Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
· Gavin Baker
And that was day three. I went to the bookstore and I bought the books that they had, which were Peter Lynch's books. I read those books in two days. I'm a very fast reader. Then I read all these books about Warren Buffett. Then I read Market Wizards. Then I read Warren Buffett's letters to his shareholders. This is during my internship. Then I read Warren Buffett's letters to his shareholders again. Then I taught myself accounting. There's this great book, Why Stocks Go Up and Down. Then I went back to school. I changed my majors from English and history to history and economics. And I never looked back. And it consumed. I continued to really focus on climbing, but I would be in the gym and I would print out everything that the people on The Motley Fool wrote. They had these fools. They were early to talking about return on invested capital. Incremental ROIC is a really important indicator. And I would just read it and I would underline it and I'd read books and then I'd read the Wall Street Journal. And then eventually there was a computer terminal finally set up near the gym, and I'd go to that gym and just read news about stocks. And it was the most important thing in my life. And I barely kept my grades up. And yeah, that's how I got into it. History, current events, skill and chance. And I am a competitive person and I've actually never been good at anything else. I got picked last for every sports team. I love to ski. I've literally spent a small fortune on private skiing lessons. I'm not that good of a skier. I like to play ping pong. All my friends could beat me. I tried to get really good at chess, and this was before, when you actually had to play the games. And my goal was to beat one of the people. I'm sure there's a park somewhere.
· Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Gavin Baker
[00:00:00] S0: It's literally right there. [00:00:00] S1: Oh, just right there. [00:00:00] S0: The most famous one is right there. [00:00:00] S1: Okay. Well, there's one in Cambridge and I wanted to beat one of them. Never beat one of them. I've never been good at anything. I thought I would be good at this. And the idea of being good at something other than taking a test that was competitive was very appealing to me. And so I think that's been a really important thing too. And to this day, this is the only thing I'm good at. I'd love to be good at something else. I'm just not. [00:00:00] S0: I think I'm going to start asking this question of everybody, the ongoing education of Pierce and Maeve. Amazing place to close. I love talking about everything. [00:00:00] S1: Thank you. [00:00:00] S0: Thank you so much for your time. [00:00:00] S1: This was great, man. Thank you, thank you, thank you.