Talking Billions Sep 21, 2026 1h 12m 47m saved
With Ian Cassel, founder of MicroCapClub and CIO of Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management
About 18% of the micro caps that exist are profitable businesses, and Ian Cassel's advice to anyone new to the space is to ignore the other 82%.
The usual reason given for avoiding the smallest listed companies is that they are risky. Cassel's framing is the reverse: the risk is concentrated in a specific, identifiable subset, and what is left is a corner of the market that large institutions are structurally barred from entering.
"Because it's a place where small smart money can gain an edge because institutions are kept out."
Cassel became a full-time private investor at 28 on his own capital, founded MicroCapClub in 2011 and Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management in 2018, and has just published a book, Stock Picker, which is what host Bogumil Baranowski brought him on to discuss.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 72 minutes of audio, 25 minutes of reading.
Here are the 17 principles that matter.
Key Takeaways
About 18% of micro caps are profitable, and that subset is where Cassel tells newcomers to look
The rest are story stocks that have to raise capital every six or nine months and dilute holders
Illiquidity is the wall that keeps institutions out — a stock trading $10,000 a day cannot absorb institutional money, and that barrier has held for a century
He wrote "10k and two 10 baggers equal millionaire" on a napkin at 22 and looked at it every day until it happened in 2009
$20,000 his parents handed him at 16 became $120,000 by the time he left high school, then lost 90% in the crash that followed
He calls that first win misplaced self-confidence, and says it set the risk appetite for the whole career
He moved from 2–4 stocks at 25% positions to 15 stocks at 3–5% at cost and thinks he gave up volatility rather than return
Great leaders come in three shapes — repeat winners, overlooked internal successors, and first-time founders — and a 10% ownership screen misses the second kind entirely
A long pause in a management meeting works like a double click on a mouse, because it makes the other side go a level deeper
The whole North American micro cap market adds up to about 500 billion, against 22 US companies that are each bigger than that
Losing seasons are made of holding losers too long, and a 3% position can take up 90% of the day's attention
Investing is 5% intellect and 95% temperament, and ±30% days are normal in this part of the market
1. The Napkin At 22
Baranowski opened by reading from the book — Cassel's line that he has been a stock picker all his life, has never had a normal job, has never worked for anyone, and loves finding small stocks nobody wants and selling them ten times higher when everyone does. Cassel's first move was to correct the premise that he did it alone.
He then went back to the decision itself. He had just made money in a micro cap, XM Satellite Radio, while a sophomore or junior at university, and was not doing the internships or minding the grades that would have led to a job.
He wrote the goal on a napkin and stared at it every day
At that point, I was technically like one ten bagger down.
Ian Cassel
What he wrote was 10k and two 10 baggers equal millionaire. It was, he said, his vision statement and his rallying cry, and to most people it sounded ridiculous.
The appeal was the absence of other people, not the money
why wouldn't I just do that and not have any bosses, no clients, customers, no headaches, not having to have opinions on things you don't need to have opinions on, you know, that sounds much better to me.
Ian Cassel
It took most of a decade
And, it took six, seven years to reach that goal, finally in 2009.
Ian Cassel
Baranowski's own reflection was that doing it this way meant Cassel never had to unlearn anything — he was never trained inside a firm and never had outside money shaping what he could do. Cassel agreed, and added that he does run outside money now, most of the capital is still his own, and the order he did it in is what lets him refuse to style drift.
2. The Family Business
Asked about growing up, Cassel made a general claim first.
Nobody arrives at the market as a blank slate
I even wrote a blog post here recently talking about like no investor is a blank slate. We all kind of enter the game before we even open a brokerage account with a certain temperament and values that I think ultimately gets kind of manifested in our investments.
Ian Cassel
He grew up in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, an hour west of Philadelphia, in what he described as rural blue-collar Bible belt country with the largest Amish community in the United States and, he thinks, the world. His parents were conservative Christians from a brethren and Mennonite mix; the family prayed three times a day, went to church twice a week, and listened to Christian radio.
A television they were not allowed to watch
We had a TV, but we weren't really allowed to watch much of it.
Ian Cassel
Three generations of one small business
My dad was a small business owner. My grandfather started the business in 1945. He took it over in 1981, and I was supposed to take it over for him.
