The World's Best Investing Strategy that No One Follows

So I think that as we go through life, we get some aha moments, and it can become a source of tremendous competitive advantage. One of the things I learned about very early was the power of that.

There is Monish P. He is the CEO of Dando Funds, an all-round legendary value investor with current assets under management of approximately $800 million. He’s very well respected in value investing circles, notably teaming up with Gu Spear in 2007 to place the winning bid of $650,000 for Warren Buffett's annual charity lunch. Monish has always idolized both Warren Buffett and the late Charlie Munger, so much so he has a full bronze bust of both investors sitting right front and center in his office.

But what you may not know is that back when Charlie Munger was still alive, Monish actually forged a good friendship with him, sharing meals and playing bridge regularly while they discussed the world of investing. In this recent interview, Monish noted one thing in particular that he took away from his time with Charlie that really shaped the investor that he is today.

“I think it must have been 2004 or something, and so that was the first time I met Charlie and actually hung out with him a bit. The quote you brought up: ‘Take a simple idea and take it seriously.’ It's a famous Munger quote. Take a simple idea and take it seriously.”

Charlie Munger was always someone who spent a lot of time thinking about human psychology and behavior when it came to life generally, but specifically the financial markets. He was the master of boiling down these complex behavioral patterns and biases into simple ideas and rules to help you invest rationally and come out on top.

It’s something that I've always tried to practice in my life, even before I heard of Charlie or even before I heard about that quote because I think it's so powerful. That idea clearly rubbed off on Mish. In fact, this idea of looking at the cognitive or behavioral shortcomings of investors, as well as taking simple ideas really seriously over time, helped Mish create his own secret superpower of investing. The strategy, which is now at the very core of his approach as an investor.

So I think that as we go through life, we get some aha moments, you know, where we uncover some nugget of wisdom or knowledge. Maybe many other humans have either not figured out or not given the amount of weight they should to that particular piece of wisdom and knowledge, and it can become a source of tremendous competitive advantage.

One of the things I learned about very early was the power of cloning and the power of copying. Wait, what? Mish's grand idea is plagiarism? Just copying other people? Just copying other investors? That feels wrong; that feels almost immoral. It feels almost illegal.

Well, that's kind of the point. In many instances in life, copying is illegal. You can't copy ChatGPT for an essay; it's illegal to make copies of movies. You know you wouldn't copy your mate's new haircut because you liked it. You wouldn't buy the new Tesla Model 3, red paint with white interior just because you like your mate's new red Model 3 with a white interior. In almost all contexts, copying is frowned upon or even illegal.

I still don't know why it is the case, but humans have an aversion to cloning. They somehow consider it beneath themselves. That, you know, I didn't come up with this or this is not my idea and that sort of thing, something, some weird thinking like that.

And that's the thing: the reason you want to copy stuff is because it's good, right? You never look at the bad stuff and think you want to copy that. But copying stuff almost feels like you're cheating, like you're using someone to further your own goals. But in some instances, copying isn't cheating, and it doesn't even leave a victim. In fact, in some context, if you can push through the natural human aversion to copying, it can actually be a very useful tool.

What I also found is that when I forced myself to copy things that I found to be smart, it gave me a big edge. Specifically, it can give you a big edge when it comes to investing. It isn't illegal to copy someone's investment ideas, right? In fact, it's a smart strategy to look at the world's biggest and best investors, learn what makes them tick, and then shamelessly copy their approaches.

So that was Mish's big brain wave. One of the best ways to learn about these super investor strategies and to clone them is through books. For example, "The Intelligent Investor" by Ben Graham, "The Education of a Value Investor" by Guy Spier, "Rule One" by Phil Town, and all of these books are also available on the Blinkist app.

In fact, just the other day, I listened through the Blink for "Rule One" again just to brush up on my 4M approach for my own investing. So Blinkist is an app that summarizes lots of different non-fiction books and podcasts into really digestible 15 to 20-minute blinks, and it makes it really easy for you to learn new things if you’re a super busy person.

