Interview: Financial Independence And Value Investing In The 21st Century
Value, Portfolio Strategy, Crypto, Gold
Seeking Alpha Analyst Since 2015
Author and entrepreneur. My articles typically cover macroeconomic trends, portfolio strategy, value investing, and behavioral finance. I like to profit from the biases and constraints of other investors. Paywalled articles are available along with 1,000+ other authors by subscribing to Seeking Alpha Premium.
You can read some more of my work for free here on my Substack.
Summary
- Last week, I traveled to Florida to spend time with Pietros Maneos, a self-made multi-millionaire and value investor.
- In our interview, we discuss topics like value vs. quant investing, crypto, and stocks vs. real estate.
- What readers can learn about achieving financial independence.
- How Seeking Alpha has played an instrumental role in our careers.
Miami is a melting pot in which none of the stones melt. They rattle around.
-Tom Wolfe
Over the past couple of years, Seeking Alpha blogger Pietros Maneos and I have exchanged dozens of ideas that have greatly improved both of our investment results. We have a lot in common, both having lived in South Florida for part of our lives and attending the University of Miami, though over a decade apart.
After he graduated from Miami, Pietros traveled extensively and worked as a personal trainer before buying raw land in the mountains of North Carolina and building a vineyard and wedding venue from scratch. He sold the vineyard and reinvested the money in affordable housing in Florida, where he added units and improved his properties. From there, he added value investing to his repertoire, achieving a multi-million dollar net worth between stocks and real estate. If you know Pietros from Seeking Alpha today, there's a good chance that it's because of his monthly letters and because he and I coordinate our value investing picks together. He publishes his investment results at the end of each month, where anyone reading is free to follow along.
I hopped a plane from my home in Texas to South Florida this past week to share a couple of days with him and his family and to learn more about his investing philosophy. During the week, we recorded some of our conversations to share with my audience here.
Topics covered:
1. Syncretic investing. Syncretism is a greek philosophy where ideas that don't normally go together are fused together. For example, value investors and quants often find themselves at odds in the stock market. I started as a bottom-up value investor, moved more into quant investing as time went on, and now have married them back together. To this point, stock market investors often avoid real estate, but real estate and stocks go very well together when intelligently applied. Pietros used a similar idea on leveraged ETFs to combine leverage with diversification.
2. Crypto investing. Pietros was an early proponent of Bitcoin (BTC-USD), whereas I changed my tune during the coronavirus pandemic, looking for a fundamentally sound alternative for a store of value that isn't US dollar. We explain how investors can combine old ideas like dollar-cost averaging and compound interest with new ideas like cryptocurrency investing, as well as how we get part of our monthly income from interest on lending our crypto.
3. Financial independence. How Pietros achieved independence from corporate America through real estate and value investing (and how he learned it). I've taken a similar path in 2021 with online businesses and value investing.
4. How Seeking Alpha has made us better at fundamental analysis with its community of investors.
Analyst's Disclosure: I am/we are long BTC-USD.
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