Ian Cassel
It was as small as a business gets — his father working, his mother doing the books — and the income swung. Good years and bad years averaged out to decent: enough for a new Ford F-150 every four years and a week at the Jersey Shore. The lesson Cassel draws from it is about the household rather than the accounts. The volatility in his father's business mimics the volatility in a portfolio, and what let his father live with it was a calm home to come back to. He says that shaped how he thought about marrying, having a family, and sitting through drawdowns. He also noted that his parents gave a set percentage to the church in good years and bad, and that his mother died after 35 years of marriage.
3. The First Account
The other thing his parents did was hand him $20,000 when he was about 16, in 1996 or 1997, with no instruction attached. They opened a brokerage account in his name with their financial adviser and gave him full control. He could have spent it on a car.
Instead a piece of direct mail about technology stocks arrived, he put $5,000 into one, and it doubled inside a month. So he did it again.
A monkey with darts could have done it
And as everybody knows during that point in time, you could be a monkey throwing darts at a newspaper and pick a winning stock if it had technology in the name during the late 90s.
Ian Cassel
The $20,000 was $120,000 by the time he graduated high school. The crash took 90% of it back, and that is when the small-cap technology companies he owned became micro caps and he became a micro cap investor.
The first win was luck, and the luck is what mattered
It put enough misplaced self-confidence in me that it made me believe that I could just keep doing this.
Ian Cassel
He was working part-time as a receptionist for a financial adviser while at university, answering the phones through that crash. What that taught him was that he did not want clients — which, he said, ruled out the career he had assumed he would have. His summary of the whole episode is that the first big win put him permanently on a higher risk rung, and that losing money out of the gate would have produced a different investor.
Baranowski picked the point up and generalized it: he asks audiences whether they made or lost money on their first stock, and the answer predicts how they think about risk, volatility and drawdowns decades later.
4. What A Micro Cap Is
Asked to size the landscape for someone who has never looked at it, Cassel started with a count.
Half the world's listed companies are micro caps
60,000 stocks globally across all global markets I would say about half of them would be micro caps
Ian Cassel
They are small enough to be invisible
half of them are these small obscure public companies that might not even be the largest company in a small town but they have a ticker symbol that you can buy in your Schwab account or your IBKR account
Ian Cassel
Because they are that small, no institution covers them and no analyst endorses them, so most people do not know they exist.
5. The Illiquidity Wall
The historical case comes first. Cassel said that dividing a century of US stocks into market-cap deciles shows the smallest decile — roughly $120 million and below — outperforming by something like 300 basis points, a figure he hedged himself as he gave it.
He then layered on the work of Roger Ibbotson, the Yale finance professor who updated a white paper on illiquidity as a factor every year.
Ibbotson tracked illiquidity as a factor from 1970 onward
he looked at all stocks in the US since 1970 up until I think 2017 or 18 up until he stopped publicly updating his white paper.
Ian Cassel
Ibbotson's matrix crossed size against liquidity, and the cell with the best performance was illiquid micro cap, ahead of the next by about 200 basis points.
That, Cassel argued, is the structural feature that has survived everything else. A stock that trades $10,000 a day cannot absorb institutional money: acquiring a position takes too long and selling one is close to impossible. Large pools of capital do not want that. What they will accept, he noted with some amusement, is no liquidity at all — private equity and venture capital, which is also small-business investing.
The edge exists because the competition is locked out
Because it's a place where small smart money can gain an edge because institutions are kept out.
Ian Cassel
And the lock-out is what produces the returns on the way up, because it reverses.
Liquidity arrives with success, and brings the buyers with it
their stocks go up, their liquidity profile increases, and that allows access for larger pools of capital to finally buy them as the stocks go up.
Ian Cassel
So the buying gets bigger as the stock rises
So, it brings in greater and greater waves of capital as a winning stock goes up.
Ian Cassel
He put the durability of the arrangement at a hundred years behind and, he hopes, a hundred ahead.
What happens if it stops working
If it ever gets out of place, I'm going to have to go find a job.
Ian Cassel
6. A $500B Total Market
Baranowski's read was that this is a space that sits between two worlds — not liquid enough for an institution, not private either. He added a media observation of his own.
The press celebrates the private version and dismisses the public one
The financial media, they glorify VC and private equity and they despise public small cap or micro cap investing.
Bogumil Baranowski
Cassel's answer was a scale comparison.
The entire micro cap market is about 500 billion
if you actually would add up all the market capitalization of every micro cap that exists, it would be about 500 billion.
Ian Cassel
He set that against 22 individual US companies that are each worth more than 500 billion.
