Ian Cassel has owned roughly 100 stocks over the past six or seven years and has held exactly one of them for more than five. That is not a confession of failure — it is his description of how micro-cap investing works.
The genre those numbers sit inside usually promises the opposite: find the great compounder, hold forever. Cassel's book argues that small companies are fragile in ways large ones are not, so the job is deciding which ones are worth owning rather than renting.
"It's hard to find ones that are worthy of owning and not just renting."
Cassel founded MicroCapClub, co-organizes the Planet MicroCap event, runs a concentrated fund, and has just published Stock Picker, which opens with his mother's death rather than with a screening methodology.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 55 minutes of audio, 23 minutes of reading.
Here are the 18 lessons that matter.
👤 Guest: Ian Cassel, founder of MicroCapClub, co-organizer of the Planet MicroCap event, manager of a concentrated micro-cap fund and author of Stock Picker
🎙️ Host: Andrew Walker, who hosts Yet Another Value Podcast and invests as a one-person shop
📰 Published: 15 September 2026 on YouTube (Yet Another Value Podcast)
🔴 YouTube | 🟢 Spotify | 🟣 Apple Podcasts | ⏱️ 55 min | ✅ Time saved: 32 min
Key Takeaways
The average hold on a micro cap is about a year, and that is by design rather than by failure
He has owned about 100 stocks in six or seven years and held one past five
Small companies are fragile in ways large ones are not, which is what shortens the hold
Key person risk, customer, product and jurisdictional concentration all at once
The US micro-cap universe is still larger than the NYSE and Nasdaq combined, even though the Walmart-sized listings stopped coming
Ten to thirty meetings with management teams are needed before the skill turns from a liability into an asset
The first ones, he says, you walk out and buy the stock either way
The edge from talking to people is rising precisely because AI can read everything that was written down
He only averages up when the fundamentals are accelerating faster than the share price
The way out of a losing streak is to get more diversified, not more concentrated
Selling a loser frees the mind share that finds the next winner
He was a paid capital-markets consultant to companies he wanted to own, and it cost him about $1M in 2009
A stock that is scarce gets bought higher than its fundamentals justify, because institutions have nowhere else to express the theme
1. Why He Wrote It
Andrew Walker opened on the book itself. Cassel had co-authored two books about a decade earlier with Sean Iddings, on the intelligent fanatics Charlie Munger named in his speeches — Les Schwab and John Patterson of NCR among them — trying to pull leadership lessons out of those stories and apply them to micro-cap investing.
This one is different in kind: a culmination of his own narrative combined with stock picking and micro-cap investing, and he described it as more personal and a joy to write because of that.
The prompt was fifteen years of articles and readers asking him to package them together so they could read the whole thing at once.
The other prompt was his age. He described telling himself for years that he would never write a book, then hitting just over 40 and deciding to bookend the first half of his life — "Well, hopefully it's my first half. I can die tomorrow."
Walker said the timing was part of why it landed for him, since he is rapidly approaching 40 himself.
2. The First Five Pages
Walker's first substantive reaction was to the opening of the book, which he had expected to be a research manual.
The book opens with Cassel's mother's death, and returns to the story in the middle. Walker said he read the first page, on a PDF, and had to step away from the computer.
His broader point is that the professional ideal cuts against the material. Investors are told to be stoic, to buy the stocks and keep the emotions of the market out of it — and what shines through the book is the personal side, including personal finances, which he said he was not prepared to think about at 27.
Cassel's answer was that he deliberately avoided the standard form. "I don't think the world needs another invest like me book or instruction manual book on how to invest in micro caps or whatever it is cuz we're different, and you can be successful in every different myriad of ways of flavor of investing."
"I wanted to write something that was authentic genuine personal."
The thesis he drew from it is that the two tracks run together: supporting yourself on your own capital, launching the fund, having kids — and your maturation as a human being running alongside your maturation as an investor.
3. Codfish and Lombardi
Every chapter opens with an anecdote. Walker's example was the 1800s problem of shipping codfish from the northeast to the west coast: freezing them tasted terrible, shipping them in an aquarium tasted terrible, and the answer was putting a catfish in with them so the muscles kept working.