Did you know the typical social media user now spends 2 hours and 23 minutes per day using social media platforms worldwide? I personally am really bad at scrolling before bed, so now instead of doing that, I try and just put on a Blink and learn something new while I wind down. I love the Blinkist app; it's made a big difference for me.

If you wanted to try it too, you can now get 40% off Blinkist annual premium. So start your 7-day free trial by clicking the link in the description box or scanning the QR code on the screen now. And again, thanks to Blinkist for being long-term supporters of my content here on YouTube.

Now back to Mish's big brain wave. I remember when I was in my early 20s, I read this book by Tom Peters. You know, he was a big management guru in the 80s where he was giving the example of these two gas stations in California that were diagonal on a busy intersection from each other. Both the gas stations were self-served, so you come in, you pump your gas, and you leave.

In one case, the owner would come out maybe once an hour or something, pick a random car, and wash the windshield or check the oil. Just some extra service at no charge. The guy who was diagonal across the street was seeing this take place and he said to himself, "Well, that's kind of stupid. You can't do it for everyone. If you did it for everyone, you'd lose your shirt because you're not charging for it." He never copied or cloned that, and over time, what happened is that the gas station that was providing this random extra service saw an increase in business, and the one diagonal from him saw a decrease. Even after seeing the decrease, the guy across the street did not change behavior.

So Tom Peters said, and this is what I found very unbelievable, “You can go to your most direct competitors, and you can sit down with them, and you can give them all your trade secrets, everything you learned that has given you an advantage, and they will listen to you, but there will be no behavior change.”

Even when I first heard that last bit, I personally thought, "No way. There's no way, even with evidence, that a business would not change its ways if they learn of a competitor doing things a better way." But then I realized there's actually an example of exactly what Monish was talking about with one of the stocks that I already hold, that being Tesla.

You know, ages ago, Tesla open-sourced all their patents, and back then, nobody bothered to use them. They floated the idea of selling their batteries and powertrains to other OEMs—no interest. They said they would license their self-driving tech to other car companies in the future, and so far they've had one serious phone call in business. There seems to be a general aversion to cloning. Brands have too much pride in their way of operating.

Yes, there are some businesses, I find, especially in the beauty industry, that their whole business is to be a cheaper copycat, but generally speaking, most companies won't copy their rivals just out of pride. But what's interesting is that the companies that do think differently, that do try to intensely copy the best ideas from their competitors, well those companies typically do quite well.

This was an example of a simple idea. What I found is that there is a very small sliver of humans who are master cloners, and these small slivers of humans own the world. They really, really did very well.

For example, almost everything at Microsoft is cloned. Microsoft spends so many billions of dollars on Microsoft Research and their research labs and so on. Nothing has ever come out from that. What has worked for them is looking at Lotus and creating Excel, looking at WordPerfect and creating Word, looking at the Mac and creating Windows, and on and on and on. Even now, OpenAI is a partnership with AI. You know, Google actually did the work; Microsoft did none of the work, and they're ahead.

If you look at all the world’s biggest companies, pretty much all of them have adopted copying as a strategy, and it's a big part of their success stories. Meta copied stories from Snapchat, Reels from TikTok, Threads from Twitter. Apple is never first in a product category anymore. They waited for wireless earbuds to take off, and then they made AirPods. They waited for Meta to work on VR, and then they made the Vision Pro. They copied pull-down notifications from Android, wireless charging from Samsung. They even had an aversion to large-screened phones until they saw it take off with Samsung.

Amazon copied Costco's model with Amazon Prime; their streaming service copied Netflix. Alexa launched after Siri and Cortana. Google wasn't the first search engine. Google Drive came out after Dropbox; Google Chrome was not the first web browser. All of these companies found great success through copying, taking an idea and finding a way to make it their own.

You can also think about it from the other perspective, right? Blackberry is a famous example of a company that refused to clone. The iPhone came out, and instead of learning from Apple, they doubled down on their own way of making a phone. If you watch the documentary, well, you know how that turned out.

Sam Walton was another great cloner, and in fact, Costco—Jim Sinegal, who was the longtime founder and CEO of Costco—he had cloned the entire model from Sol Price, who he used to work for. Someone asked him, “What did you learn from Sol Price?” and his response was, “It’s the wrong question. Everything I know is from Sol Price.” He says there’s nothing I know that did not come from Sol Price.