Which makes the whole space a rounding error
Even though 500 billion sounds like a lot, we know that's like nothing, so it's still a small market.
Ian Cassel
7. Story Stocks Vs Fundamentals
Baranowski raised the statistic from Jenga Investment Partners' study of global equities from 2012 to 2022. Cassel gave the finding and then the part he thinks gets left out.
87% of the decade's 10x stocks started as micro caps
Well, 87% originated out of the micro cap ecosystem, which was an incredibly large number.
Ian Cassel
And nine in ten of those were already making money
And what was also interesting that I like to highlight is that 91% of those 87% were profitable businesses. They weren't story stocks. They had fundamentals to them, and that's globally across the globe.
Ian Cassel
That sets up the distinction the rest of the section turns on.
A story stock is exactly what it sounds like
So, a story stock is just that, a story.
Ian Cassel
No fundamentals, no earnings, probably no revenue. Cassel was careful to say he started there himself, before he had taken an accounting course, and that he still likes a good story attached to an investment as long as there are fundamentals under it. His practical advice is a filter.
The profitable slice is 18% of the space
It's about 18% of micro caps that exist are profitable.
Ian Cassel
And the other 82% is where the damage comes from
You don't need to look at the ones that are stories that have to raise capital every six or nine months and dilute you and that's where a lot of the problems arise from.
Ian Cassel
He also offered a theory about how investors sort themselves: whether you found the market before or after you took an accounting course decides whether you drift toward cheapness or toward narrative.
8. The Intelligent Fanatic
The phrase is Charlie Munger's
intelligent fanatic is a term Charlie Munger used to describe a great business builder
Ian Cassel
Munger named a few of them in his speeches — Les Schwab, John Patterson — and around 2015 Cassel's friend Sean Iddings started writing about them. Iddings sent Cassel a report on Les Schwab, Cassel read it and said it could be a chapter, and the two of them spent about three years turning it into two books. The subjects were people who built a business from nothing and then dominated a niche, a geography or an industry for decades rather than for a year or two.
The project changed how Cassel invests, because it sharpened the qualitative lens he uses on management. The smaller the company, he argues, the more the leadership decides the outcome.
Find the leader early and the company follows
if you want to find great companies early, you must find great leaders early.
Ian Cassel
He was precise about the label: the companies he owns today do not have intelligent fanatics running them, they have potential intelligent fanatics. The title is earned by reaching escape velocity and leaving the micro cap ecosystem behind.
9. Three Kinds Of Leader
Asked what he listens for, Cassel first pushed back on the checklists. People want the founder, 10% ownership, a low salary, an office in a strip mall — and those rules exclude good leaders. His own taxonomy has three buckets.
The easiest to spot is the repeat winner, whose track record is their resume.
They came back to do it again
They're doing it to bring the gang back together again and do it again.
Ian Cassel
He screens for management changes at small companies to find them, and the hit rate is deliberately low.
Two out of fifty make you sit up
you might look at 50 management changes in the micro cap ecosystem. Again, 48 of them you'll pass on and then there's two that you see that resume and it makes you sit up a little straighter in your seat
Ian Cassel
The second bucket is the one a rigid screen throws away.
The overlooked superstar comes from inside
And these are kind of leaders that emerge during a turnaround from within an organization.
Ian Cassel
Usually the second in command, usually passed over for a decade, usually with no time for the chief executive who just got pushed out — and with the founder's energy despite owning almost none of the business.
Ownership percentage is not the same as motivation
it doesn't matter that they only own 1% of the company. You know, they can still operate with that same amount of energy as the founder did with 10%.
Ian Cassel
The third bucket is the first-time founder or first-time chief executive, which he says is the hardest to judge: real intensity, and no idea what they do not know. The repeat winner has already made the bad mistakes, already has a reputation, and already knows which partners to call, so they tend to move faster. He also noted that the pairings show up at this size too — the Batman and Robin combinations, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger being the obvious one.
What he is actually looking for cuts across all three.
High standards and obsession, measured in small things
But I would say the constant is you just want to see high standards and you want to see obsession, kind of those two things, and it's kind of simple things like, is the CEO working on a weekend? Is he responsive on a Saturday?
Ian Cassel
None of that shows up in a transcript or in one meeting. It takes a series of conversations and, he says, site visits measured in hours rather than minutes.
Five or six hours, not one or two
Even going on site and spending not one or two hours but five or six hours with them.
