The Rob Vinall Podcast
By Robert Vinall
The Rob Vinall PodcastJul 25, 2023
RV Capital's Letter to Co-Investors in the Business Owner Fund for the first half of 2023
The podcast contains discussions of the following topics:
- A new investment in Interactive Brokers
- Increased investments in Meta Platforms and Ryman Healthcare
- Why the fund is concentrated in individual companies and what drives their weighting in the portfolio
- AI and Wix
A Postcard from China
Impressions from my first trip back to China after the pandemic.
Topics discussed include:
The increasing liveability of China's major cities; City planning in China; China's decoupling from the rest of the world; Battery Electric Vehicles; Competition; Politics and Macro; and my response to the question: Is China Investable?
RV Capital's Letter to Co-Investors in the Business Owner Fund for 2022
The letter contains a discussion of the following topics:
- An update on my health situation;
- A discussion of health data and privacy;
- A (I hope premature) post mortem of our investment in Carvana;
- Lessons learned from the Investment in Carvana;
- A defence of doing things differently.
RV Capital's Letter to Co-Investors for the First Half of 2022
RV Capital's first half letter for 2022 contains discussions of:
- Organisational changes at RV Capital;
- How I have dealt with the drawdown;
- Surging inflation;
- Rising interest rates and their implication for investing in long-duration cash flows;
- The fund’s exposure to tech stocks;
- War in Ukraine; and
- Taiwan and its implication for investing in Chinese companies
- And the development of our largest investments
Panel Discussion for Emerging Managers
This is a live recording of a panel discussion for emerging managers at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on the 27th of March 2022. The members of the panel are Claudine Innes, who is responsible for manager selection at a single family office based in Bilbao; James Ferguson, Partner at Global Endowment Management, an investment company based in Charlotte; and Patrick Maurenbrecher, co-founder of Kontora, a multi family office based in Hamburg. The discussion contains lots of practical advice for emerging managers looking to start their own investment firm.
The chat is also available as a video at https://youtu.be/HiXXWhmbE-Q
https://www.globalendowment.com/our-team#james-ferguson
https://www.kontora.com/en/kontora/your-advisors/
Fireside Chat with MITIMCo's Joel Cohen and Rob Vinall
This is a live recording of the fireside chat between Joel Cohen and Rob Vinall at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on the 27th of March 2022. Joel works at MITIMCo, the investment management company of Cambridge-based university MIT. Joel also started the website emergingmanagers.org. The interview contains lots of practical advice for investors looking to start their own investment management firm.
The chat is also available as a video at https://youtu.be/iZSQcLhgiwo
https://mitimco.org/emerging-managers/
https://emergingmanagers.org/
Fireside Chat with ShawSpring Partners Founder Dennis Hong and Rob Vinall
This is a live recording of the fireside chat between Dennis Hong and Rob Vinall at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on the 27th of March 2022. Dennis is the founder and CEO of ShawSpring Partners, a Boston based investment firm founded in 2014.
The interview is also available as a video recording at https://youtu.be/vIgXfFAS8gU
Fireside Chat with Trupanion CEO Darryl Rawlings and Rob Vinall
This is a live recording of the fireside chat between Darryl Rawlings and Rob Vinall at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on the 26th of March 2022. Darryl is the founder and CEO of Trupanion, a pet health insurer based in Seattle, USA.
Q&A with Rob Vinall at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering
This is a live recording of Rob's Q&A at RV Capital's 2022 Annual Gathering in Engelberg, Switzerland on 26 March 2022. It features questions from both the live and online audience. The recording is also available as a video on Rob's YouTube channel. Recordings of the other sessions at the annual gathering are also available both as a podcast or on YouTube.
A link to the YouTube recording is here: https://youtu.be/uGDmvRWAgy8
RV Capital's 2021 Co-Investor Letter
RV Capital's 2021 letter contains a discussion of our recent investment in Carvana, an e-commerce platform for buying and selling used cars.
The letter also weighs the relative importance of moat vs execution. It makes the argument that investors perhaps overestimate the importance of competitive advantage when evaluating companies. Execution is everything.
RV Capital's Letter to Co-Investors for the 2021 Half-Year
Why investors are overestimating the impact of regulation in China;
Some parallels to a prior market panic;
New investments in Alibaba and Salesforce.com.
More Accuracy
In my 2020 Investor letter, I discussed the concept of “Margin of Safety” i.e., paying less for a security than it is worth, and its implications for investing. This memo is intended as a follow-up to that discussion. It is divided into seven parts:
Part 1: Why the importance of striving for an accurate view of the future is not obvious to older value investors.
Part 2: Why experience is sometimes a disadvantage.
Part 3: Why the opportunity set is different today and what this means for investing.
Part 4: Why the goal is to be more accurate, not accurate, when forecasting the future.
Part 5: Why skewness matters.
Part 6: Why skewness does not obviate the need to calculate a company's intrinsic value.
Part 7: What Nicholas Taleb misses.
A Look At Compounders Through The Lens Of "The Intelligent Investor"
What are Compounders? Why are they so popular amongst investors? And is the phenomenon sustainable?
A critical analysis using a framework suggested by Benjamin Graham in his seminal work on investing: "The Intelligent Investor".
A Close Encounter with a Conspiracy Theory
A podcast about conspiracy theories, mental illness, how we evaluate information, and the lessons for investing.
My Favourite Podcasts
A list of my favourite podcast shows. My preference is for shows about Tech, Health, Business and China that celebrate open and honest debate.
RV Capital's 2020 Letter to Co-Investors
Rob reads out his 2020 Investor letter. The Letter includes:
- A discussion of the short attack on Grenke;
- Some further thoughts on investing in early-stage listed businesses in the context of our recent investment in Slack;
- A critical look at the concept of margin of safety;
- A discussion of the pros and cons of being contrarian;
- How I got podcasting "religion";
- Why RV Capital's 2021 Annual Gathering will not be on Zoom.