Cassel said the stories come from ordinary curiosity and wide reading over fifteen years. "I've always found these little like oddball stories."
He noted what has changed: today people put the request into Claude and get something reflective of the point back immediately, where he had been doing it for fifteen years before that existed.
The one Walker singled out is John Madden, then an assistant coach, watching Vince Lombardi spend eight hours on a single play and coming away thinking he knew nothing.
Walker turned it on his own show. Investors regularly tell him they could not talk about a stock for an hour; his answer is that if they have done the work and he asks even decent questions, they will be surprised how fast an hour goes.
Cassel's version is a claim about concentration. A portfolio of 15 stocks or fewer leaves the time to know every detail, qualitative and quantitative — and on any stock you own, you should be able to talk for five hours about a random topic, because you have to know it better than everybody else.
The other anecdote in that chapter is Frank Perdue, whose obsession with the nitty-gritty of his craft Cassel called the same pattern.
4. Still 8,000 Micro Caps
Walker's sharpest challenge was whether the book describes a market that no longer exists. There are few US companies under $500 million; Sarbanes-Oxley and public-company costs keep them private; most of what is left is small caps that fell 90%, or businesses where shareholders come second to a founder who cannot be replaced.
Cassel conceded the top end of the range. "You don't see Walmart going public in 1970 as an IPO as a micro cap anymore." The US still gets 100 to 150 listings a year, but mostly story stocks or a company raising for a phase one trial rather than a real business behind it.
The offsetting fact is sheer count: the number of US micro-cap companies still exceeds the companies on the New York Stock Exchange and Nasdaq combined.
"We can pick and choose the five or 10 or 15 or 20." He put the universe at 8,000 and said nobody has to own all of them.
How many you can source domestically, he said, depends on which flavor of investing you run.
5. Renting, Not Owning
The hold period is where Cassel's practice diverges most sharply from the buy-and-hold orthodoxy, and he stated the number without hedging it.
The average hold on a micro cap, even for someone who knows what they are doing, is around a year. His own record: roughly 100 stocks owned over six or seven years, one held for more than five.
"It's hard to find ones that are worthy of owning and not just renting."
The reason is fragility rather than impatience. Small businesses carry key person risk, customer concentration, product concentration and jurisdictional concentration at once, which widens the range of bad things that can happen relative to a larger company.
Walker put the line from the book to him: most micro caps should not be held for more than 36 months, alongside the junior miner curve the book uses — buy before discovery, ride to the point of production, sell at the peak. His objection was that this is timing-dependent and inflection-dependent in a way that sounds like luck.
Cassel's answer was that he does not set the exit in advance. His intention is to hold for a long time; the reality is that most of these companies deserve to be sold, and the situation can change from week to week or quarter to quarter.
His worked example is the mechanics of a single contract. A $20 million revenue company wins one large order, revenue jumps 30% for three quarters, everyone extrapolates it a decade forward in a spreadsheet, the multiple goes from 8 times earnings to 80 — and in the fourth quarter, when the comparison has to be replaced and is not, the stock falls 80%.
6. The Hurricane Company
Walker raised a story from the book as the over-the-top version of the same lesson, and Cassel supplied the punchline.
After Hurricane Katrina, a company bought two rivals and became the largest hurricane recovery business in the US. Its pro-forma financials showed a $60 million market capitalization company earning about $90 million, and the stock ran.
Cassel bought it, sold it for a large gain, and the company later went bankrupt.
What the pro-forma numbers quietly assumed was a weather event. "The business model required two direct category 3 hurricanes to hit cities."
7. Outmatched by CEOs
Walker described his own ambivalence about management meetings: they are the way to learn something nobody else knows, and also the way he has taken his biggest losses, because chief executives are practiced salespeople meeting ten investors a week while he might meet two.
His self-description is the line of the episode. "I am just a little silly investor with a mustache sitting in a closet."