Ian Cassel
And the work is slow because the bar is high
it just takes a long time to find these businesses that are worthy and have leadership worthy of owning and not just renting.
Ian Cassel
He was equally clear about the other side of it: when the reps show you the leader is not who you thought, you sell.
10. Silence As A Tool
Baranowski asked about a passage in the book on using silence in management interviews. Cassel's argument is that almost nobody can sit in it.
A pause is a double click
as an interviewer, I find that a long pause is sort of like a double click on a mouse, you know, where oftentimes it forces the other side to go deeper into whatever they were talking about
Ian Cassel
He does not think it is manipulative — it just gives the other person room to go a level further. He admitted he talked too much when he started.
Skill in interviewing is measured in how little you say
And honestly, the better you get at it, the less talking you do.
Ian Cassel
Baranowski said the same thing happens to him on this show: the best material often arrives after he stops recording, and he has restarted recordings to capture it. He described lingering in the room after the other analysts have left, and asking the same question a second way, as the thing that produces the extra conviction needed to hold a stock through a selloff.
11. Buy Or Sell, Never Hold
Cassel's first mentor was a man he met at 22 on a public stock message board — RagingBull.com, where micro cap investors congregated in the early 2000s because no institutional research existed. Skip posted with an authority that drew attention, and ignored Cassel's first approaches. So Cassel changed tactics.
He researched Skip's own holdings until Skip had to answer
I'm going to show value to him you know and so I'm going to really research a few of his holdings that he owns and I'm going to find some little nuggets that I know he doesn't know
Ian Cassel
Skip replied in the middle of the night and a friendship followed, including trips to where he was based. Cassel describes him as loud, brash and opinionated, cut from the 1970s and 1980s Wall Street cloth, with a baritone voice, a military family and a career training brokers to sell stocks to retail investors. He held three or four micro caps at a time and knew each of them better than anyone.
The first conviction investor he ever met
He was the first conviction investor I ever met.
Ian Cassel
And the rule that came with it
He didn't believe that a stock was a hold. He believed a stock was either a buy or a sell, never a hold.
Ian Cassel
Cassel believed that for a while and no longer does — he thinks a position you entered at a good valuation can stay a hold even after it re-rates, as long as you believe the business compounds and you are not trying to guess whether the multiple should be 18 or 28. What he kept is the inversion: look at the price today and ask whether you would buy it, and if not, ask why you are holding it.
He also kept Skip's attitude to analysis without capital behind it. Skip would ask whether Cassel owned a stock before he would listen to the pitch.
Either own it or stop talking about it
Like, either put your money where your mouth is or shut your mouth.
Ian Cassel
There are enough analysts already
You know, there's too many analysts in this world. Be an investor.
Ian Cassel
Baranowski said he used to ask junior analysts at a large firm the same thing, because an idea handed to someone by a manager almost never develops into conviction the way one they found themselves does.
12. How A Losing Streak Works
Asked about the multi-year stretches when nothing worked, Cassel gave a single cause.
The losing seasons were losing positions held too long
my losing seasons were mainly holding large losing positions too long.
Ian Cassel
His description of how a stock picker dies is a slow slide rather than a blow-up: a couple of bad events in the larger positions, then the wrong response.
Selling the winners to average down into the losers
You sell your kind of your remaining winners that you have to double down on those losers because you're trying to convince the market that you're right.
Ian Cassel
The hidden cost is attention rather than capital.
A position you are wrong about takes 90% of the day
you probably spend 90% of your day thinking about this stock that you're just wrong on
Ian Cassel
His way out of the ruts was to sell one or two of the positions he had been waiting on for an extra year or three, be honest about whether management was executing, and get something on the board.
Singles are enough to stay in the game
You don't need any home runs.
Ian Cassel
Baranowski added the observation that a 3% position can take half your attention, and that attention is the resource to redeploy. Cassel extended it: the number that matters is capital at cost, not today's weight, because a 3% position can be one you put 12% into and then watched fall.
13. From 4 Stocks To 15
Baranowski described his own discipline — never more than 3% into a position, about 30 holdings, and letting winners run to 6%, 9% or 12% without ever having bought that much. Cassel said that is the model he has evolved to as well, from a very different starting point.
He used to run four stocks at 25% each
when I started you know up until I was even when I was a full-time private investor I was still in like four stocks
Ian Cassel
Now it is fifteen at 3 to 5% at cost
I'm a 15 stock investor taking 3 to 5% at cost positions.
