Is Your Circle of Competence Wider Than It Really Is?

Hey guys! This week we have Nicholas E. Radice on the podcast. Nicholas is a distressed and real asset investor with a unique approach to markets. Nicholas is from Upstate NY and got his start in distressed investing after growing up in the midst of a manufacturing collapse in his hometown. After graduating from Cornell University, Nicholas worked under famous distressed investor Ian Cumming, before starting his own private investment holding company, backed by Peter Thiel. 

This podcast dives into Nicholas's unique investment approach as he combines lessons from Cumming and Thiel into the forgotten corners of the markets like microcaps, dark stocks, and real asset plays. 

If you enjoyed this conversation, make sure to follow Nicholas on Twitter @NICKRADICAL4. 

Here's a time-stamp of our discussion: 

• [0:00] Introduction 
• [6:00] Reducing Complexity 
• [9:02] Finding What Matters Most
• [16:15] Defining Circle of Competence
• [28:00] Short Term Skeptic, Long Term Optimist
• [35:00] Lessons from Ian Cumming & Peter Thiel
• [60:00] Discarding Ideas Quickly
• [72:00] Dark Stocks, OTC Stocks, and Microcap Ideas
• [74:23] Mistakes of Omission 
• [80:05] Closing Questions

Finally, a big thanks to the following sponsors for making the podcast a reality.

Mitimco

This episode is brought to you by MIT Investment Management Company, also known as MITIMCo, the investment office of MIT. Each year, MITIMCo invests in a handful of new emerging managers who it believes can earn exceptional long-term returns in support of MIT's mission. To help the emerging manager community more broadly, they created emergingmanagers.org, a website for emerging manager stockpickers.

For those looking to start a stock-picking fund or just looking to learn about how others have done it, I highly recommend the site. You'll find essays and interviews by successful emerging managers, service providers used by MIT's own managers, essays MITIMCo has written for emerging managers and more!

Tegus

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I spend nearly all my time reading Tegus calls on existing holdings and new ideas. And I know you will too. So if you’re interested, head on over to tegus.co/valuehive for a free trial to see for yourself.

TIKR

TIKR is THE BEST resource for all stock market data, I use TIKR every day in my process, and I know you will too. Make sure to check them out at TIKR.com/hive