Cassel's answer starts with reps and is blunt about the early ones. The first ten or twenty times you sit across from a management team your eyes are as big as saucers, you are not paying attention to what you are asking, and you walk out and buy the stock either way because you are enamored to be there.
Walker added the psychology: if you started in or just out of college, in your own head you are still a student talking to a titan of industry, even when it is a company worth $20 million.
His estimate of the crossover is specific: ten, twenty or thirty reps before the liability turns into an asset and you can approach a meeting with a neutral mindset.
What started him on it was one meeting: the chief executive of XM Satellite Radio, which he said got him enamored with the qualitative art of judging leaders.
The method is duration rather than frequency. "It's going out and not just spending an hour with them, but spending an entire day to where you can get past the sound bites of the first two hours of a conversation."
And the purpose is not conviction to hold — it is early warning. Knowing someone well enough to sense something is wrong before they say it, which he compared to knowing your wife is angry without being told.
"That Spidey sense has saved me a lot of money over the years."
He was careful to say the approach is not compulsory: he knows plenty of people who never talk to management and have excellent records.
8. Which Trips Are Worth It
Walker pressed on cost. A video call is 30 minutes and low stakes; an in-person visit is a flight, a hotel, a day, and time away from family.
Cassel's filter is a decision threshold, not a research stage: he is usually at least mentally more than halfway to a buy before he books the trip.
Two things trigger one. Something he has just looked at that struck a chord, or something he has followed for a long time where a catalyst appears — or a fat-finger seller drills the stock down 30% and he can get on a plane quickly, see the real story and take advantage of the seller.
The budget is about twenty trips a year, of which roughly five are his own Planet MicroCap events, leaving the rest for company visits he can take at short notice.
The constraint he named last is domestic rather than financial. "I married well and she can step up with the kids, and that's key for this game, too."
9. Consulting From Inside
Between roughly 2005 and 2009, after graduate school, Cassel did capital-markets consulting work to cover his bills while building toward full-time investing — and he did it for companies whose stock he wanted to own.
Walker said he had not heard of anyone structuring it that way, and Cassel confirmed the obvious problem: he went out and found companies he liked as an investor, told them what they should be doing differently with their narrative, and was then blocked from buying while he worked with them.
His own rule was stricter than the legal line. He did not take material non-public information every time, but wherever he judged it a gray area he simply would not cross it.
The cost was real and he put a number on it: he estimates he left about a million dollars on the table in 2009 because he was still over the wall with one last client.
His description of the worst version — holding a seven-figure position when the chief executive tells you the company is about to miss a quarter.
Walker's counter-question was whether he would have sold anyway without being told, and both acknowledged what it feels like to be inside a company that knows bad news is coming.
10. The Value-Added Investor
The consulting years connect to something Cassel said he left out of the book: a model he saw once, around 2003 or 2004, and never forgot.
A fund manager he befriended ran perhaps $10 million in nano caps. He took a 10% position in a healthcare company, about a million dollars, filed, joined the board, and helped the chief executive with the narrative and with capital markets.
It became roughly a 20-bagger over the following four years, and what struck Cassel on reflection was the distinction: the manager was a value-added investor rather than a value investor, improving the company's odds rather than only buying low and selling high.
That is how he describes his own fund now. It still deals in very small market capitalizations, but takes a decent position, and management teams generally want it on the register because it is not there to flip out of the stock and gives usable advice.
His framing is a hybrid of private equity and venture capital meeting public micro cap, looking for good situations that can become great rather than bad situations that can become less bad.
The payoff he named is not a return. Being able to point at a company and say it is better because he was there — which he said goes beyond returns into fulfillment, and is the sort of thing you start thinking about past 40.
Walker's aside was that 25-year-old Cassel would not have recognized any of this: by his own account he was a story-stock investor buying Porsches and selling them to fund his portfolio, with an average holding period of six months and no interest in adding value, only in who would buy his shares 100% higher.
11. Scarcity of the Stock
One of the book's ideas is scarcity, and Cassel applies it to the share count as well as to the business.