Ian Cassel
And he does not think the change cost him return
And the irony is I don't think I'm really giving up anything. I'm giving up a lot of volatility probably.
Ian Cassel
The logic is that when a micro cap works it works by an order of magnitude, so the entry size matters less than the number of chances.
A 3% winner that goes up tenfold is already a large position
like a 3% micro cap winner you know when it 10xes it's going to be a meaningful piece of that portfolio
Ian Cassel
Baranowski said he learned the same lesson the hard way, having once held four stocks himself, and that the wider portfolio bought him better sleep.
14. Valuation Still Matters
We forget about price in bull markets
I think valuation is always important and we always we forget about valuation in bull markets and we remember it in bare markets
Ian Cassel
And quality is not a defense against overpaying
history has proven that you can pay too much even for a wonderful business.
Ian Cassel
He gave two examples. The first is a company nobody disputes the quality of.
Microsoft in 1999 took 20 years to get back
whether that's buying Microsoft in 1999 where it took, almost 20 years to get back to the old high and then another three or four years after that to actually catch up to the S&P return.
Ian Cassel
The second is live.
Costco is wonderful, but at what price
Or if you're looking at, something like Costco, which everybody agrees is a wonderful business, but at what price?
Ian Cassel
At somewhere around 50 to 60 times earnings, he ran the arithmetic of a de-rating.
A move from 50 to 35 costs seven or eight years
if that PE would, god forbid, subside to 35, at their current growth rate, it would take another seven or eight years to make money, just with the multiple compression from 50 to 35.
Ian Cassel
His own test is deliberately blunt.
Can this double in three years on fundamentals
do I believe that I can double my money in this stock at this price over the next three years based off fundamental underpinnings?
Ian Cassel
What that requires, in practice, is a company growing its top line organically at 20 to 25% without diluting him, with operating leverage doing more on the bottom line. And there is a second effect he says is specific to this end of the market: a small company carries key-man risk, customer concentration, contract concentration and geographic concentration simply because it is small, and those fade as it grows.
The same business earns a higher multiple just by getting bigger
quite honestly it's deserving of a higher multiple as it gets bigger.
Ian Cassel
So the multiple expansion, in his framework, is gravy on top of the doubling rather than the reason for the trade.
15. 95% Temperament
Baranowski quoted the book's line that investing is 5% intellect and 95% temperament, and set it next to Warren Buffett's foreword to Benjamin Graham's book — the framework is in the pages, the emotional makeup you have to supply yourself.
Cassel defined temperament as the sum of your views on risk, time horizon, volatility, position sizing and what you value, which together decide which style of investing you can actually apply.
Consistency, not brilliance, produces the return
it's not what you can do randomly that will produce you a long-term return. It's what you can do consistently.
Ian Cassel
He thinks temperament can change, and position sizing is where his changed most. What does not change is the volatility of the asset class.
Plus or minus 30% in a day is normal here
you got to be used to volatility. You know, plus or minus 30% in a day is normal.
Ian Cassel
Baranowski compared it to a free climber who has to be repeatedly exposed to the same pressure before responding well to it. Cassel's version was shorter.
Twenty years in this market ages you differently
You age in dog years.
Ian Cassel
16. The Porsche And The Rolex
Baranowski asked, with some mischief, whether Cassel had bought a Porsche or a Rolex lately — because in the book he buys both immediately before a multi-year drawdown. He had not.
The purchase came in 2009, right after he became a full-time private investor and just after the financial crisis. He was single, it was a moment of relief, and he was honest about the motive.
It was aimed at the people who had doubted him
quite honestly, I sort of just wanted to give the middle finger to everybody that doubted me, and it was kind of my way of showcasing that to everybody.
Ian Cassel
Which is a common enough mistake
then they show it you know by buying things to prove how smart they are to people that don't care about them anyway
Ian Cassel
The car did not last a year
And I ended up selling that Porsche a year later.
Ian Cassel
The white gold Day-Date he still has, and expects to pass on to his son. He is not against buying nice things and would buy a Porsche again, with one condition.
There is a queue
But my wife wants a new kitchen before that happens.
Ian Cassel
17. Compounding Beyond Money
The closing question was about success defined broadly, and the idea in the book that compounding applies outside a portfolio. Cassel's answer starts with the occupational hazard.
