Claude Walker

and how it feels because that's the same conviction you will actually need to have a really big winner.

Like I'm not advertising, don't fall in love with stocks like I did at the beginning because it's a renewable energy stock or it's a lithium stock or whatever the story is.

And don't fall in love with that and stop being a good investor and an analyst, which is a whole different set of skills.

But you still do need to have that affinity.

It's going to be really hard to win big on a company that you have a disaffinity for anyway.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I'll tell you...

My aha moment there was because I was doing law and I was interested in renewable energy, I did a renewable energy law thesis for which I needed to interview a bunch of renewable energy companies that were listed on the ASNs.

So I was just this honest student that was like, all right, I want to talk to all these CEOs.

And that's how I learned that if you could just...

guess their email which is usually trivially easy after a few tries and you reach someone if you're like hey this is me i'd love to talk to you about you know the thing that you're always thinking about like their company um and just make sure you have just like like one little good like a little good question which means that how do you ask a good question means you have to have like for example read their letter in the annual report and you know read

you know a little bit of reading and thinking and and it's that uh it's the old coding you know quest response what have you tried like google it first if you can find the answer in google easily then you shouldn't ask the ceo but when you find something um that's like a good thing to ask then yeah do it you'll you'll be surprised and um in particular the smaller companies uh usually will have time to reply to people and it's always a good um

it's a good sign if people will talk to you, generally speaking, although, you know, it's not a hard and fast rule.

Sometimes they come back with spin or, or just a bit too into marketing, but most of the time it's a great result.

Yeah.

So shareholder activism is... So one side of ethical investing is, which I've talked about a lot, it's like, oh, I won't own shares in that because I don't like it.

Another approach is to buy shares in a company and become a shareholder and then agitate as a shareholder for change.

And just like the strategy of not owning shares at all, shareholder activism is...

something that works when there's like lots of there's lots of people doing it um and so it's usually hard to um at least in the sense we're talking about it right it's usually hard to point to an example where one particular shareholder has quickly won however a good example we've already touched on today is i would say that um