The mechanism: a company with a niche, that is not issuing equity, that develops an attractive story, forces institutions to buy it higher because there is no supply coming.
Walker's large-cap illustration was Cable One, which traded at a substantial premium to Comcast and Charter. Small-cap managers told him they preferred the larger companies and thought them cheaper, but their mandates would not allow them — Cable One was the only cable exposure they could hold, so it carried a premium.
His conclusion is one he says he would have dismissed six or seven years ago: once something enters a mandate, buyers will drive it above what the fundamentals demand because they need to be in it.
In an illiquid micro cap the effect multiplies. Cassel's own example was Quepasa.com, a Latino social network of the period, and he generalizes it to any theme, AI included: find the best micro-cap way to participate, and it works best when only a few such companies exist.
12. Six Dividends, 300 Pages
Walker ran a text search through the book before recording, and reported the result as a question about capital allocation.
In a roughly 300-page book, the word "dividend" appears six times and almost all of them on one page, about a gold mining stock he identified as GORO, bought at a dollar a share and later paying a dollar a share in dividends. "Share buyback" and "share repurchase", he said, do not appear at all.
Cassel agreed with the observation and explained it as style. He is a growth investor looking for things that are undervalued and can become very overvalued, not things that will pay a dividend — though he does care about dilution, since issuing equity is how a multi-bagger gets destroyed.
What he wants instead is high organic growth funded internally and plowed back into growth.
Walker added the variance argument. If you think you have skill, you want more variance; a company at the point of paying a dividend has seen its variance shrink, and what is left is skewed to the downside — a dividend cut — because nobody expects a dollar dividend to become eight or eleven next year.
Cassel's last word on it was about how an investor changes. He started as a story-stock investor, moved to precious metals and junior mining, then to growth at a reasonable price. "I didn't care about profitability until 10 years in."
He described each stage as learning to paint with another color, and said that after twenty years you can use several — which is why his portfolio holds some cheap stocks and a couple of story stocks at the same time.
13. Evolve or Go Extinct
A line from the book — great investors evolve or go extinct — set off the longest exchange of the episode.
Cassel's own case is his early mentor, Skip, whom he still respects but moved away from as his own approach developed while Skip stayed with the same story.
Walker's case is a category of investor who has not looked in the mirror. People who did very well from 2000 to 2002 and poorly since the financial crisis, who blame the Federal Reserve, passive investing or broken markets.
"Maybe I need to look in the mirror and say the problem isn't the market, it's me."
His counter-example is Buffett, who has stayed a value investor while changing what that means — from Benjamin Graham net-nets, to See's Candy and businesses that compound, to what Walker described as running a private equity firm with a public book, partly driven by the size of his capital base.
Cassel's version is that the good ones press out their circle of competence rather than reinventing themselves, doing it in small ways — shooting bullets before cannonballs — and never being satisfied, because they know there is a better investor inside them.
He added the second stage: the best go from playing every instrument in the orchestra to leading it, by putting a team around them.
The live example was a Fundsmith letter announcing a move toward momentum after a period of fundamentals-driven underperformance. Cassel said he was probably one of the only people who did not pile on and call the manager an idiot.
Walker's critique was about size of step rather than direction: wholesale change out of value and into momentum is a cannonball, not a bullet. Cassel agreed — you can tell no bullets were fired first.
14. No Team, Just a Network
Walker quoted Cassel's own line back at him: as a portfolio manager it does not matter who is around you, because your investors do not care, you get the credit and the blame, and you have no place to hide.
Cassel said he is the wrong person to ask, because he does not really have a team at the fund. It is him, plus one recent operations hire to take the administrative work off him.
What fills the gap is a network rather than a payroll. MicroCapClub and his personal contacts give him the equivalent of two or three research analysts he can lean on, plus a Slack group of ten or twenty people who remind him of himself twenty years ago — the ones with 28 hours a day to research stocks, before he was married.
The underlying discipline he described is an audit of yourself: being honest about what you are strong and weak at, and filling the weaknesses with tools, people, or both.
