The Rob Vinall Podcast

The letter contains a discussion of the following topics: An update on my health situation; A discussion of health data and privacy; A (I hope premature) post mortem of our investment in Carvana; Lessons learned from the Investment in Carvana; A defence of doing things differently.

RV Capital's first half letter for 2022 contains discussions of: Organisational changes at RV Capital; How I have dealt with the drawdown; Surging inflation; Rising interest rates and their implication for investing in long-duration cash flows; The fund’s exposure to tech stocks; War in Ukraine; and Taiwan and its implication for investing in Chinese companies And the development of our largest investments

This is a live recording of a panel discussion for emerging managers at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on the 27th of March 2022. The members of the panel are Claudine Innes, who is responsible for manager selection at a single family office based in Bilbao; James Ferguson, Partner at Global Endowment Management, an investment company based in Charlotte; and Patrick Maurenbrecher, co-founder of Kontora, a multi family office based in Hamburg. The discussion contains lots of practical advice for emerging managers looking to start their own investment firm. The chat is also available as a video at https://youtu.be/HiXXWhmbE-Q https://www.globalendowment.com/our-team#james-ferguson https://www.kontora.com/en/kontora/your-advisors/

This is a live recording of the fireside chat between Joel Cohen and Rob Vinall at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on the 27th of March 2022. Joel works at MITIMCo, the investment management company of Cambridge-based university MIT. Joel also started the website emergingmanagers.org. The interview contains lots of practical advice for investors looking to start their own investment management firm. The chat is also available as a video at https://youtu.be/iZSQcLhgiwo https://mitimco.org/emerging-managers/ https://emergingmanagers.org/

This is a live recording of the fireside chat between Dennis Hong and Rob Vinall at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on the 27th of March 2022. Dennis is the founder and CEO of ShawSpring Partners, a Boston based investment firm founded in 2014.  The interview is also available as a video recording at https://youtu.be/vIgXfFAS8gU

This is a live recording of the fireside chat between Darryl Rawlings and Rob Vinall at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on the 26th of March 2022. Darryl is the founder and CEO of Trupanion, a pet health insurer based in Seattle, USA. 

This is a live recording of Rob's Q&A at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on 26 March 2022. It features questions from both the live and online audience. The recording is also available as a video on Rob's YouTube channel. Recordings of the other sessions at the annual gathering are also available both as a podcast or on YouTube. A link to the YouTube recording is here: https://youtu.be/uGDmvRWAgy8

RV Capital's 2021 letter contains a discussion of our recent investment in Carvana, an e-commerce platform for buying and selling used cars. The letter also weighs the relative importance of moat vs execution. It makes the argument that investors perhaps overestimate the importance of competitive advantage when evaluating companies. Execution is everything.

Why investors are overestimating the impact of regulation in China;  Some parallels to a prior market panic;  New investments in Alibaba and Salesforce.com. 

In my 2020 Investor letter, I discussed the concept of “Margin of Safety” i.e., paying less for a security than it is worth, and its implications for investing. This memo is intended as a follow-up to that discussion. It is divided into seven parts: Part 1: Why the importance of striving for an accurate view of the future is not obvious to older value investors. Part 2: Why experience is sometimes a disadvantage. Part 3: Why the opportunity set is different today and what this means for investing. Part 4: Why the goal is to be more accurate, not accurate, when forecasting the future. Part 5: Why skewness matters. Part 6: Why skewness does not obviate the need to calculate a company's intrinsic value. Part 7: What Nicholas Taleb misses.