My story...
Hi there, I’m Manuel Mauricio and I’ve created AllinStocks.com to help other investors get better at investing in stocks.
The question
A few years ago I was an architect. Yes, an architect. I was an expat architect in São Paulo, Brasil when I realized that the money I had in the bank should be yielding something more than zero. I had a light understanding of what inflation was and I knew that my money would be worth close to nothing by the time I retired.
I had previously bought stocks. The first stock I bought was of a bank that was going through a rough patch. Luckily, after a 10% share price decline, I decided that was my limit and sold all the shares -10.000 Euros rapidly became 9.000 Euros-. The bank eventually went bankrupt and that experience, albeit a short one, led me to acknowledge that I knew nothing about investing.
The answer
I reckoned that if I was going to invest by myself, I had to learn something about it.
I soon discovered Warren Buffett and other value investors like Peter Lynch, Mohnish Pabrai,etc. These guys were getting – and still are – double digit returns on their money decade after decade.
How could this be? It obviously couldn’t be luck. After digging a bit deeper, I figured it was a set of principles, strategies and rules that could be learnt, so I decided to learn them. I like to call this set of principles Intelligent Investing, after the great book by Buffet’s mentor Ben Graham. I started by reading about these great investors in my spare time, trying to emulate their strategies, learning as I went along. At a certain point, I realized that learning on my spare time wasn’t enough for what I figured I had to know if I wanted to get really good at it. I decided I had to dedicate all my time to it.
There is a great quote by the fund manager Robert Vinal that I like to borrow to illustrate my story:
” I got in because it was easy. I’ve stayed because it was hard.” – Robert Vinal
The decision
A year later, I quit my high paying job, I quit smoking -a long time goal of mine- and went back to my home country to live with my girlfriend. We rented a small apartment in Lisbon with a tiny office where I could immerse myself in my studies.
I then spent months reading: Buffet, Lynch, annual reports, fund letters, accounting books, finance books, blogs, message boards, online courses with famous fund managers, you name it.
I didn’t have a plan for how to make a living out of so much study but to me, that was a secondary issue. I am a firm believer of Steve Jobs’ philosophy that sometimes we have to take a leap of faith and believe the dots will somehow connect in the future.
The importance of a tutor
After some time, a fellow investor noticed how deep I was into investing so he invited me to co-launch his stock picking service into new geographies. We laid out the strategy and I got to work immediately.
Unfortunately, about a month later, he realized that he had no time to spare for a new project. I was already so into it that I decided to do it on my own. That’s how AllinStocks.com started.
The future
I now spend almost all my awake time researching businesses and writing about them in an easy-to-understand way so that like-minded investors can benefit from my work, hopefully increasing our wealth together over time.
I’m not interested in the hot stocks of the moment, I am not interested in getting rich tomorrow. In fact, I think that’s the fastest way to destroy capital. Instead, I am interested in buying great companies, with great managers, at a cheap price and then hold them as long as they present themselves as good investments.
I like to think of AllinStocks.com as the place to go for investors who want to learn how to proficiently analyse and value stocks . I strive to be the most transparent I can be by maintaining an active dialog with my readers. In fact, I have several personal friends following my work and I hope I can make a difference to, not only their lives, but to the lives of all the subscribers.
If you want to know more, here’s the video of a conversation I had with Bobby Kraft for the Planet Microcap Podcast.
Thanks for reading this! I’d love to have you join me and my community of 1000+ investors. Subscribe below.