and the End of US Exceptionalism - Ep 289 The US dollar accounts for 58% of foreign currency reserves today, down from 70% two decades ago. The US government's freezing of roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank reserves turned the dollar into a political weapon and undermined the comfort countries (even adversaries) had in it. Central banks are now accumulating gold as if preparing for an Indian wedding. The Iran war, an unraveling of post-WWII alliances, and a US borrowing 6% more than it earns are all reacting to the same underlying shift: the assumptions behind US exceptionalism are quietly being rewritten. I walk through what that means for portfolios, and why our exceptionality was not a gift from the economic gods but partly gifted to us by Lady Luck. I work through how to think about the dollar's slow decline (not binary, but billions of incremental decisions, like Vietnam and Brazil settling trade outside it, or India buying Middle East oil in local currency). I discuss why we added to gold despite my hating the position. I explain our exposure to oil and natural gas through a Canadian, a Swedish, and a Norwegian producer, and why management matters more than geography in a cyclical industry where eternal optimists tend to buy at the top and dilute at the bottom. I also answer the crypto question. Bitcoin may have been a lottery ticket a decade ago. Today it is hardly one. The full letter, with the client questions that prompted it, is at investor.fm. _________________________________________________________ 🔗 LINKS MENTIONED: Trump’s call for a bitcoin strategic reserve is a very bad idea https://investor.fm/trumps-call-for-a-bitcoin-strategic-reserve-is-a-very-bad-idea/ _________________________________________________________ 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on Vitaliy's FREE weekly newsletter: 📚 Vitaliy's books: Soul in the Game - The Little Book of Sideways Markets - Active Value Investing - 🌐 Follow Vitaliy: X/Twitter - LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/katsenelson/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/vitaliyk/ Website - _________________________________________________________ WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) and an award-winning writer. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." His work has appeared in the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, Barron's, Fortune, Institutional Investor, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of three books, including Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. _________________________________________________________ Please read the following important disclosure: View IMA's regulatory filings — including ADV Part 2A & 2B, Form CRS, firm brochure, conflicts of interest disclosures, sample quarterly letters, and privacy policy — at imausa.com. /episode/index/show/intellectualinvestor/id/41294080