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Top 50 Microcap Investor List: Andrew Page
This week’s Top-50 feature is Andrew Page, a private investor, managing director and founder of Strawman. com. Prior to founding Strawman.com in 2018, Andrew was a Research Analyst for the Motley Fool and an Industrials Analyst for Australia’s leading online broker, CommSEC.
Read our feature on Andrew Page here
Truffle Hogs
“It is unfortunately true that experts are generally better at seeing their particular kinds of trees than the forest of all life. Thoughtful laymen can become very good at seeing the forest, particularly if they lose their timidity about challenging the experts.” —Garrett Hardin (“Filters Against Folly”)
A recent podcast chat between Malcolm Gladwell and Michael Lewis contained a profound piece of investment wisdom, even though it wasn’t intended that way:
Michael Lewis: Experts have been interesting to me for a long time. I think there are kind of two sources for my interest in the subject. One is, at the very start of my career, when I land on Wall Street not knowing anything and I start giving finance advice to people, when I don’t know what I’m talking about, and they take it. And I get paid huge sums of money for this expert advice. I become aware that people don’t really know who the expert is—that it’s really easy to pretend to an expertise without having it, especially in the financial markets. But I think it was a general bewilderment that expertise got so mis-valued or misunderstood.
And then, like you, I’ve made my career figuring out who the expert is. I’ve walked into worlds that I know very little about, whether it’s Silicon Valley or professional baseball or the American government, and I’m looking for the reliable narrator. I’ve found over and over again, it’s kind of a surprise where you find the expert. It isn’t the person—if you knew nothing about it and you just had a casual familiarity with the world—it isn’t the person you might think it is. They’re often hidden, buried, on the outside, on the fringe in some little narrow space. And you go find them and unlock them and you have a great story…. At some point in almost everything I’ve done as a writer, I’ve got to figure out who the expert is. And that in itself is an interesting task.
Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah, that notion, where we are the truffle-hunting pigs of the professional world. We go around sniffing for the real thing in a way that very few other professions are so completely organized around, that bit of truffle-sniffing. Everyone else dwells in their own little corner, but we’re constantly on the move.
As we live through these volatile markets, keep in mind how difficult it is to tell who the real expert is. As Lewis observed, it’s not always who you think it is. The real experts may not be the people who show up on TV, or in newspapers or magazines.
For those investors that analyze individual companies, being a truffle hog might be the most beneficial activity one can pursue. Many times, company executives tell a rosy story that a mid-level manager can dispel in less than ten seconds.
So, we encourage you to look hard to find those hidden experts. Markets are volatile. Risk is high. But so is the reward for doing good work.
“I never allow myself to have an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.” —Charlie Munger
Tweet of the Week
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