Investors live in a barbell, he said: always modeling one to three years ahead while having to live in the present. When you know a business well enough to build conviction, you can almost taste the returns, and you start wanting time to move faster — the next quarter, the next earnings number, the reward, the reputation.
Wanting time to pass is the worst part of the job
And the worst part of investing is wishing, time goes faster so you can get to your returns quicker, only to look back that you didn't really spend the time in the present with the people you should have been present with, your family, friends, kids, and wishing you would have had that time back.
Ian Cassel
At 45, with an 11-year-old and an 8-year-old he had just put on the school bus, he described time flipping from abundant to scarce, and made the point that you only notice your own ageing by watching other people do it.
His resolution ties the two halves together, and it is the argument the book's title rests on.
The secret to compounding is the work you do today
And the secret to compounding is doing the work today to get to the returns.
Ian Cassel
That list is deliberately mixed: hug your kids, tell your partner you love them, call your parents, apologize, forgive someone, and also do the maintenance due diligence, run the screen, have the hard conversation with a chief executive, and cut the loser out of the portfolio.
Today is the only variable you control
when you take care of today, tomorrow really does take care of itself.
Ian Cassel
Baranowski closed on the asymmetry between the two resources.
Money is replaceable, time is not
Somebody explained to me how money you can borrow it, you can even steal it. But time, we only have that much.
Bogumil Baranowski
Bonus Insights
The host's read on why the career shape mattered
Baranowski returned several times to the fact that Cassel ran his own money first and took outside capital second, and that this spared him the unlearning most managers have to do. Cassel's own version was that it lets him tell prospective clients that they either align with his flavor of investing or they do not.
The grandmother test
Baranowski said his own first lessons about price and value came from shopping for groceries with his grandmother, who was never an investor, and that reading investing books later mostly confirmed what she had already told him.
Chris Mayer's hundred-baggers
Baranowski linked Cassel's 87% statistic to Chris Mayer's work on hundred-baggers and drew the intuitive conclusion: a trillion-dollar company cannot be a hundred-bagger, so the arithmetic itself pushes you down the size scale.
One Up on Wall Street
Baranowski said he read Peter Lynch's book at 20 and thought he wanted to be a private investor, and that what he admires is that Cassel actually did it.
Escape velocity is the exit
Cassel's framing of what success looks like for one of his holdings is that it stops being a micro cap: the leader earns the intelligent fanatic label by getting the company out of the ecosystem entirely.
Cassel's bottom line is that the edge in the smallest listed companies is structural rather than clever — institutions cannot own an illiquid stock, so the ones that can are paid for it — and that capturing it takes a temperament built to hold a small number of profitable businesses through 30% days for long enough that the leadership has time to prove itself.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
MicroCapClub (The community Cassel founded in 2011 for experienced micro cap investors)
Intelligent Fanatics Capital Management (The fund he started in 2018, where he is CIO; roughly 15 positions at 3–5% of cost)
SiriusXM (XM Satellite Radio was the micro cap win at 21 or 22 that convinced him to devote himself to the space)
Charles Schwab and Interactive Brokers (The retail accounts he names as the places an ordinary investor can actually buy these tickers)
Microsoft (His example of paying too much for a wonderful business: bought in 1999, almost 20 years back to the old high)
Costco (The live version of the same question — a business nobody disputes, at a multiple that costs seven or eight years if it compresses to 35)
Raging Bull (The public stock message board where micro cap investors congregated in the early 2000s, and where he met his first mentor)
Books & Resources Mentioned
Stock Picker – Ian Cassel (The new book this conversation is built around, on the mindset, temperament and strategy behind picking stocks)
Intelligent Fanatics Project – Ian Cassel and Sean Iddings (Two books, about three years' work, on the business builders Charlie Munger called intelligent fanatics)
Lessons from a decade of ten baggers – Jenga Investment Partners (The 2012–2022 global study behind the 87% figure, and the 91% of those that were already profitable)
Liquidity as an Investment Style – Roger Ibbotson (The Yale professor's white paper on illiquidity as a factor, updated annually until around 2017 or 2018)
100 Baggers – Chris Mayer (Baranowski's cross-reference: the same arithmetic about having to start small)
One Up on Wall Street – Peter Lynch (What Baranowski read at 20 that made him want to be a private investor)
The Outsiders – William Thorndike (Named alongside the Intelligent Fanatics books as the kind of reading that makes investors impose rigid rules on management)
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