So as weird as it sounds, when it comes to business and investing, cloning or copying is a really smart strategy. If you have the open-mindedness and humility to actually do it, it can be a real superpower. But this is not just limited to businesses; the concept of cloning is very handy to the investor as well.

In fact, a core part of Monish's investing strategy is to look into what his idols are buying and selling, trying to learn the lessons and clone the strategies. And of course, in this day and age, we can actually see what the world's best investors are buying and selling each and every quarter through the 13F filing.

The 13F is an SEC filing that all fund managers in the US with more than $100 million in assets under management have to file each quarter, and it shows you their equity portfolios. Thus, by looking at the changes from quarter to quarter, you can see what they've been buying or selling.

Although these days, nobody really looks at the 13F filings themselves, as a lot of websites like Data Roma or Whale Wisdom will automatically show the changes without having to calculate anything.

Now, of course, you do have to be careful at whose 13F filing you’re looking at, but there’s no doubt if you’re looking at the 13F from, say, someone like Warren Buffett, chances are the buys and sells are going to be a result of hundreds of hours of rational, long-term-minded analysis and could very well be worth cloning. Interestingly, the numbers back up that hypothesis too.

Now, full acknowledgment, this study is a bit old, but in 2005, two guys sat down and figured out that in the period from 1976 through to 2006, if you simply copied Warren Buffett's trades, even after the 45-day delay between the end of the quarter and the release of the 13F filings, you would have still achieved an average annual return over that time period of 24.5% annually versus just 13.83% for the S&P 500.

If you look at this chart here, the only better thing you could have done across that time period was to actually just own Berkshire Hathaway stock itself. So when it comes to the world of investing, cloning ideas or straight-up copying can be an absolute superpower. To be perfectly frank, I clone the super investors all the time.

However, with that said, there are some limitations to cloning, and I want to make sure I don't give the impression that all investors should just blindly follow the stock picks of someone they look up to. The art of cloning is nuanced because there are risks to the strategy.

You need to be extremely careful that when you do clone ideas from other investors, you also do the digging and really make the idea your own. There are two reasons why this is so important. Say you've seen that Buffett is buying a new stock, and you respect and trust Buffett and his approach so much so that you just jump in and buy it too. Then, let's say some unforeseen issue arises in the business and the stock loses 20% in a week.

Well, what do you do? Maybe you look for what Warren Buffett is saying about it, but what if he's not saying anything? Did a good deal just get better, or did something change meaning you should actually be selling? Ultimately, you need to make the cloned investment idea your own so that you know what you should do when the stock price rises or falls in a hurry.

So that’s the first thing. And then the other thing is exactly what I mentioned earlier. When we get these 13F filings, they are horribly out of date. Remember, 13F filings report the equity portfolios at the end of each quarter, so any changes reported could have been made in a three-month period. And then, to make things harder, the 13F filings only become public information 45 days after the end of the quarter.

So at best, the info you get at the time of release would still be 45 days old, and at worst, it could be up to 4 and a half months old. As we’ve seen in the stock market, a lot can happen to stock prices in that space of time. So it’s definitely not a perfect system, and they’re really the two main considerations.

Yes, as Monish said, cloning is a superpower, and yes, you can use it in investing. The caveat is that you have to make sure you make the cloned ideas truly your own. If you blindly copy, that’s when you get caught out.

But overall, guys, that is a little look into the Monish P. idea of cloning the world’s best investors. I’d love to hear from you guys down in the comments section below. Do you clone? How do you guys go about it? Do you source investment ideas from the world's best? And if so, who do you look at? Who do you trust and who do you maybe not trust?

Also, if you're interested in the full Warren Buffett-style strategy, if you want a full explainer from start to end, then you can definitely check out New Money Education's "Introduction to Stock Analysis." That is also linked down in the description, and it helps financially support the channel as well. So check it out if you’re interested.

But apart from that, guys, thanks very much for watching, and I’ll see you guys in the next video. [Music] [Music]