Alec Renehan

know moats or technological advantage or it's about people and yet as investors we seem to always start at the opposite end of the spectrum with like ratios and margins and numbers um and obviously they're incredibly important and they they give us a lot of the story but that people and culture piece is is something that i think we need to be needs to be more front and center

Yeah, I think Nick Griffin, the CIO at Monroe Partners, gave us a stat that has really stayed with me and I think has informed a lot of my investing decisions when I am thinking about investing in individual companies.

And that is that it's just 4% of listed companies that drive all of the excess return in the stock market.

It's, you know, and then I think it's about half sort of get the market average return and then the rest do less.

But the challenge for us as long-term investors is finding that 4% of companies that will be the next leg of the market's journey upwards.

If we think back historically, we know what those companies are.

Speaking in 2021, it's pretty obvious.

It's the Facebooks, the Apples, the Amazons, the Microsofts.

But in previous generations, it was the Walmarts and the Boeings and stuff like that.

These exceptional companies are the ones that drive the overall market return.

And

for me reflecting on that and really trying to internalize that in my investing decisions it it's really about like not taking swings at things that are okay and you know like we we love looking at small caps and we love thinking about how you know if they get included in an index or if they just get another contract and stuff like that you know they're

they could go to the moon and they could tend back.

But really the driver of long-term gains isn't okay companies being added to indexes or added to active managers portfolios.

It's exceptional companies just continuing incredible growth journeys.

And for me, that's really what investing is today.

It's where's that next exceptional company coming from?

buy Amazon.

I think for me, I didn't grow up in a household that, you know, I learned about investing and I came to investing in

relatively early.