And being willing to lose them. If you hire someone who reminds you of you, and you are entrepreneurial, they will eventually leave — so applaud them when they do and keep an eye out for the next one.
On the inbound side, he is looking for one thing in the write-ups that reach MicroCapClub: evidence the writer actually spoke to somebody at the company and included what they learned in the thesis.
The filter is getting harder because of AI write-ups, which he said are still obvious today but will not be for long.
His claim about where the edge is going runs against the technology. "It's going out of your way to have those conversations." The only place left to get an edge is the interpersonal material that is not recorded or transcribed, and he thinks that edge is going back to what it was thirty years ago.
"Again, it's unique information that only you can get if you can go get it."
The mentorship version of the same rule is how he got Skip's attention. Trying to get it directly did not work. What worked was researching the stocks Skip already owned, finding incremental information through scuttlebutt, and posting it — so Skip would wonder who the kid was and how he knew something Skip did not.
The general rule: provide value first, and the reciprocation happens on its own rather than through anyone reading a fire hose of unsolicited theses.
Walker's version of the problem is the volume: people sending a write-up a week, and no obvious way to tell eagerness from spray-and-pray — with the caveat that his own work at 21 was not that good either.
15. Buy Low, Then Buy Higher
Cassel is a proponent of averaging up, which Walker said he has struggled with for years: you buy at 10, the stock is at 15, and it no longer feels like the same purchase.
Walker's second worry is position sizing. A 5% position that doubles is a 10% position before you add anything, and he has watched people buy all the way up and then get destroyed.
Cassel's test is a ratio, not a price. He averages up only into companies whose fundamentals are accelerating faster than the share price — which is the arbitrage, and the reason a stock can be as cheap at 15 as it was at 10.
The second argument is about quality rather than value. When a $20 million or $50 million company doubles its revenue it is a better business than it was: more customers, more products, more geographies, more management depth, and therefore deserving of a higher multiple.
He drew the line at price action alone. Some things go up because the market is hot or because they have touched an AI theme, and those are not candidates for averaging up.
Walker's own confession was two cases in the last couple of years where he wrote down that the business was better than the day before, did not act, and watched both work out.
16. Every Trade, Logged
Cassel has journaled since his twenties, and he keeps two separate practices rather than one.
The creative one has no agenda. He used to get up at 5 a.m., make coffee, do mindless tasks until the caffeine hit, then write — sometimes about personal things, sometimes about stocks, sometimes about anything else. Most of the book came out of that.
The investing one is structured and deliberately old-fashioned. He updates his thesis at least every quarter and after every conversation with a chief executive, in a Word document he can search, alongside a watch list of things he is waiting to see change.
Every trade gets a record. "Every trade I make, I say what I did and why so I can go back and reflect on it."
The point of the record is the uncomfortable review — going back over the ones that went up fivefold immediately after he sold, and seeing whether anything can be pulled out of it.
Walker's own practice is newer and broader: writing down thoughts on markets, less to reference later than because getting the thoughts onto paper is itself the useful part.
17. Getting Out of a Slump
Walker asked about imposter syndrome — the feeling after a big winner that it was the last one — and said a performance coach had pointed out that he says it every time.
Cassel described two mirror-image failure states. "We have a tendency when we're on a hot streak to get conceited and think we know everything. And then when we go through a low streak, we feel like we know nothing." In the low state investors reach for answers everywhere, stretch the strategy into places it should not go, and buy things at the top.
The specific pathology he named is concentrated investors doubling and tripling down. They average down into the positions that are not working, sell incremental winners to fund it, get more concentrated in their losers, and eventually go broke and shut down.
His diagnosis of the motive is that they want to prove the market wrong rather than make money or stop losing it.
His own prescription is the opposite of what the instinct says: get more diversified. "Actually sell a loser, free up the mind share, add a couple more batters to the lineup, give yourself a couple more chances to win, and that's how you get out of the hole."
The reframe that made it possible came from a panel three years earlier, where an investor said that selling a loser is the ultimate expression of conviction — the belief that you will go and find something better.
Both described the physical relief of it, Cassel saying that once the position is off the books and off the screen it feels like chains coming off.
Cassel also said he does not engage with bear cases publicly — he will listen to one, but will not debate it on Twitter.
18. Taking Care of Today
The last chapter, and the last question, is about wanting time to move faster — pulling next year's returns forward so you can find out whether you were right.
Cassel said the feeling is an artifact of age. At 25, time was abundant and there was room for mistakes; past 40 it becomes scarce, which is scarcity applied to your own life rather than to a share count.
The occupational hazard he described is precise. A stock picker is always estimating where a business will be in one, two or three years, making a decision today, and then waiting — so your children come home from school and you are still thinking about an earnings call.
His argument is that the habit costs returns as well as time: thinking too much about the future stops you doing the thing today that produces the return tomorrow.
The chapter's answer is a list of present-tense actions, and he mixes the domestic and the professional deliberately. "Hugging your kids today, kissing your wife today, telling her you love her even though it's a bad day and you don't feel like saying it." Calling your father, apologizing, doing the research, doing the expert call, running the screens.
"And if you do all these things today and not wait, that's what produces tomorrow."
Bonus Insights
One of the book's rules is not to ask multi-part questions, and Walker said he felt personally attacked by it, since he likes to ask seven at once. His defense is that it works if you have a long block of time and can follow up; the risk with a stacked question is that the answer skirts the parts the executive does not want.
Walker's verdict on the book, stated repeatedly: "I loved it." He said he has had many book authors on and that this one landed differently because of how personal it is.
Cassel's closing remark was about the show rather than the book — that giving smaller-cap and younger managers a platform helps micro-cap investing generally, whether or not each guest is a micro-cap investor.
Walker's own framing of who listens: mostly people in their late twenties and early thirties, who he suspects will read the midlife passages the way he did at 27, and understand them later.
Cassel's bottom line is that micro-cap investing is a craft of renting rather than owning: the businesses are fragile enough that most of them deserve to be sold, the only durable edge is the information you get by physically turning up and talking to people, and the discipline that keeps you in the game is behavioral — selling the loser, diversifying in the slump, and doing today's work today.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
MicroCapClub (The community he founded and still runs; he judges the write-ups posted there on whether the author actually spoke to someone at the company)
Planet MicroCap (The event he co-organizes, and about five of the roughly twenty trips he takes a year)
Cable One (Walker's scarcity example: it traded at a large premium to Comcast and Charter because small-cap mandates could hold nothing else in cable)
SiriusXM (As XM Satellite Radio, the source of the management meeting that started Cassel on qualitative work; its chief executive was the first titan he sat across from)
Quepasa.com (A Latino social network of the period, and his own example of finding the one micro cap that expresses a theme)
GORO (The gold mining stock Walker identified as the book's only real dividend example — bought at a dollar a share, later paying a dollar a share)
Fundsmith (Its letter announcing a shift toward momentum after underperformance; Cassel declined to criticize it, Walker called the change a cannonball rather than a bullet)
Berkshire Hathaway (Their case study in evolving without changing label — Graham net-nets, then See's Candy, then what Walker called a private equity firm with a public book)
Claude (What Cassel says people now use to produce the kind of illustrative anecdote he spent fifteen years collecting by hand)
NCR (John Patterson's company, one of the Munger-named intelligent fanatics in Cassel's earlier books, alongside Les Schwab)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Stock Picker – Ian Cassel (The subject of the episode: part memoir, part micro-cap method, opening with his mother's death)
Cassel's two earlier books on intelligent fanatics – with Sean Iddings (Written about a decade ago, built out of the leaders Charlie Munger named in his speeches)
Ross O'Toole's book on interviewing management teams (Walker's previous book guest, and the reason he says he is pulled back and forth on management meetings)
The Fundsmith letter (The live example of an investor evolving, and of doing it in one step rather than several)
Watch the full episode:
If this was worth your time, send it to someone closer to the industry than you are.
Get the latest market chatter as it happens: