You can also listen to a narration of this article on iTunes & online.

10 Life Lessons I Passed On to My Daughter on Her Bat Mitzvah

There are certain milestones in life that make you pause and reflect. For me, aside from reflecting on the life of a departed parent, these have been around birthdays and my kids officially becoming adults by celebrating their bar/bat mitzvahs. I shared the speech I wrote for my middle daughter Hannah’s bat mitzvah in 2018 (you can read it here).

On January 11, 2026, almost exactly eight years later, my younger daughter, Mia Sarah, celebrated becoming an adult, at least according to Jewish tradition (she turned 12). This is what I told her.

Dear Mia Sarah,

Let me tell you what happened two weeks before you were born. We were celebrating Hannah’s 8th birthday, on December 28, 2013. The conversation shifted to you – a bowling ball in Mom’s stomach. Both of your grandmothers, armed with a ruler, studied Mom’s stomach very carefully and with scientific certainty pronounced you’d be a boy.

Then, two weeks later, on a Saturday morning, Mom woke us up; and all of us, including Jonah and Hannah, went to the hospital to meet the bowling ball.

Since you were born into a Jewish family, every birth is associated with food – specifically, the food I ate when my kids were born. When Jonah was born, on the way to the hospital we stopped at Taco Bell. With Hannah, I upgraded to Chipotle. With your birth, while Grandma Zoya kept Mom and future you entertained in the hospital, I took Jonah and Hannah to Einstein Bagel for breakfast.

For reasons I don’t understand, I had to eat on my own each time. Mom always had an excuse, something about contractions. Very antisocial.

No, there is no punchline or lesson here. I just thought it was important for you to learn about the moments you missed.

I have to confess, the most difficult part about having kids – other than raising them – is naming them. There’s so much responsibility. You give someone a name they’ll carry for the rest of their life. They need to like it. You need to like it. And if you’re an Ashkenazi Jew, there’s an extra degree of difficulty – tradition says you have to name a child after a relative who passed away. Try giving Slavic or old Jewish names to modern American kids – you’re going to set them up for years of abuse.

Jonah’s middle name is Berel – after my Mom’s father.

Hannah’s first name is after your Mom’s grandma, and her middle name, Emily, is after my grandma.

Naming you happened in the dark ages before ChatGPT– we had to do it manually. We finally settled on Sarah Mia, the Mia part after my Grandmother Manya. We called you Sarah Mia for a day or two, but for reasons I cannot explain, it didn’t sit well with me. I asked Mom if we could flip it to Mia Sarah. She agreed. Luckily, the mailman hadn’t picked up the mail yet. The hospital hadn’t submitted your name to the government, so we easily changed it.

Life is full of randomness. If the mailman had come a few hours earlier, you would have been Sarah Mia.

Let me tell you a secret. We didn’t plan Jonah and Hannah, but you were requested by me. When I asked Mom if we could have another child, her reply was – are you writing another book? We had a deal – a book per child. At the time, I’d written two books. I was not thinking about a book. I had a different reason. Your existence was triggered by my love of skiing with Jonah and Hannah. I know, really selfish. Mom doesn’t ski, and I wanted to make sure I’d have a ski buddy when your brother and sister decided they were too cool to ski with their dad. Though Jonah and Hannah still love skiing with me, you now understand why your getting better at skiing is such a high priority.

Now you understand why it is your moral obligation, basically your life’s purpose, to become a better skier and ski more with me.

Back to food. I remember sitting at Einstein Bagels while Mom was battling contractions, looking at Jonah and Hannah finishing their lox bagels and thinking there was no way I could love anyone as much as I loved them. And then you arrived.

There are so many odd things I love about you. I love how you learned Russian by watching seven seasons of the Russian sitcom “Inlaws” ten times.

I love how after binge-watching “MasterChef” on Hulu you started giving everyone at home cooking advice as if you were a master chef.

I love how you were genuinely upset that I dedicated The Little Book of Sideways Markets (written four years before you were born) to Jonah and Hannah and did not mention you.

I love how you and Hannah, despite your age difference, are best friends. This is so special – treasure it.

I love that you are the one who came up with the title for my new book, What a Life!, without even reading it. You said, “Dad, you say it all the time – it should be the title of your book.” This ended a six-month search for the title.

I was the first person to take you to the movie theater, when you were four years old. We saw Coco. I love how you and I spent hours and hours singing every possible version of “Remember Me” from Coco during the pandemic. It became our song.

I can keep going, but I don’t want to make Jonah and Hannah jealous. Though you do try to trick me at least once a week into saying that you are my favorite child. So far I have avoided that trap. But you are getting more creative every day.

My favorite part of the day is from 7:40 to 8am when I get to drive you to school. I cannot tell you how much I look forward to it. I treasure these 20 minutes dearly and try desperately to bottle them up. Though I know there will be a time when you won’t need me to drive you to school, and then at some point you’ll be going to university.

During those drives, you and I listen to music. And not just classical music. We’re discovering new musicals. I love watching you when you hear music for the first time – your face lights up.

On curiosity, role models, and wisdom.

Learning and discovering new things should be a big part of your life. Never stop being curious.

You have two incredible role models – Jonah and Hannah. You’ve done an awesome job of absorbing their best qualities. You are as funny as Jonah. Let me correct that – you are funnier than Jonah. Though when I tell Jonah this, he tells me that you’ve just perfected “dad jokes” and, since I am your only audience, I’m not a great judge of your humor.

If you become an entertainer, there is nothing wrong with focusing on a niche. There are a lot of dads out there for dad jokes. Though Jonah would say your current niche – Russian-Jewish-agnostic-balding-investor-writer-wannabe-philosopher – might be a bit too narrow.

Hannah wakes up with a smile. Honestly, I’ve never seen another person who does this. You almost wake up with a smile. The first five minutes of the day you have the intensity of someone trying to solve the Middle East conflict; but then in a few minutes you melt into Hannah’s sunshine, and the rest of the day you are sunlight, emitting kindness and joy.

Always look for role models. Find the best and worst qualities in your friends. Adopt the best and avoid the bad. As you get older, expand your role models far beyond your immediate circle of friends and family – otherwise you’re limiting yourself. Find role models in the pages of books, in history, in fields beyond your own.

Don’t limit yourself to just one source of wisdom. Wisdom is everywhere – you just need to be open to it. I have learned a lot from traveling, in conversations with friends, and of course in books. What I love about the Judaism of my ancestors is that they encouraged debate, that everything in the Torah was up for questioning and you had to arrive at your own conclusions. Religion can make people open-minded and it can also close them off.

Look at religion the same way I look at AI – it can liberate you or it can enslave you. If you outsource all your thinking to AI, it will weaken your thinking muscles. You won’t develop your own critical thinking. You’ll become a follower, not a leader. The same applies to religion. I know I’ll be expelled from this synagogue as a heretic, but not all wisdom is in the Torah. If it were, we would have been on Mars five thousand years ago. Thoughtfully choose what works for you – ignore what doesn’t.

On choosing who you let into your life and on focus.

Both Hannah and Jonah elevate you. In fact, in your Bat Mitzvah speech, you say that God’s belief in Moses elevated him to do great things. Surround yourself with people who will elevate you and make you better. Do not let toxic people who will bring you down into your life. Subtracting is as important as adding.

But you are your own person. If I had to use one word to describe you, it would be sharp. It’s sharpness with an enveloping sphere of kindness and sensitivity. I also know that you’ll tell me exactly what you think. You are smart, but it is your focus that brings this sharpness. You can do your homework for one subject for three hours straight.

I love how you started gulping books like Hannah. Just like Jonah 2.0 – in his senior year in high school and beyond – you are organized and dedicated to studying. Most importantly, just like both of your siblings, you are kind.

This focus is a superpower – keep it.

On family.

Mom and I are very lucky. We are blessed with incredible kids. I have the same message for you as I have for Jonah and Hannah – you are wonderful as you are.

As you get older you’ll have other people in your life, but remember that Jonah and Hannah are the most important people – you should take care of each other.

Mia Sarah, my sharp, kind, wonderful girl – I know that as you grow up you will become even more of what you already are: an incredible, thoughtful human being who lights up the world around her with kindness, curiosity, and that superpower focus of yours.

And if I ever rewrite and republish The Little Book of Sideways Markets, I’ll dedicate it to Jonah, Hannah and Mia Sarah.

I am going to steal Grandpa Naum’s line. I have three kids, I love them all equally. But if you divide 100% by three, you get 33% — you have this 1% left. Today, on your birthday, I love you 1% more — yes, you got it out of me, today for one day you are my favorite child by 1%.

Mom and I are very proud of you.

Mazel Tov.

Pagliacci - Prologue

We are exploring timeless arias from Ruggero Leoncavallo’s opera Pagliacci.

There are many ways to look at this opera: It is an opera about love, about infidelity, and about actors being real people with real emotions. I remember writing about it for the first time in 2016, when I had just come off one of the most difficult, painful professional years of my career. I could relate to this opera so much, especially to one aria close to the end of the opera (we’ll discuss it in a few emails hence).

Watch the full opera (directed by Franco Zeffirelli) here.

Prologue

Tonio, dressed as the commedia dell’arte character Taddeo, steps before the curtain during the orchestral prelude. He addresses the audience directly in the aria “Si può? Signore! Signori!” (“May I? Ladies and gentlemen!”), asking permission to speak. He breaks the fourth wall and explains that the author wants to revive the ancient tradition of a prologue, emphasizing that the actors on stage are real people with genuine emotions, passions, hatreds, and sorrows. This sets the verismo (realism) tone: The story is about human beings, not just fictional characters. Tonio then retreats behind the curtain as the main action begins. #TimelessArias

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You can also listen to a narration of this article on iTunes & online.

Q&A: From Imposter Syndrome to Authenticity

Where do you find the courage to write the way you do, and how did you develop your unique style?

A short answer would be that it came from writing for a long time. I let myself be me when I write. People who know me personally will tell you the person you see on paper is the person you get in real life. Okay, almost. I am more polished, "edited," on paper.

I just made it sound easy. It is not. It comes down to confidence. It took me a long time - years, to get comfortable with being me on paper.

One of my favorite frameworks is "fake it till you make it." I think it's usually misunderstood. It's not about deceiving others but about deceiving yourself into being the person you might not be yet.

In my case, the "faking" part is writing as if I have the right to write about topics outside of investing. This framework forces you to reach further, helping you to grow. You constantly feel at least some minor discomfort as you are reaching, as your knowledge and experience may not be quite up to the task. But this is how you grow.

I think there is another name for this framework – imposter syndrome. If you don’t have this feeling in many parts of your life, you are not growing.

What helped me gain confidence is my readers. If I wrote into the ether and never got feedback from readers, my writing probably would have remained in its original form – proper and boring. Whenever I let the real me show up on paper readers responded favorably. This, little by little, gave me the confidence to be me. I've been told I am breaking different writing conventions with my writing. I wouldn’t know. One of my favorite comedians is Victor Borge, who immigrated to the US from Denmark and said, "This is your language; I am just trying to use it."

There are probably certain rules of writing I am breaking without knowing I am breaking them. As I’m typing this, I’m listening to Hector Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique. Berlioz was largely self-taught as a composer. This symphony broke all the traditional rules; it was a "program" symphony (it had a story line); it revolutionized orchestral music. I am not at risk of changing the world forever; I just want to point out that it is a lot easier to break the rules when you don't fully know them. Berlioz and I have this advantage.

Outside of studying English in college and failing at it – that is the only class I had to retake – I never took formal classes in composition or writing. Today if I took these classes, they would probably ruin me. This joke comes to mind: A grandson asks his grandfather, "Grandpa, when you sleep do you put your beard above or below the blankets?" Grandpa lost sleep for a month.

You write about 'Soul in the Game' - I see it as a game you can't lose. How do you think about that?

What is interesting about this is that originally it was just a chapter in a book that didn't have a name. That book got started as a collection of my essays. “Soul in the Game” was just one of my essays. But once it was elevated to being the name of the book, it became the book's central theme. As it should be: It’s a central theme of my life. Having soul in the game is having an alignment with what you are doing – an alignment with your life.

Let me give you an example. The investment industry is vast. I run an investment firm; I am a value investor. But I really cannot stand financial or tax planning. Doing financial planning is like going to the dentist for me. We have folks at IMA who have financial planning backgrounds and can answer occasional questions from clients on this subject.

If I took a wrong turn somewhere and had to become a financial planner, it would require some retraining. I could do it. But I would have a miserable life. Not because there is anything wrong with financial planning, but because I'd be misaligned with what I was doing.

It would be very difficult for me to have soul in the game and – this is a very important "and" – I would have no passion for what I was doing. It would be a 9 to 5 job (sentence) for me. I'd be mediocre and miserable. I'd be competing against folks who dream about tax codes and required minimum distributions.

This would be a game I'd be destined to lose. It is difficult, though not impossible, to be good at something where you don't have soul in the game. But even if you are good at something you are not aligned with, one thing is certain: You are going to have a life that has a giant hole in it.

“What's your definition of success?”

There are many ways to answer this question. You have successes in many dimensions of your life. I give a different answer to this question every time it’s asked.

I recently took my kids to a Nuggets (basketball) game. I had all three of them with me. I felt successful as a parent (of course, my wife deserves huge credit here too) and truly happy at that moment, because I saw how much they really love and care for each other. This is rare. They have a truly special relationship.

I told them from a very young age that their siblings are the important people in their lives, more important even than their (future) spouses. Their job is to protect and take care of each other.

I look at success as the ability to control my calendar. Spending time on doing things that are meaningful to me and being surrounded with people I love, and respect are important, too.

Chopin Piano Concerto No. 2 – 2nd Movement

We are continuing our exploration of 2nd movements of romantic piano concertos with Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 2. #PianoAdagios

Frédéric Chopin composed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in F minor, Op. 21, before his Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11. He wrote Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1829, when he was about 19, and Piano Concerto No. 1 in 1830. However, due to publication order, the F minor concerto was labeled as No. 2 and the E minor as No. 1. The second concerto was premiered on March 17, 1830, in Warsaw, while the first followed on October 11, 1830. So, despite the numbering, Piano Concerto No. 2 was composed and performed first.

Click here to listen.

Today I’m diving into questions I’ve received from readers.

You can also listen to a narration of this article on iTunes & online.

Q&A Money Should Buy Time, Not Things

How did your childhood and upbringing shape your relationship with money and career path?

I grew up in the Soviet Union. It was a command-controlled economy. Just think about it – all prices and the salaries of every single person in a country of two hundred fifty million people were set by bureaucrats thousands of miles away – that system was set up to fail.

Bureaucrats in some dark room in a featureless building in Moscow decided that professors with PhDs should make more money than doctors or mechanics.

My father was a professor at a university and had a PhD, thus he was well paid. Yet, despite a very modest lifestyle, we never had much money. We never went hungry, but my mom constantly worried about what she was going to feed us. Similar to the rest of the populace, we had little savings and lived paycheck to paycheck.

I have a message for the young generation, to those who may be fantasizing about the fairness of socialism. You are right! Let me agree with you – it is the fairest system of them all. It is the very best system at equally distributing misery.

If you take the lives of the bottom 20% of the economic strata in the US, they are swimming in abundance compared to the experience of 95% of the population of the USSR. I know this because for the first ten years of our lives in the US, we were them. Every member of my family, except for my 13-year-old brother, worked. And we all had minimum-wage jobs.

The contrast between the two systems – socialism in the Soviet Union and capitalism in America – is stark. Experiencing the lack of opportunity in the Soviet Union and seeing what this country had to offer made me want to be successful. But maybe because of the influence of my parents, I never had an obsession with money.

I am (only slightly) embarrassed to say that in choosing my career path, I did not consider money. Looking back, I was young and naïve. I thought you could make money in all careers. When I was in college, most of my dating wasn’t with girlfriends – I only had a few of them – but with majors. I dated a lot of majors. I even wanted to be a lawyer for a semester because at the time every TV channel was focused on the O.J. Simpson trial.

Then, by complete accident, I fell in love with investing. Two things happened at once – I was hired by an investment firm to help them with computers, and I started taking finance classes. My major dating was over. I was not nine like Warren Buffett; I was 21. But I was very lucky. Knowing with great certainty what I wanted to do for the rest of my life gave me focus.

I wrote about this in Soul in the Game: when my wife and I got married, we had a very strict budget – we sat down and prioritized what was important to us. Travel, experiences, our kids’ education, and a rainy day fund were our top priorities, while house and cars were less important. Thus, we spent our small paychecks accordingly. I think we bought a new kitchen table and couches ten years into our marriage; until then, we used hand-me-downs from my brother Alex. This was not a great sacrifice – it just was not that important for us.

Fast forward a few decades, our income is greater, and there’s a lot more air between our earnings and spending. Maybe it is looking at corporate income statements every day when I analyze companies that programmed me that way – but I always recognized that making more money (growing revenues), though important, was not the only way to have higher net income. Our wants – our expenses – can always outmarch our paychecks. As you make more money, if you’re not careful, wanting more and more becomes a constant tune played in your head.

Our consumerist society is a slave of money; this is what keeps our economy going – always wanting more. I am not sure if it is our genetic programming, more likely cultural. I’d rather be its master.

Today, I am constantly working to deemphasize (deprogram) the importance of money in my life. I know this may sound strange coming from the guy whose job is to grow his clients’ nest egg. I find tremendous satisfaction in my job, I take it very seriously, but it is an incredible intellectual riddle, and opportunity to learn and to help others. But while I am doing, I am not obsessed with what it is going to do to my bank account.

You’ve written that ‘money should be buying time’ rather than the reverse. How do you think about the relationship between time and money?

I read a line said supposedly by Carl Jung recently: “Life does begin at forty; before then you are just doing research.” There is truth in that line. When you are young, life feels infinite. This changes your relationship with time. At least it did for me. When you cross forty, you realize that you’ve just crossed the halfway point of your life. You can look back and then look ahead and more or less visualize the amount of time you have left – I have as much left as I have lived.

At about that point, I realized that life is not a game where whoever has the biggest pile of money at the end wins. As my income went up, instead of buying myself things, I turned to buying time and experiences.

It’s a trade-off. We have lived in the same house for twenty years. In the past, we never bought new cars, always used ones. A small mortgage and not having car payments, intentionally living below our means, gave us extra resources to buy time.

I probably have written about this before, but I’ll repeat myself. I am going out of my way to keep my life simple. I see how, as people earn more money, they start complicating their lives with second homes and tax shelters. We went the other way – we embraced Airbnbs and simplicity.

We all trade money for time and time for money. Working is trading our finite time for money. Every time you eat at a restaurant, you are trading money for time. I’m just being more intentional with the process, and today I have more resources than I did twenty years ago.

It’s also about what you choose not to do. In the past, I’d be trying to sell an old bicycle or just let it sit in my garage for years; today I’d just give it away. One way to approach it is to put a dollar amount on your time. Let’s say you get overcharged by, pick an amount, and it would take one hour to dispute this charge with the credit card company. Would you spend that hour to dispute $10? $100? $1000?...

Once you realize you only have a limited number of hours on this wonderful planet, you start spending more to buy time than your paycheck might strictly seem to support.

You write that happiness comes from ‘having and solving good problems’ and that while money may not bring happiness, lack of money causes unhappiness. Tell me more about your views on happiness and money.

Happiness is a cocktail that has a concoction of ingredients. Good problems are a very important ingredient. Any creative activity that brings us long-term happiness has friction, which is often accompanied by pain, which is what we usually call problems. I call them good problems.

I’ll use my life as an example. Investing – the market can make you look like a complete moron for years. Kids – my father said, “small kids don’t let you sleep; older kids don’t let you live”. Writing can be excruciatingly painful and frustrating.

But I would not trade any of these “good problems” for anything. In fact, this pain is the source of meaning and growth. While we are going through problems, we may only feel pain, but knowing that there is growth, meaning, and happiness on the other side of it is very helpful.

About money. It is very simple. Think of it as water. If you have an unlimited supply of drinking water, it is not going to make you happy. However, if you have no water, thirst will make you unhappy very fast.

We often tie our happiness to more... especially, more money. There we get on two different treadmills – absolute and relative – both bring frustration and dissatisfaction. On the absolute one, we tell ourselves, “I’ll be happy when I have X amount of money.” Once you reach X, it just becomes a foundation for new reset. It never ends.

The relative treadmill is even worse; you are trying to compete with your neighbor or your brother-in-law. It is worse, because their success, instead of making you happy for them, makes you miserable.

La Traviata: Violetta-Germont duet

We are exploring timeless arias from Giuseppe Verdi’s opera La Traviata.

I love this duet, as it goes through incredible emotional highs and lows. Germont, Alfredo’s father, confronts Violetta, thinking she’s taking advantage of his son. Then, he discovers that she’s secretly selling her own possessions to help Alfredo pay his bills. Germont’s heart melts as he starts to appreciate Violetta’s purity and genuine love.

But then he has to ask Violetta to leave Alfredo – their affair is scandalizing his family and jeopardizing his daughter’s upcoming marriage. Violetta is a courtesan – a woman of high society who lives explicitly at the expense of the men she dates – and her presence threatens everything respectable society holds dear.

Now Violetta confronts an impossible choice: her love for Alfredo against the future of his “innocent” sister. She must decide between her own happiness and the chance for another woman – one she’ll never meet – to have the respectable life that she herself is forever denied.

The tragedy is that Germont isn’t evil. He’s just a father caught between society’s rules and his children’s futures. And Violetta, having just been recognized for her true worth, must sacrifice everything for a world that will never accept her.

#TimelessArias

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You can also listen to a narration of this article on iTunes & online.

Learning to See

I don’t think I’ve ever traveled as much as I did in 2025, particularly in its final stretch. I spoke to CFA societies in the UK and France, traveled to Mexico to watch my son propose to his girlfriend, then flew directly from Mexico to NYC to attend a small investment conference. Most of the travel (with the exception of Mexico) was for work. But it never felt like work because I traveled with my family (I hate traveling alone). In Europe I was joined by my wife; in New York I was accompanied by my brother Alex.

When I came back to Denver in early December after almost a month away, I told my assistant Meli that I was done traveling for at least the next few months. Of course, the very next day I found myself telling my daughter Hannah about a play I saw in NYC, and before I even finished I caught myself asking her, “This play is only running for another week, and then it will most likely be gone forever. Do you want to go see it?” She was on winter break from the University of Denver and quickly said yes. Her brother Jonah did not require much convincing to join us (he never does), but Mia Sarah still had school. So four days after I returned from NYC, I went back with my older kids for a two-day trip.

The play was the main reason for the trip. My friend Jeffrey Scharf, a value investor just like yours truly, has an affliction for writing plays. His play “Reunions” was running off-Broadway, and as a good friend, I felt I had to see it. I did not expect it to move me so much – so much that I wanted to bring my kids to see it. I was not surprised that they fell in love with it too.

I love NYC during Christmas time. I am not big on celebrating any religious holidays, but crisp air, lights, decorations, even a throng of tourists make this city nostalgically special at this time of year. Nostalgia is the right word; somehow this most iconic American city reminds me of my childhood in Russia. The secular country I grew up in was big on celebrating the New Year with Grandpa Frost – Russia’s answer to Santa Claus. The event was bigger than Thanksgiving and Christmas in the US combined. Walking the streets of NYC layered up in clothes, the cold air hitting your cheeks, and finding comfort in a cup of hot tea – all of this felt somehow nostalgic. Add to this spending time with my kids, going to the theater, and visiting museums… what could be better?

Let me say something about going to museums. I have loved classical music all of my adult life, but my love for visual art only really developed over the last ten years. Growing up, my parents would take me to art museums whenever we visited a large city, but I only went because they did.

In 2012, I started an annual tradition of driving to Santa Fe with my father and Jonah. I always looked forward to it because I got to spend time with them and visit the wonderful Santa Fe Opera. However, the official purpose of the trip was to visit the galleries on Canyon Road. Imagine a sleepy neighborhood where every one-story adobe house has been turned into a tiny gallery – over a hundred of them, all exhibiting art. At some point Hannah joined us on our yearly visit, and we’ve continued the tradition without my father; in the last several years Jonah’s fiancée Molly has tagged along as well.

Looking back, something changed inside of me around the time we started making this annual pilgrimage to Santa Fe’s museums and galleries – a change from “I go because that is what we do” to “I cannot wait to go to a museum.” I even started going to museums on the rare occasions when I traveled by myself. I put on headphones and just dived into the world of paintings from centuries earlier. Just as reading good fiction transports you into a different world and into the lives of others, these visits do the same – with the added benefit of the beauty you see nurturing your soul.

What truly amazed me is that my kids have now developed a desire to visit museums on their own, without any nudging from me. Jonah and I were in Houston in September on a company trip. We had a few extra hours. Without asking me, he found an art museum nearby, and we were looking at Claude Monet’s haystacks twenty minutes later.

The same thing happened on this trip to NYC. At Jonah and Hannah’s insistence, we visited not one, not two, but three world-class museums. We started at the Guggenheim, then moved on to the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met) – probably my favorite museum in the world – and concluded with the amazing Frick Collection.

This was our first time visiting the Frick. Henry Clay Frick was a “robber baron” during America’s Gilded Age. The story we heard at the museum was that Frick started his collection either out of guilt or because he wanted to change his legacy after ten people died in a labor strike. In less than a decade, he assembled a truly remarkable art collection. His story reminded me of Alfred Nobel, the inventor of dynamite, who, after reading his own obituary accidentally published in a newspaper, wanted to change how he would be remembered and wound up creating the Nobel Prize. It is amazing what people will do for their legacy.

Back to the art.

As we walked through the museum, I carefully observed my kids, especially Jonah. I remember when he was maybe six years old and we took him to the Denver Art Museum for an impressionist exhibition. He practically sprinted through the whole museum – I could not get him to stop and look at the art. Today, he was inhaling the art slowly, sharing his thoughts with us about each painting he observed.

At the Met he stood in front of one painting – Rembrandt’s “Aristotle with a Bust of Homer” – for five minutes. This is what he later wrote on X:

A man drained of spirit reaches for a sculpture as if it were the last vessel capable of understanding him. In touching this lifeless form, he confronts the truth that he has become just as hollow, finding solace only in something that, like him, no longer possesses a soul.

You may look at this painting and see something else. It does not matter. This is the beauty of art – we bring ourselves into a world created by others.

In addition to walking ten miles a day and our museum adventures, we also visited watch stores while in NYC. I wanted to see the Watches of Switzerland store in Soho (the investor in me accompanies me everywhere), which exhibits a lot of micro brands. It is interesting how researching Watches of Switzerland has sucked me into the world of Swiss watches. I am not as fanatical about them as Jonah or my brother Alex, but I appreciate them a lot more now.

After we returned to Denver, I asked Hannah what her highlights from the trip were. She surprised me when she mentioned visiting watch stores. She is not interested in collecting watches, but sees their artistry clearly. We can debate whether these metal trinkets are art or craft; in my view you can find art anywhere – you just have to be open to seeing it. This is what trips to museums do – they open our eyes to see.

Looking back, I recognize that my parents (my mom passed away when I was 11) gave my family an amazing gift: the ability to see. They never forced us to go to museums; they just took us with them. My father would discuss paintings with us. He did not tell us what to see (though as an artist, he definitely had a lot to share). He asked instead what we saw, and he genuinely listened to what we said. I realize now that my father taught my kids and me to really look and see. I hope, someday, my kids will pass that gift to their kids.

And with this, I present to you a work of art by a new Katsenelson artist – my daughter Hannah. For the first twelve years of her life, she had an incredible teacher: my father. I think he’d be proud.

This is my final article for 2025. As the year winds down, I'm grateful you've been part of this conversation. Writing is a lonely craft until readers like you bring it to life.

I hope these articles have added something to your life—a new perspective, a useful framework, or perhaps just a moment of clarity in a noisy world.

May your holidays be filled with what matters most. Thank you for reading.

- -

If you donate $100 or more to any charity on the list below, I’d be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books — Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideways Markets.

Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both. Just email a copy of your receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive. If you already have a copy, we can mail it to your friends. We can only mail it within the US.

I have selected three specific charities that are near and dear to my heart:

Jewish National Fund: An organization dedicated to building a strong, healthy, and secure future for the land and people of Israel.

American Jewish Committee (AJC): Global advocacy group fighting antisemitism, defending Israel, and promoting Jewish security through policy, education, and coalitions.

Boulder Symphony: An organization committed to connecting with the human spirit through symphonic music and fostering music education in our community

Rachmaninoff Piano Concerto No. 3 – 2nd Movement

We are continuing our exploration of 2nd movements of romantic piano concertos with Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3. #PianoAdagios

In 1909, Sergei Rachmaninoff crafted his Piano Concerto No. 3 in D minor. It’s dedicated to pianist Josef Hofmann, though he never performed it. Rachmaninoff premiered it himself in New York on November 28, 1909, with the New York Symphony Society. This is one of the most difficult to perform piano concertos ever written. I fell in love with it in 1997, and we have been together since.

Let’s play this game. Listen to these two performances first:

Click here to listen.

Then listen to Valentina Lisitsa perform solo without orchestra. Again, I hope you’ll see Rachmaninoff’s genius in making the piano be both a soloist and an orchestra:

Click here to listen.

Who Am I? (and my composers)

Someone recently asked whether I think of myself as Russian, or American. My initial response (without thinking) was – American. But as I gave this question more thought I realized that the answer is more complex. First of all, the question is incomplete, as I have another identity – I’m Jewish (we’ll come back to it). But when it comes to national identity, I think of myself as American. I moved to the United States in 1991 when I was 18 years old, and this country has been incredibly kind to me. I received my undergraduate and graduate education here. I speak, read, and write much better in English than in Russian.

Let’s say I was watching the Olympics and the American team was playing a team from any other country (including Russia). I’d be rooting for the Americans – I wouldn’t have to give this a second thought.

However, as I got older, I started to appreciate that when it comes to some elements of culture, I consider myself Russian. For instance, Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky are my composers. I cannot really describe what “my” means, but their music speaks to my soul. I experience a connection to their music that is unique.

That is really all I had to say here, but writing is very psychotherapeutic; it’s like being on the psychiatrist’s couch without a $200 bill. As I’ve been typing away at this, I have realized that there may be a logical reason why Russian music is “my.”

Tim Urban estimated that by the time you finish high school you have spent 93% of the total time you’ll ever spend with your parents. Today I spend at least six hours a day with my kids and another 20 hours on weekends. When kids live in your house they are completely dependent on you, especially younger ones. Let’s take my five-year-old Mia Sarah and thirteen-year-old Hannah, for example. Neither one drives, of course, and my wife won’t let them past the porch without adult supervision (she’d put a leash on Mia Sarah if she could).

When they go to college, get married, and have their own offspring, we’ll be lucky to see them six hours a month (though I hope it will be more than that). We are getting a small taste of what’s to come with my seventeen-year-old Jonah, who is a senior in high school and still lives with us. He has a car, girlfriend, study groups… we’ re lucky if we spend two hours a day with him during the week.

How does this relate to my being culturally Russian?

My parents loved classical music, and they especially loved Russian composers, Russian writers (my father read to me almost every day before I went to sleep), and Russian painters. So, what I am today, at least culturally, was planted in me during 93% of the time I spent with my parents, before we left Russia. So, on some (Freudian) level, maybe Russian composers are my composers because they are my parents’ composers.

And then there is being Jewish. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. For some people being Jewish means one thing: religion. Not me. To me being Jewish means three things: religion, tradition (philosophy), and nationality.

I didn’t realize that there was such a thing as Jewish religion until I was in my late teens. Soviets were not big fans of religion (they indiscriminately disallowed all of them), as it competed with their own version of religion – communism.

I was always reminded that my nationality was Jewish, because my parents’ (and later my) passports said that. Since I was a little kid I knew that my being Jewish was not a good thing, as if my nationality was not as clean or as good as everyone else’s. That feeling of being ashamed of my nationality completely went away after I moved to the US.

I recently took the 23 and Me test and learned that I am 97.5% Ashkenazi Jew. (There was not much surprise there – just take a quick look at my photo at the bottom).

And then there’s the second part of my being Jewish – tradition and philosophy. Neither my parents or grandparents were religious, but Jewish traditions and philosophy were deeply ingrained in them. I lump tradition and philosophy together because often you don’t know where one stops and the other begins. Religion and harsh external environment (for centuries Jewish people have not had easy lives) have helped to shape both.

Anyway, this is a very, very long introduction to the music I wanted to share with you today, Piano Concerto Number 4 by (my composer) Sergei Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff wrote the original version in 1926, but it received a very muted response. Rachmaninoff revised it twice, and his final version (completed in 1941) is the version usually performed today. However, in 2000 Rachmaninoff’s estate allowed the original version to be published, and thus we now have two versions to compare.

Click here to listen.

You can listen to a narration of this article on iTunes & online.

Charlie Kirk and the Cost of Courage

When Charlie Kirk invited me onto his show, I hesitated. I knew little about him and had heard mixed opinions. Out of curiosity, I watched a few episodes. What I saw was a man I often disagreed with—but also someone earnestly searching for truth, and willing to listen with respect.

Charlie had read my book and wanted to talk about it. I agreed to go on his show on the condition that politics stay off the table. What followed was a terrific conversation. We spoke about cold showers, Stoicism, mindfulness—the deeper questions of how to live well. In those moments, Charlie wasn’t the political figure many love or hate; he was simply a curious human being who cared about more than politics.

What struck me most was this: Charlie understood that free speech isn’t singing kumbaya with people who already agree with you. It’s engaging with those you vehemently disagree with. He built a career on that principle—hearing, debating, and welcoming voices across the spectrum.

This belief resonated with me deeply. I grew up in the Soviet Union, where truth was whispered only in the safety of small kitchens. Reading the wrong books, holding the “wrong” opinion—it could cost you your job, your freedom, even your life. I know what real oppression looks like. I lived through it.

America, to me, was always the opposite—a place where disagreement was not only tolerated but celebrated. Where ideas competed openly, and freedom of thought was a birthright. But America feels increasingly fragile. The space for disagreement is shrinking, and fear of speaking up is growing.

Charlie understood this danger. He believed in the marketplace of ideas, especially when those ideas challenged his own. In that sense, he lived his values with rare courage.

After I shared these thoughts on X.com, my friend Guy Spier wrote something that touched me:

“Charlie Kirk had the rare courage to speak up for what he believed in, no matter the cost. How many of us were too scared? Afraid of losing our job, our investor base, our writing gig, our clients, our friends. The enemies of free speech only had a few high-value targets—and Charlie Kirk was one. But if more of us had spoken up and said what we know in our hearts to be true, then he would perhaps not have been such a lone voice. There would have been strength in numbers. How about more of us just develop a little more courage to stand our ground and speak our dangerous truth? That's something I will do in memory of Charlie Kirk.”

Guy is right. Democracy doesn’t just die in darkness; it also dies in silence. It dies when fear keeps us from speaking honestly, when we retreat into echo chambers, when we reduce people to labels instead of listening to their ideas.

Chris Rock once said, “Anybody who says words hurt hasn’t been punched in the face. Words hurt when you write them on a brick.” Words themselves shouldn’t scare us. We should not be afraid to speak with those who disagree with us.

I disagree with my past self from five, ten, even twenty years ago—and I’m proud of it. That disagreement is proof of growth. In the Abracadabra chapter of Soul in the Game, I described how our words shape our thinking, and how true learning requires humility—the courage to treat every belief as a hypothesis. That’s why free speech matters: it forces us into the discomfort where real growth lives.

In memory of Charlie, I want to honor that courage. I refuse to stay silent. I love this country too much to bite my tongue. This newsletter will remain focused on investing, life, and music. But if you’d like to hear my unfiltered thoughts on everything else, you’ll find them here.

Rest in peace, Charlie.

Next week my company is hosting our 14th annual The Intellectual Investor Conference in Vail (formerly known as VALUEx Vail). I encourage you to check out presentations from past events—there’s a lot of insight there.

Right after the conference, I’m flying to Calgary to visit three of our companies, including a trip to the oil sands.

People have asked me, “What do you expect to learn from these trips?” Honestly—I have no idea. I’ve increased company visits over the last few years (even went to CES in Las Vegas in January), and every single time I’ve learned something valuable… I just didn’t know it at the time.

Also, I love traveling and seeing the world.

Choosing it

A few days ago, I was at my 11-year-old daughter Mia Sarah’s bridging ceremony from elementary to middle school. I was talking to another father, a friend who lives near us. He was complaining about the traffic and how much he hates driving his daughter to school.

I recognized my old self in his words.

I have two older kids—Jonah (24) and Hannah (19). When I think back to the years I spent driving them to school, I remember those moments with a lot of nostalgia. I didn’t always appreciate them then, but I do now. I have a perspective he doesn’t yet.

Driving Mia Sarah to school is one of the highlights of my day. I actually look forward to it—it’s our time. We’ve got our morning routine: I finish my writing while she’s getting ready, then she makes us breakfast. In the car, we listen to music. Sometimes we ask ChatGPT to tell us about the composer. Watching her react to a piece of music for the first time is priceless. I don’t take calls—those 15 to 30 minutes, depending on traffic, are ours.

I told my friend:

"You’re driving your daughter anyway. You may as well choose to enjoy it. You’re turning a negative emotion into a positive one. You’re making memories—for her and for you. Ten years from now, you’ll look back on these drives as some of the best moments of your life."

Schumann Piano Concerto

Today we are going to continue our exploration into Clara and Robert Schumann's music by diving into music by Robert. I first heard Robert's piano concerto around the same time as Edvard Grieg's piano concerto, probably on the same CD.

Grieg was directly influenced by Robert's concerto; he had heard Clara perform it. Also, Grieg's teacher was a friend of Robert. Both concertos have this ongoing conversation between the piano and orchestra, a common theme in romantic piano concertos.

Click here to listen.

Article available in Russian here.

This week, I am going to share with you two essays that I wrote a few years ago. I want you to see this country through the eyes of an immigrant. If you were born here, you have only seen prosperity, making it more likely for you to take what you have for granted. We tend to not appreciate what we have until we lose it.

30 Years in America - Edition 2024

On December 4^th, 1991, my family “got off the boat” from Russia – we landed at JFK, our stop on the way to Denver. I was 18. This was a new world to us. My first surprise was Denver’s shocking flatness. I learned about the United States mostly from American movies which, with the exception of Westerns, heavily biased coasts and skyscrapers. Denver was flat, sunny, and unusually warm. Just a few days before we were freezing our bones in Moscow in negative 30 degree weather. It was 65 degrees in Denver. People wore T-shirts in the middle of winter.

That was not the only surprise for us.

In Russia, every time we left the house, we paid close attention to how we dressed. Here nobody cared about their looks. This was liberating. I embraced this newfound freedom with all my heart. To this day I am the worst-dressed person in our 12-story office building, sporting mostly T-shirts and jeans.

We were picked up at the airport by half a dozen strangers, members of my aunt’s synagogue. There were six of us: my father, stepmother, brother Alex, stepbrother Igor, my 84-year-old grandma, and yours truly. We had brought all our life possessions with us – thirty duffle bags. These strangers, who were to our big surprise always smiling (I will address the topic of smiling in a second), picked us up and drove us to our fully furnished apartment. They had furnished an apartment for people they didn’t know! That was shocking to me. I had been brainwashed into believing that Americans – capitalist pigs – would sell their brothers to supersize their happy meals. (I’ll touch on this topic in a few pages, too). Now, these cold-hearted capitalists had taken their time and money to care for people they had never met. Capitalism was supposed to make people selfish and greedy, but these people were anything but.

Now, on the subject of smiling – Americans do it a lot. Let’s be honest; these smiles are manufactured. There is no way you are happy to see every stranger you meet on the street. Russians are stingy on smiles. They don’t give you frivolous smiles. When they smile they mean it. My thinking on this topic has changed a lot over the years. The pivotal moment was when I went back to Russia with my brother Alex in 2008. I realized that smiling faces had become a necessary and welcome part of the décor of my daily life. Today I walk in the park daily. I may be listening to an audio book or a podcast, but I try to give every person I meet a big smile. I do this intentionally for a selfish reason – you do this a dozen times in an hour and your facial muscles lighten and relax and your mood improves. Try it. It works.

Language was another surprise. George Bernard Shaw said, “England and America are two countries divided by a common language.” Shaw was so right. I had studied (more like memorized) English in school. I had enough vocabulary to maybe buy milk. But that was British English. American English was a completely different animal. Americans garbled entire sentences into a single sound. I honestly could not tell when one word ended and another began. The only person I understood was James, a wonderful man who had recently moved to Denver from Dallas. James was one of those cold-blooded capitalists who volunteered his time to help us acclimate in our first few months in the US. Unlike non-Texan Americans, James spoke with a slow Texan drawl. I could understand every word he said!

I think it took me six months to be able to understand spoken American English. I remember that day – my father was driving me to school and we were listening to classical music on the radio. A commercial came on, and I could understand it! That was a big day for me.

It is going to be very difficult for me to say what I am about to say without sounding like a complete idiot. But I must preface it by explaining that in Soviet Russia everyone (for the most part) was equally poor. My family, despite my father’s high salary (he had a PhD, which boosted his pay), lived from paycheck to paycheck. Going to a restaurant was a big event for us. Our understanding of money, especially mine, was very limited – we never had any.

My father’s younger sister Anna had moved to the United States in 1979. She got divorced and remarried, to a rabbi, Nathan, who headed a small congregation in Denver. I remember one day Nathan pointed out to me one of his congregants and said, “He is a millionaire.” I still remember the thought that ran through my head – there must be something special about that person. After a few weeks of intense observation of this fellow, I came to the conclusion that having millions of dollars in the bank did not make him extra special. He drove a fancier car. He probably had a bigger house. But he dressed worse than me (which is hard to do) and he ate the same hamburgers and ice cream as everyone else.

Over the years I have learned that money and power reveal. They often unmask a person. Sometimes you like what is revealed; many times you don’t. In fact, thirty years on, as an occupational hazard (I run an investment firm), I’ve spent some time around quite a few very wealthy people. I haven’t observed any extra dose of happiness in them. Money solves money problems. It doesn’t make people love you; your actions do. Money, just like education, is supposed to buy you choices. It should provide security. The first few years in the US, my parents worried how we were going to pay for groceries and rent. We don’t have that worry today – and that is liberating. (I wrote an in-depth essay on this subject. You can read it here.)

As I was reflecting on the last thirty years, I realized that the US has kept its promise. The poem on the Statute of Liberty reads:

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The US has always presented itself as a country of opportunity. A country where you can achieve anything if you work hard. The only job that is off limits to an immigrant is becoming the President of the US. I’d say that is a feature, not a bug, of being an immigrant.

After we arrived, 1991 quickly turned into 1992. I spent a few months that year knocking on the doors of every business establishment within walking distance of our apartment and saying, “I’d like to fill out an application.” (My American aunt taught me to say this.) I did not realize it at the time, but the country was in a recession. Getting a job was very difficult. Every member of my family needed to work. I was rejected by both Taco Bell and McDonalds on multiple occasions. I still hold a little grudge against those two specific establishments when I drive by them.

My first job in the US was folding towels at an athletic club. I was fired a few months later for reasons still unknown to me. The manager called me into his office and gave me a long speech (I was a bit confused because he was smiling while he was firing me). Unfortunately, because he was not Texan, I didn’t understand much of what he said. I did understand that I was fired.

My next job was bussing tables at the Village Inn restaurant on Friday and Saturday nights. When I say night, I don’t mean evening, I really mean night. My shift started at 9pm and ended at 5am. At 2am, once the bar closed, the restaurant was flooded with folks looking for burgers and fries.

Everything I earned at the Village Inn, down to the last penny (including tips), I gave to my parents. This money went for food and rent. It was the least I could do. My stepmother, who was a doctor in Russia, was now cleaning rooms in a hotel. So, despite having a job, I had no money of my own. Once I went on a date with a girl to a Chinese restaurant. She ordered kung pao chicken, I ordered water. It was an embarrassing experience. I had to postpone dating for a while.

Those were difficult years, but I would not trade them for anything. Those years taught me to work harder than anyone else. I don’t know if I was driven by hunger for success, fear of failure, or by seeing the contrast of what this country had to offer versus my life in the Soviet Union. Probably all of the above.

Yes, this country has kept its promise. But as I reflect on spending the bulk of my adult life here, I realize I understand this country less today than I did 30 years ago.

If you want to keep feeling uplifted about the US, stop reading here. Seriously, my essays are usually a happy place, and the happy place is about to end.

Over the last decade something has changed. This change probably started at the turn of the century, but over the last ten years it became very noticeable. The country turned tribal.

Tribalism is benign when it comes to certain parts of our lives, like sports. You love your local high school or college or pro football team and (peacefully) hate other teams. We accept a certain amount of irrationality in belonging to a football tribe. I live in Colorado and thus supposedly belong to the Broncos and CU Buffs tribes. Even if you are a Green Bay Packers or Nebraska Cornhuskers fan, you don’t hate me for that (or if you do, it’s just for a few hours a year).

But tribalism is dangerous in other parts of our lives. We outsource our thinking to the mother ship of the tribe. Other tribes become our nemesis, and most importantly we lose nuance. Early in our lives our parents presented the world to us in binary terms. Honesty is good, lying is bad. They were trying to instill values that were black and white (right or wrong). But the world around is anything but. It is full of nuances. When I discuss politics or economics with my kids, they instinctively want to look at everything in binary terms. I try very hard to explain to them the complexities of the issues. These complexities are completely lost in tribal thinking. (I wrote about the dangers of tribalism in investing here).

Tribalism in the US has become so strong that it has started to impact our freedom of speech. No, the government is not going to send you to the gulag for your political thoughts. We do it to ourselves by cancelling each other.

Let me give you this very recent example. Chris Cuomo was fired by CNN for helping his brother Andrew Cuomo deal with sexual harassment allegations. I was going to tweet something along the lines that CNN is a private enterprise and can do what it wants. But I don’t think any less of Chris Cuomo for choosing his brother over his job. This is the value I instill in my kids – I tell my son and two daughters that the three of them are the most important people to each other in the world (even more important than their future spouses). They have to take care of each other for the rest of their lives. If one of my brothers got in trouble, I’d do anything I could to help him, even if it meant losing my job. I think there is a Taco Bell or McDonalds out there, still waiting to fix the mistake it made in passing on me 30 years ago.

I was going to tweet this about Chris Cuomo, but then I caught myself self-censoring. The thought that kept me from tweeting was, “People have been cancelled for less.” So much for free speech, for feeling you can voice an opinion you know people will disagree with. On the surface my self-censored opinion is irrelevant. But this is not about me. How many of us now find ourselves afraid of being cancelled, or just don’t want to get into mindless, vitriolic debates with tribal drones (people who just repeat the talking points of their tribes). The more we self-censor, the less free we become.

As nuance is lost, we lose pragmatism and resilience, and we follow the paths of all empires – they get too rich, overextended, think they are better than others, and then fail. (I wrote about our fiscal situation in this essay, so I won’t repeat myself on that topic).

I see much the same thing happening on the corporate level. As great companies triumph, they lose a healthy sense of paranoia and perspective, their culture stiffens, and they start thinking that success is a God-given right. Hubris creates an opening for the competition to slide in. At first the competitors are content with breadcrumbs, but eventually they eat your lunch and dinner. IBM, GE, Xerox, Kodak, Polaroid – they used to be the hallmarks of this country and now they are the sorry old shadows of themselves.

It pains me to see the younger generation romanticizing about socialism. When you tell them that every country that tried it failed, they answer that they’ll do it better. I have unique insights into this topic, both as a person who lived under Soviet socialism and as an investor. Socialism fails not because of the quality of people involved – nobody thinks that Russia or Venezuela would have succeeded if only they had better bureaucrats. Even if we had lent them out our most distinguished DMV or postal service workers, that would not have saved them. Socialism simply runs counter to our genetic programming. The alignment of incentives is paramount to the success of any enterprise. The incentives of government bureaucrats are aligned not with the success of the country but with their keeping their jobs.

You want a corporate example? Compare the innovation of SpaceX, a company run by an ambitious founder, to the space program run by the US government in league with our traditional defense contractors. Capitalism is far from perfect, but it is the best system we’ve got. (Full disclosure: We do have a position in defense contractors. The specter of Chinese dominance motivated us to buy them, and I wrote about that here.)

Yes, I know that this not what you were expecting to read from me. I am as surprised as you. But I felt it was my civic duty to share these thoughts.

I am still optimistic about the US. The wise words of Winston Churchill come to mind here: “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing after they have tried everything else.” I still would not want my kids or my (future) grandkids to live anywhere else. But we should not take our success for granted and, just like immigrants fresh off the boat, we should be a bit hungry and appreciate that what we have here is very special. We should be very careful about our freedoms.

I was going to end this with a traditional “God bless America.” Sure. But I think relying on divine intervention is not enough; we should all make small decisions every day to improve the country. My writing this, even if it means losing half of my readers, is my first step.

I'd love to hear your thoughts, so please leave your comment and feedback here. Also, if you missed my previous Q&A "Breakfast In Omaha Meeting 2024 – Session Two", you can view it and leave a comment here.

Fantastic Fantastique

Louis-Hector Berlioz (1803-1869) was not a child prodigy; at age 12 he was a latecomer to music (by that age Mozart had already completed his first performance tour). His father discouraged him from studying piano, so he did not. His parents wanted him to be a doctor (every Jewish mother wants her son to be a doctor), and Berlioz was sent to Paris to study medicine. At the age of 23, despite his parents’ objections, he formally abandoned the study of medicine and focused solely on music.  Berlioz never received classical musical training, and thus it was easy for him to break the rules of music composition since he didn’t know them.

It’s hard to say whether Berlioz’s musical adventure would have amounted to much if he hadn’t fallen in love. When he was 27 he attended a performance of Hamlet. There he saw her: Harriet Smithson, Irish Shakespearean actress. He was fatally smitten. He wrote her love letters, but his love went unrequited. He rented an apartment across the street from her and then wrote her the ultimate love letter: Symphony Fantastique.

Fantastique was written in the pain of unreturned love. Berlioz wrote:

Oh, if only I did not suffer so much!… So many musical ideas are seething within me.… Now that I have broken the chains of routine, I see an immense territory stretching before me, which academic rules forbade me to enter.

In another letter he wrote:

Sometimes I can scarcely endure this mental or physical pain (I can’t separate the two) … I see that wide horizon and the sun, and I suffer so much, so much, that if I did not take a grip of myself, I should shout and roll on the ground. I have found only one way of completely satisfying this immense appetite for emotion, and this is music.

As a side note, the topic of pain and creativity is very dear to me. I strongly believe most creativity in the world is unleashed by pain. If it was not for pain we would not have Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which he wrote after suffering a three-year depression from the failure of his first symphony. Or think about this: Beethoven was deaf the last ten years of his life, and this is when he composed his best work.

Back to Berlioz. Either Berlioz could not take the pain or he needed additional stimulants to access his newfound creativity; in any case, he consumed a lot of opium in the course of writing Fantastique. Fantastique premiered to incredible success in 1830 and turned Berlioz into a huge star. Harriett was unfortunately not at the premier and only heard the symphony two years later. By then Berlioz is famous, and she recognizes his genius. They get married and … are unhappy and separate.

Nevertheless, we should all thank Harriet for this incredible masterpiece.

Here is how Leonard Bernstein summarized this symphony: “Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.”

Final point. Fantastique is a five-movement program symphony. (Program music means that the symphony follows written program notes; think of them as silent opera.) It’s the love story of Berlioz’s unrequited love for Harriet – on psychedelics. There is a glittering ball, a lonely idyll in the countryside, and other visions induced by opium. (I kid you not; here is what Berlioz wrote in his program notes: “The Artist, knowing beyond all doubt that his love is not returned, poisons himself with opium. The narcotic plunges him into sleep, accompanied by the most horrible visions.”) The symphony continues with the murder of the artist’s love interest, the execution of the artist after a stirring march to the gallows, the artist’s funeral, and the artist’s love interest’s reappearance as a witch). You can read the whole fantastical story here.

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

Please read the following important disclosure here.

Article available in Spanish here and Russian here.

Rediscovering the Essence of the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

When in the past I described my trip to the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting to others, I often found that I contradicted myself. I said I was going to see Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger speak, and then I said that their presentation was the least important part of the trip. 

The BRK annual meeting is the main attraction that brings forty thousand people to Omaha; but once the novelty of breathing the same air as Buffett wears off, people keep coming back not because of the annual meeting – they can watch Buffett answering questions (Munger passed away in 2023) from the comfort of their couch at home – but because … 

For three days in May, Omaha turns into a gathering of like-minded people. What do I mean by like-minded? In the past, I'd say they were value investors. But this year, I saw Omaha through the eyes of my 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, and came to a slightly different conclusion. 

It was Hannah’s first pilgrimage and my 22-year-old son Jonah's fourth. Jonah just graduated from CU Boulder in finance. Hannah is going to be a freshman at the University of Denver and is deciding between psychology and a business degree. She has expressed very little interest in value investing. 

To my surprise, this year in Omaha a number of people came up to me asking for advice unrelated to investing. A friend of mine, who is an accomplished value investor, wanted to talk to Hannah, but she was busy talking to someone else, so he ended up directing his question to me. He had wanted to ask her, “What did your father do to form such a special relationship with you?” He had two young daughters and wanted to make sure he would have such a close relationship with them.

This question stumped me, a little. I am sure this is not the only thing I did, but it’s one that came to mind right away: Spending time with my kids one-on-one was very important. We do plenty of things as a family, but the conversation is different when both my wife and I are with our kids. Our attention shifts to our spouse. 

My wife doesn't ski, so the kids and I spent a lot of time on ski lifts and ski slopes together. Many times, I've traveled with my kids on business trips. I started doing that because I hate travelling alone, but then I realized how much I enjoyed spending time with them when I travel, and the trips became a great excuse for us to be together. 

My wife doesn’t like long drives, so my father and I would take the kids on road trips to Santa Fe. This doesn't mean you have to travel with your kids to have one-on-one time. When I go for early morning walks, I take my kids with me, too. It comes down to really spending time with them, being present, and being vulnerable as they get older. (I wrote about that here). 

Along the same lines, I was treated to an interesting, somewhat new perspective on my book. A lovely couple came up to me and told me that Soul in the Game was a parenting book. They are both doctors and live in North Dakota. The man said, "I was born in Pakistan. In Pakistan, men go to work. Their job is to make money. The wife's job is to take care of the kids. Men spend little time with their kids. This was the example my parents set for me. Your book showed me a blueprint for being a better father." 

A young woman who attended one of Q&A sessions in Omaha, picked up my book at the airport, read it on the plane home, and emailed me: “Your book has made me a kinder person. You also made me realize the importance of focusing on what truly matters in life, and changed my perspective towards having kids. Because of you, I now hope to have kids in the future and learn from them to become a better person!”

I cannot tell you how weird it feels to be turning into Dr. Spock and dispensing parenting advice. Or life advice in general. But she nailed what kids do to us – they transform us into better people. We have ideals for our kids – we want them to grow up to be good, honest, kind-hearted people. We try to instill these values in them, but at the same time we don't want to be hypocrites; and as a result, we end up changing ourselves towards the ideals we try to infuse in our kids.

Jeffersonian dinners

I get to see my friends who come from all over the US and the world to Omaha. Folks I talk to on a regular basis but see only a few times a year. Hannah and Jonah got to spend time with my friends, too.

Every evening in Omaha we had a dinner, but not a traditional one. Instead, we had Jeffersonian dinners. (This is the only dinner I'd have in a group larger than four.) Matt Stafford, whom I had the pleasure to meet at a conference in Switzerland, wrote a book on Jeffersonian dinners and has turned them into a science.

Thomas Jefferson hosted this type of dinner at the White House when he was the president. The rules are simple: There is one conversation per table, and the group or moderator chooses a topic. If people don't know each other, you go around the table and do short introductions first. That's basically it.

I love Jeffersonian meals because they turn dinners or lunches (even breakfasts) from loud, often uncomfortable small talk with someone who is sitting to your left or right into opportunities to have meaningful conversations from which you get to learn. 

You'd think a lot of value investors would get together around the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting – the Woodstock of Capitalism – and talk mostly about money or stocks. Though I had one-on-one stock discussions here or there, most conversations at these dinners were about life. 

Here are the topics we pondered at our dinners this year: (1) If you could meet anyone, dead or alive, who would it be and what would you ask him/her? (2) What is the nicest thing someone did for you? 

Last year, a friend who was a top executive at one of the largest European cosmetics companies gave us an interesting answer to the following question at one of these Jeffersonian dinners in Omaha: What do you know that others don't? He said, "When you buy face creams and lotions, always choose the cheapest, top-selling, ubiquitous one. Even though it is the cheapest, it brings the highest revenues and profits to these companies, so they pour huge amounts into R&D into it." 

You never know what you’ll learn at these dinners. 

Since I am on the topic of Jeffersonian dinners, a few days after we came back from Omaha, Jonah graduated from CU Boulder. 

My wife and I hosted a graduation dinner for him at a restaurant in Denver. I've gone to many graduations in the past. A lot of people who are friends of the parents and the graduate get together, you hear a toast or two, and then the party turns into a lot of small talk.

This dinner was very different.

We reserved a private room at a restaurant that had one big table. We had close family and six of Jonah's close friends – a total of twenty-one of us. Half an hour into the dinner, once the food orders were taken, I told folks that we were going to have a Jeffersonian dinner, briefly explained the rules, and picked the topic of the conversation – Jonah. I asked everyone to tell a favorite story about Jonah. 

We learned a lot of interesting things from Jonah's friends, and Jonah's friends got to hear a lot of embarrassing stories from his sisters and his parents. It was a very touching, meaningful, and unforgettable event.

Back to Omaha.

When we came home, Hannah announced to my wife that she is going to Omaha again next year. My wife was surprised and said, “Jonah is into finance. You are not. Why?”

Hannah said, “I got to meet so many interesting people and had so many terrific conversations. None of them were about finance. I learned so much. I had conversations I have never had with my friends.”

I’ve been going to Omaha since 2008, but this year I saw the event from a different perspective, through Hannah’s eyes, and I realized the genius of Buffett and Munger.

There are a lot of great investors out there – none of them have an annual event hosted in the middle of nowhere (sorry, Omaha folks), where forty thousand people show up for three days to celebrate... I was going to say “capitalism,” but I think it is much more than that (sorry, capitalism). It’s about learning, self-improvement, becoming better… people. If you go back and listen to past Q&A sessions from the BRK meeting, a very large number of questions were completely unrelated to finance or investing; they were about life. 

So you see, to be a good investor, you have to constantly learn. This creates a learning muscle that cannot help but take you beyond the bounds of finance. As you start learning and reading more widely, you cannot help but try to become a better person (even a better parent). 

This is what has happened to me, except the process was supersized by daily writing, which is a steroid for learning that took me far outside of finance. I guess this is why I (completely!) unintentionally became a person who is dispensing life and parenting advice. 

This is what Hannah saw in Omaha, and this is why she wants to keep coming back – she wants to keep learning about life. And of course, as an added bonus, she’ll get to spend lots of quality time with her brother and her father. 

As value (life) investors say, “Next year in Omaha!” 

One more thing: This year I was going to host a small reader get-together. What started out as a modest event for 75 people turned into three Q&A sessions attended by 300 people, with 200 people on the waiting list (we did not have enough space). 

We have learned from this year's experience – we are going to book a much larger venue next year. If you are planning to come to Omaha next year and would like to attend our get-together, I suggest you get on the list early (and don't forget to separately register your friends and family members who want to attend).

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I'd love to hear your thoughts, so please leave your comment and feedback here. Also, if you missed my previous article "Dad, You Are Not Growing! (Embracing Vulnerability)", you can read it and leave a comment here.

Below is my latest Youtube video:

Giovanni Bottesini – Double Bass Concerto No. 2 in B minor

Today I’d like to share with you a composer and concerto that are completely new to me: Giovanni Bottesini’s Double Bass Concerto No. 2 in B minor. 

Bottesini (1821-1889) was born in Northern Italy. He studied violin and would have become a violinist. But when he applied to the Milan Conservatory, they had no scholarships available for violin positions but had an opening for double bass (also known as the contrabass, the largest, lowest-pitched string instrument. Think of it as a giant cello). So Bottesini ended up studying double bass. 

Bottesini changed the public’s perception of the double bass, showing that it could be a solo instrument, and went into the musical history books as the Nicolo Paganini of the double bass. He was a virtuoso and greatly expanded the limited repertoire for the giant instrument. He composed 48 pieces for the instrument, including three concertos. 

Bottesini earned a living as a conductor and was well known throughout Europe. Verdi chose him to conduct the first performance of Aida. But his first love was double bass, and while conducting opera, during intermission he would bring his double bass on stage and play his fantasies on the theme of the opera.

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

Please read the following important disclosure here.

I am both sad and excited about going to Buffett's Omaha this year. I am sad because Charlie Munger, a person I had tremendous admiration for, passed away last year. I'll miss his wit and wisdom. I am excited because I'll be there with both of my older kids. In addition to my son Jonah, who is soon to be graduating from CU Boulder, I'll be joined by my daughter Hannah, who is about to graduate from high school and will be going to the University of Denver in the fall. This is Jonah's fourth time and Hannah's first time to attend the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting.

• If you are going to Omaha, my friends at my favorite bookstore in the world, Hudson Booksellers, located in the Omaha airport, are running a promotion on my books. If you buy Soul in the Game, you'll get The Little Book of Sideways Markets for free.

Dad, You Are Not Growing! (Embracing Vulnerability)

“Dad, you are not growing. You’ve stopped learning new things. You used to have new, creative ideas. Lately you were just improving things that are familiar to you. This is just a copout for you from learning and creating new things.”

This is what my 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, told me in response to my idea of taking the Stoic section from Soul in the Game, polishing it, adding a few new chapters, and turning it into a small, standalone book. 

I got this idea while I was listening to the Stoic chapters in Soul in the Game as I was preparing for a podcast interview with a heavy focus on Stoicism. I wanted to make sure that examples from the book were fresh in my mind. 

I cannot tell you how much I hate what I am about to say, as it is impossible to say it without appearing conceited. But the truth is, the raw emotion I experienced after listening to these chapters again was, “This is really good, and so helpful.” 

Although the book was published in June 2022, the manuscript went through its final edit in August 2021. Since then, I have researched a few hundred stocks, written a few hundred thousand words, read dozens of books, and listened to a few thousand hours of podcasts. Time creates distance between you and your written words. Therefore, as I listened to the Stoic chapters in Soul in the Game, as weird as it may sound, I found myself returning to those chapters more as a reader than their author. That is why I had this reaction. 

I realized I could create a very accessible, small-sized, practical guide to Stoicism. I liked this idea because the almost 30,000 word Stoic section is sandwiched between the parenting and creativity sections of Soul in the Game. Also, since the book came out, I have given literally hundreds of interviews about Stoicism and have learned more about it. I’ve had new ideas. 

I have done this before, kind of. My first book, Active Value Investing, had 300 pages and 75 charts and tables. John Wiley & Sons asked me to rewrite it for their Little Book series, and this is how The Little Book of Sideways Markets came about. It was 1/3 the size and had only five charts and tables. I believe the Little Book is a better version than its predecessor because I had the opportunity to improve it and cut things down. However, here is the paradox: I could not have written the Little Book without first writing the big book.

I probably would not have had the confidence to publish a standalone Stoic book. Anyway, it is this idea that triggered Hannah to give me this little lecture. After she told me this, I did not say anything, just went for a walk in the park to think about it. 

As I started to think about what Hannah said, I was overwhelmed with parental pride – I realized that my wife and I had raised a student of life (a person with a growth mindset). I did not think this way when I was her age. 

Hannah’s comment made me think about my circle of competence. On one side, I want to increase its circumference – learn new things – because it is on the edges where growth happens. 

However, that is not the only place where it happens. 

We also need to increase the density of what is inside the circle by revisiting what we think we already know. We forget. We also experience new things – and these experiences change us. This is why I believe we need to reread great books. When I reread a book, I am not the same person who read it five years ago. Experiences (life) have made me a different person. Thus, the same words have a different impact, as they are processed by a different version of me; and so I learn new things. Extracting the Stoic section from Soul in the Game and turning it into a standalone book would give me another opportunity to reread and study the Stoics.

Part of me wants to go back to the Stoics; another part wants to keep moving forward. 

Most importantly, Hannah’s comment also made me think about the relationship I have with my kids. They feel comfortable telling me uncomfortable things. I had a similar gentle but frank relationship with my father. He had enough self-confidence to not be afraid of being vulnerable. At times, when we went for long walks (especially when we traveled together), he shared regrets about mistakes he made in his relationships and different choices he wished he had made at certain points in his life. This openness elevated our relationship and made me feel comfortable giving constructive feedback, similar to the feedback Hannah gave me. 

I had never actually thought about this until now. I was never intentionally vulnerable with my kids; I was simply being myself, inadvertently copying the relationship my father had with me. Luckily, I had a good example to follow. 

In our society, vulnerability has turned into a word you would typically hear on a Dr. Phil show. By being vulnerable, we are admitting to another human that we are also human. We are not perfect; we have made mistakes, and we have fears and regrets. As I think about it, I see it as an authentic way of removing an artificially erected barrier, unclogging communication with people who are dear to you.

After I came back from the walk, I genuinely thanked Hannah for her feedback. Also, I showed her a few dozen “thinking” essays on new topics I’ve been working on for a long time but haven’t yet published. 

I have not made up my mind if I will do the little Stoic book, but if I do, I’ll call it Stoic Operating System. If you read Soul in the Game, I’d love to hear your thoughts about this idea. 

If you haven’t, I’d love to hear your insights, too, right after you read the book. 

Here are the last seven reviews of Soul in the Game on Amazon:

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I'd love to hear your thoughts, so please leave your comment and feedback here. Also, if you missed my "Hedging the Portfolio with Weapons of Mass Destruction" article last week, you can view or read it and leave a comment here.

Below is my latest Youtube video:

The Phantom of the Opera

This is a continuation of my journey into musicals (previous musicals).

The Phantom of the Opera was composed by Andrew Lloyd Weber, with lyrics by Tim Rice. The musical is based on the book by French author Gaston Leroux, published in 1910. Laroux wanted to become a lawyer, but luckily for us he gambled his inheritance away and became a reporter instead. As a reporter he learned of rumors surrounding a ghost living in the Paris opera house. He combined these rumors with true stories of a chandelier crashing down during a performance and an underground lake (there is indeed a lake under the opera house) and turned them into a novel, which was first published in a newspaper and then as a book. Until his death Laroux was convinced that the ghost living in the opera house was real. 

The Phantom of the Opera is the ultimate gateway drug to opera. At times, except for more modern instrumentation, you really cannot tell the difference between this musical and an opera. I’ve seen this musical performed live half a dozen times, and every single time I leave the theater touched, as if I have watched it for the first time. I’d argue this is Andrew Lloyds Weber’s greatest creation. 

The Phantom of the Opera is at its core a love story. Christine Daaé is a little-known soprano. From a young age she secretly takes music lessons from Erik – she calls him “Angel of Music” – who is the phantom of the opera, a ghost who lives in the entrails of the opera house and who has a deformed face (thus the mask he wears). The lead soprano calls in sick and Christine debuts at the gala performance to a great success. There she meets her childhood friend Raoul, and they fall in love. Erik, who is in love with Christine, feels betrayed… and there is a lot of jealousy, drama, mystery, kidnapping, and some murder in between. This musical does however have a happy ending. Despite his being the antagonist of the story, you feel sorry for Erik, who in the end comes through as a hero (okay, a weak hero but hero nonetheless): His love for Christine is so strong that he puts her happiness above his own and lets her be with Raoul. 

I have a very personal story associated with The Phantom of the Opera. In April 2018 then-13-year-old Hannah and I went on a two-day father-daughter trip to Washington DC to see the cherry blossoms. I love Washington DC in April; it is truly a magical place. We did the usual touristy things, visiting the Smithsonian and the Newseum (the museum of news); and up to that point the highlight of Hannah’s trip was scootering around DC. As we were getting ready to fly back to Denver, we learned that the Denver airport was closed due to a blizzard. 

We were delighted.

Hannah and I took a train to NYC and spent two days in Manhattan. We visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art (I love the Impressionist and Flemish painter collections). We also did the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). (I keep going back to museums of modern art, not just in NY but in San Francisco as well, in the hope that one day I may truly enjoy them. Not yet, but I am hopeful. Hannah and I also rented bikes and rode them in Central Park. But the highlight of our NYC adventure was The Phantom of the Opera. This was Hannah’s first live musical. We were so energized after the performance that, holding hands, we played Phantom of the Opera on her iPhone, with shared AirPods, singing it while walking through Times Square. We hadn’t a care in the world. We were intoxicated by the music, and though surrounded by other tourists, we were deep in our own phantom world. If you ask Hannah what she remembers the most about our DC trip, she’ll tell you it was going to The Phantom of the Opera in NYC and singing it in Times Square. 

Before we listen to excerpts from the musical, I must mention the 2004 Phantom of the Opera movie. It is a masterpiece. My favorite number in the movie, which highlights beautiful cinematography and singing, is called “Prima Donna,” about a character who is an overrated signer, masterfully played by Minnie Driver. As you watch it, note the counterpoint singing – performers singing arias independently of each other.

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

Please read the following important disclosure here.

With your help, we have raised over $320,000 (across multiple charities) to help Israel cope with the Hamas atrocities.

The offer still stands: If you donate $100 or more to one of these charities, we’ll be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books – Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideway Markets. Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both. (Email receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive. We can mail in the US only).

Expanding Perspectives Through Travel - From Spain to the UK

My brother Alex, my son Jonah, and I went to a conference in Switzerland. We saw this as an opportunity to turn the bookends of the trip into a small European vacation.

We flew to Malaga, located in the south of Spain, rented a car, and drove to Granada, which was about 60 miles away. We only had two days for Spain. We spent a full day in Granada, which we packed with two walking tours including tours of the city and the Alhambra (which means "red castle" in Arabic) and surrounding gardens. 

Spain was governed by Muslims for centuries, and even though they were expelled from Spain six hundred years ago, Muslim influence is still evident in the architecture of southern Spain. In fact, Spanish architecture is very different from that in the rest of Europe.

Malaga was the birthplace of Pablo Picasso. I am not a big fan of Picasso; I simply don’t understand him. Malaga has a small museum dedicated to its famous son, with a few of his paintings. A painting he created when he was 14 years old shocked me; it looked nothing like the Picasso that the world knows. This is the Picasso that I could actually like. However, I get the feeling that if he had continued to paint in this realistic style, the world would not know who Picasso was.

After our two days in Spain, we flew to Zurich and spent an evening there, where we had dinner with IMA clients. 

The next morning we took a train to Klosters, a small Swiss village located on the other side of Davos, which hosts the World Economic Forum. This is where world leaders and big shot CEOs come to virtue signal their desire to make the world a better and greener place, coming and going on their personal Boeings and Gulfstreams. 

The Davos we visited was empty and recovering from an enormous hangover from the previous week’s World Economic Forum. A waiter at the restaurant told us that during that week he had worked over 100 hours in six days. The city was completely overrun by the global elite. He told us that a table at a local coffee shop could be rented out for $1,500 per hour – an example of limited supply and insatiable, price-insensitive demand.

We spent the next three nights in Klosters attending the VALUEx Klosters conference organized by my friend Guy Spier. I first attended this conference in 2011, took a few years off, and have not missed a year since 2019. I love participating in this event. It is mostly dominated by European investors, allowing me to meet people whom I wouldn't normally encounter in my daily life. I have made many friends over the years. The conversations we start continue during walks in nature, surrounded by the breathtaking Alps, or at a restaurant or bar late at night.

Side note: I created VALUEx Vail six months after I attended Guy’s event in 2011. I made some slight modifications to fit my personality. But similar to Klosters, our conference is a not-for-profit-but-for-learning event. By the way, the next VALUEx Vail will be held on June 19-21. You can apply here.

After the conference, we rented a car without a clear destination in mind. I have friends who plan their trips meticulously; they know what they are doing every hour of the day in 15-minute increments, six months ahead. When my father traveled with my stepmother, this is what she did. 

I have done this type of trip (though I planned in 2-hour increments), but not when I’ve traveled with my brother or my kids. I love the spontaneity of our decisions – we wake up in the morning not knowing what we will do or where we will sleep. We would often book a hotel an hour before our arrival. It added some unpredictability to our otherwise predictable life. There is certainly a downside to this; we might end up staying in a gay men's hotel - this happened to Alex and me in Key West. Also, the risk manager in me was well aware that we were traveling during the off season in Europe. The chances of not finding a place to sleep or having to pay exorbitant prices were low.

We were in Switzerland, and we knew that wherever we went, it would be beautiful. The awesomeness of Europe is that we literally visited four countries in two days without even trying. An hour after we rented the car in Davos, we found ourselves in Liechtenstein, one of the smallest countries in the world, with a population of 30,000. It's a tiny enclave along the Rhine on the Swiss-Austrian border. 

We also spent an afternoon in St. Gallen, Switzerland, which is home to the Abbey library of St. Gall is more like a church of books than a library. Although books can be read, they are there more as decorative art.

We drove for another hour and spent the evening wandering the streets of Konstanz, Germany, which is located on Lake Constance. The Rhine River flows through this stunning lake. 

To be honest, we didn't even realize we had crossed into Switzerland, then Liechtenstein, and back into Switzerland before reaching Germany in just a few hours. The only indication that we had entered different countries was messages from AT&T on our phones notifying us of a carrier change. 

Lake Constance is a typical Swiss lake; on a sunny day, the blue sky and mountain reflections give it a serene appearance. This lake looks like the others I've seen in Switzerland – Lake Lugano, Lake Geneva, Lake Lucerne, and Lake Zurich. Switzerland is home to some of the most incredible lakes, shaped by the Alps. Driving through this part of the world is like driving through paradise. That's why I keep coming back to Switzerland every year – I can't get enough of its beauty.

We finished our evening in a traditional German brewery with sausage and beer. The next day, we drove around Lake Constance and stopped by one of the most beautiful churches I’ve ever seen, Basilika Birnau.

I cannot relate to church art; I increase my walking pace when I go through sections of art museums which show 250 ways Jesus was crucified. It just bores me. Until the Impressionists dared to paint nonreligious subjects in the mid-19th century, this is what a lot of art looked like – mostly religious scenes and portraits (a way for the nobility to see themselves from a third-person perspective – though mirrors have existed for centuries, their quality was very poor by today's standards.). Despite all that, I still love visiting European churches. When you are in a church, the art on the wall turns into wallpaper that just adds color and depth to the building, which is a piece of art in itself. 

Churches are built to make humans feel small; add organ music and incredible acoustics, and you will feel like an ant in awe of the universe. Some churches do a better job at this than others. Basilika Birnau definitely did this in spades.

We spent the rest of the afternoon in another German town, Lindau, where Nobel laureates have been gathering every year since 1951. It is not as famous as Davos – when the laureates gather, tables at the coffee shops do not fetch astronomical sums –but the visitors have probably contributed more to the world than the crowd in Davos.

Finally, we drove for about two hours to Zurich. Somewhere on our journey, for about twenty minutes, we crossed into Austria. We had dinner at my favorite restaurant in the world, Zeughauskeller – an old armory turned into a restaurant. It is anything but a fancy restaurant, serving mostly rustic German-Swiss food. Every time I've been there it has been full. You rarely get a private table, as someone may be seated next to you. Jonah, when he interned for Guy Spier a few years ago in Zurich, would go there for dinner just to strike up conversations with random strangers seated next to him.

The next morning, Jonah flew to Denver while Alex and I continued our journey to London. Alex's daughter, Irene, lives in London and is an accomplished violist who graduated from the Royal College of Music, the best school in Europe and second only to Julliard in NYC. She performs at Les Misérables musicals a few times a month. 

We had dinner with Irene and her musician friends, which was truly enlightening for me. I don't often socialize with career musicians, who dedicate themselves to their art by practicing six to eight hours a day from childhood. Their perspective on the world was very new to me. I don't believe I've ever had a long conversation with an adult who hadn't taken at least one economics class before. It's interesting to see how education and daily experiences shape one's view of the world. I learned an important lesson from this conversation: Spend more time listening and asking questions, trying to understand others’ points of view, rather than volunteering or advocating my opinion.

The following day, Alex and I spent the majority of our time walking the streets and parks of London. We also visited the Science Museum. It was astonishing to see how quickly air travel has advanced over the years. The Wright Flyer of 1903 could fly at a speed of 35 miles per hour for a distance of 825 feet. Fast-forward a decade, and the Royal Aircraft Factory S.E.5 of 1913 could fly at a speed of 119 mph and cover 250 miles – a significant improvement!

Once humans break old paradigms of thinking and apply their focus and energy, there is nothing we cannot achieve. I believe electric car batteries will experience something similar (though it won't happen overnight).

Alex spent the evening with Irene, and I went to dinner with three good (value investing) friends. The conversation was more familiar and very different from the previous day’s, and four hours flew by in a New York second.

The next day, Alex left for Denver. I had three back-to-back meetings with other London friends, then took a three-hour train ride to Plymouth, in the southwest of England, which was the real destination of my UK trip. 

One of our largest positions in the portfolio is Babcock, the second largest defense company in the UK. The company has been going through a significant transformation; it went from being an important UK security company to an even more important one (just look at what is happening in Eastern Europe, China, and the Red Sea) and is now much better managed. 

The new management hosted an investor day. I could have watched the presentation from the comfort of my office in Denver, but attending these types of events in person gives you an opportunity to have one-on-one conversations with management and other investors. You'll pick up details that you would not have by just watching it on the screen. One little example: I talked to a Babcock senior executive who had left a similar position at BAE Systems (the largest UK defense contractor and a very respected company in the UK, whose stock we also own). This kind of move is not common. This person saw that he could make a bigger difference at Babcock and liked the team he was joining. I probably would have missed this little data point if I had just read the Babcock annual report.

Also, we were promised a tour of Babcock's shipyard, which is one of the largest in Europe. Global defense companies make up about a quarter of our portfolio, and I felt that the knowledge I would gain from this event would have broad implications for the rest of our portfolio. And it has.

As I look back on this trip, I see that every day brought a very different experience, often in a different country. There were hundreds of conversations with a very diverse set of people, from senior executives at a defense company to aspiring musicians to die-hard value investors, along with my long talks about life with my son and my brother. On these trips time slows down and you can pack a year's worth of experiences into two weeks.

Below is my latest Youtube video:

Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky

Rachmaninoff and Tchaikovsky are my composers. What I mean by “my” is that I connect to their music differently on an emotional level than to the music of any other composers. I don’t like comparing composers – art is very subjective and deeply personal; it is shaped by our experiences. I don’t know if it is their being Russian and my being born in Russia and spending the first 18 years of my life there, or is it simply that their music aligns better with my emotional frequencies? 

When I learned that the Boulder Symphony was performing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 3 (colloquially called “Rach 3”) and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5, I felt that we had to go. I have listened to both pieces thousands of times. I was so obsessed with Rach 3 that I listened to it nonstop for months. 

Classical music rarely sells out venues in Colorado. Unless a big star soloist is featured, I usually buy tickets last-minute. This strategy had never failed me… until it did. Boulder is an hour away from our house; so just in case, I went online a few hours before the performance to buy tickets. I was surprised to find that many people in Boulder apparently connect with Tchaikovsky and Rachmaninoff as strongly as I do (or perhaps Boulder was invaded by Russians) – the concert was sold out. But I was really excited about this concert – I had been telling my wife and daughters, Hannah (18) and Mia Sarah (10), about it for days.

I called my friend Devin Patrick Hughes, the music director and conductor of the Boulder Symphony and asked if he had better luck than me getting tickets. Devin said, “Vitaliy, it is completely sold out. But come, and we will figure something out.” I said, “This is going to be interesting!”and we both laughed. (By the way, Devin interviewed me on his podcast – you can watch it here.

I told my wife and kids to prepare to stand for two hours. 

When we arrived, we were greeted by Devin’s assistant, who, to our surprise, walked us past the general seating area onto the stage! There were four folding chairs waiting for us right behind the cellos and basses. The audience could not see us, as we were separated by a black curtain, but we felt like we were part of the orchestra. These were the best seats I had ever had in my life! 

But my excitement was not for myself but for my kids – I was happy for them to experience my favorite pieces while sitting on stage with the orchestra. It is hard to describe the joy I experienced seeing their faces light up with emotion as they experienced the music of my composers. 

It is this kind of experiences that little by little has got my kids hooked on classical music. While I was traveling in Europe recently, Hannah called to tell me that she had been driving Mia Sarah to school and playing classical music in the car. In her words, “Dad, I was going you on Mia Sarah.” Hannah is eight years older than Mia Sarah, and at this age they are almost a generation apart. If Hannah is passing her love for music to Mia Sarah, she will likely do the same thing with her own children. My work is done!

Today I am going to share with you the music of my composers that we heard at the concert:

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

With your help, we have raised over $310,000 (across multiple charities) to help Israel cope with the Hamas atrocities.

The offer still stands: If you donate $100 or more to one of these charities, we’ll be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books – Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideway Markets. Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both. (Email receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive. We can mail in the US only).

Today, I am going to share with you the last part of the four-part essay.

Please post your comments here, and please share this essay – here is a link.  If you’d like to read all four parts in a PDF, you can do it here.  If this essay was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.
 
Finally, if you are on twitter, you can follow my very unfiltered thoughts there.

Article available in Spanish here.

How to Save America and Israel (Part 4)

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” –Marcus Aurelius

October 7 awakened me; it changed my relationship with Israel, and this country of my ancestors became dear to me. But as importantly, it opened my eyes to the decaying of the country that I love, that has been my home for 32 years — the US. 

The US is becoming a laughingstock of the world, deservedly so. We are still the strongest democracy in the world. People still want to move here, but we are resting on the laurels of our past glory, which was achieved by elevating meritocracy and excellence. Our successes and our grocery stores full of food have gone to our heads and are turning us into a society focused only on pleasant outcomes, independent of how much work we put in.

We are a society that is losing its pragmatism. We used to be a country of practical, innovative problem solvers, and now we are turning into a country of useful idiots, where a tiny woke minority leads us into self-immolation.

Israel will not exist 50 years from now without a strong US. I have to fight for the US – it’s a two-for-the-price-of-one type of deal: A strong United States that supports Israel is mandatory for Israel to survive. 

I learned an important lesson from longtime Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger, who recently passed away. I have been attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting since 2008. At these shareholder meetings, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger would sit on stage in a giant sports arena and answer questions from shareholders for five hours. Buffett would usually have the first chance to answer the question, and then he would direct it to Munger. 

If the question was controversial, Buffett would go into politician mode and give a non-answer answer. Munger would say what he really thought and didn’t care if his answer upset someone who disagreed with it. Buffett was shackled by the fear of public opinion, while Munger was free. 

Munger said, “I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn’t like it; indeed, especially when one doesn’t like it.” And thus, he told the truth because it mattered more than someone’s hurt feelings or criticism of him. 

Buffett was afraid, Munger was not.

The most important thing is that we should stop being afraid. This is how the loud minority gained their power. The silent majority — that’s most of us — is afraid to speak up and is thus being accused of bigotry or racism. We are afraid of being canceled, and in the process, we stay quiet while the woke minority is killing our country. 

Fighting against antisemitism and the woke cancer is one and the same fight, as we are fighting the same enemy. 

I cannot tell you how much I did not want to write this essay. But I had to. I could not write anything else until I darkened these pages with my thoughts. I realized I can no longer have tunnel vision. As my son Jonah reminded me, with greater power comes greater responsibility. 

Yes, this is the time to fight. Each of us has a different role in this fight, and we all have different strengths. Israelis are fighting Hamas. Some of my friends have gone to Israel and joined that fight, lending a hand wherever it’s needed (farming, cleaning, feeding soldiers). 

I have another Jewish friend who was never involved in politics. He told me that after October 7 he realized, “I won’t need money in the concentration camp.” He is now contributing to opposition campaigns to replace antisemitic politicians.

If you are a donor to universities, work to defund those with DEI departments that are promoting racism and inequality. Redirect your money toward universities that promote free speech, the ones whose objective is not to coddle our youth but to challenge their thinking. If you want to change society’s future, change its universities. 

We all have special gifts. Use them. Fight for what is right, while we still have something to fight for.

Lyrical Pieces by Edvard Grieg – “Arietta” (part 2)

Today we are going to continue our exploration of Edvard Grieg’s lyrical pieces with Opus 12, No. 1, “Arietta.”

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

With your help, we have raised over $310,000 (across multiple charities) to help Israel cope with the Hamas atrocities.

The offer still stands: If you donate $100 or more to one of these charities, we’ll be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books – Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideway Markets. Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both. (Email receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive. We can mail in the US only).

As expected, I received an enormous response to part two of my four-part essay. It was overwhelmingly positive, with only a small minority disagreeing with me (which was completely fine, and I thank you for it!). I may address points brought up by those who did not agree in a future essay.
 
Please post your comments here, and please share this essay – here is a link.  If you’d like to read all four parts in a PDF, you can do it here.  If this essay was forwarded to you, you can subscribe here.
 
Finally, if you are on twitter, you can follow my very unfiltered thoughts there.
 
Today I am going to share with you part three of the four-part essay.

Article available in Spanish here.

The Socialism of Grades (Part 3)

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” –Winston Churchill

Socialism is a terrific idea in theory. Who would not want everyone in society to have a house with a white fence, the job of their dreams, 2.5 kids and a dog? But plain vanilla socialism has failed every single time it has been implemented, and it turned each of those countries into a totalitarian state: Cuba, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Venezuela — the list goes on.

In a socialist state, success is pushed down, and failure is elevated — this is how equality of outcome is created. In the Soviet Union’s version of plain vanilla socialism, we were taught to hate the wealthy and empathize with the poor. This empathy was easy for us because everyone (with the exception of the tiny ruling-class bureaucrats) was poor. 

Capitalism does not offer the sexy, utopian promise of socialism, but it works in practice. Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty; but it is now under threat, ironically, from those who have benefited the most from it — academics. Universities  have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the wealth created by capitalism. 

As I am writing this, I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s “Socialism is a great idea until you run out of other people’s money.”

Universities used to be spartan gyms for our minds, places where opposing ideas collided and gave birth to new ones and where our thinking got challenged through healthy debate. This growth came with healthy pain, the type that accompanies and stimulates intellectual growth.

Today, many universities have been turned into day spas, where for $300,000 a student’s mind will be pampered and coddled. Now they are “safe places” from opposing ideas, which are considered as microaggressions. This is where free speech goes to die, unless it calls for the genocidal extermination of Jews; then you can speak your mind.

College administrations are afraid to upset their spa customers (sorry, I meant students). They are not focused on challenging their thinking (the point of education) and producing the brightest but are instead fixated on making students feel better about themselves and giving them their money’s worth. 

I was not surprised to learn that socialism is slowly poisoning our universities, but I was surprised by its new avenue — the socialization of grades. Professors at a local law school are required to grade to a B+. When professors submit their grades, if the average is below a B+, the system will reject it. The university is afraid of making students feel bad about a low, albeit deserved, grade and wants every student to have a high grade-point average upon graduation. 

However, what is inflation for one group is deflation for another. This practice punishes hardworking students, as their work may result in a lower grade than they deserve, compared to classmates who are preoccupied with attending “TikTok University” during lectures. 

Universities are on a quixotic mission to right a wrong — they are fighting against grade inequality. This is what socializing (equalizing) outcomes looks like. In fact, this seemingly innocent practice of equally high grades has the familiar ring of a Karl Marx slogan that I heard endlessly in the Soviet Union: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Law students need a B+, so they get a B+. 

With each graduating class, our capitalistic (equal-opportunity) society is being slowly diluted by equal-outcome dogma (socialism).

Grade inflation is happening in virtually every college across the country, but colleges should not receive all the blame for this, as unfortunately it starts in high schools, which are suffering through super grade inflation — grades have gone up while reading and math skills have fallen (with minorities experiencing the largest grade inflation). 

Bad (deserved) grades are a necessary part of education. How else would you know that you had not learned something as well as you thought you did? I failed English as a freshman in college. I had been in the US for two years. My English was objectively horrible. I’m glad I didn’t receive special (woke) treatment for being “fresh off the boat.” I studied a lot harder, retook the class and passed it my senior year. If I had not, my English would not have improved and I would not have written several books or received national awards for writing.

The beauty of the Declaration of Independence is that you are guaranteed the “pursuit of happiness” — you are given an equal chance to pursue it. You are not guaranteed the outcome, just the opportunity. There is enormous value, and yes even happiness and meaning in the pursuit of happiness. This pursuit will often take you down a harder road, but it will result in the best version of you and bring a sense of pride and accomplishment. 

Lyrical Pieces by Edvard Grieg

In the next few musical notes, I will share lyrical pieces by Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg (1843-1907). Born in Bergen, Norway, Grieg lived during the time when Norway was under the rule of the United Kingdom of Sweden and Norway. These two kingdoms were governed by one monarch but were peacefully separated in 1905. Grieg wrote 66 short pieces, etudes, he called them – lyrical pieces. They were published in ten volumes (books). You can listen to all of them below.
 

Click here to listen.

Over the next few notes we are going to explore several of them, starting today with Opus 47 No. 3, “Melodie.” I am going to share a variety of performances. Notice how they all sound different.

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

Wokeness Is Destroying America — One Student at a Time (Part 2)

With your help, we have raised over $310,000 (across multiple charities) to help Israel cope with the Hamas atrocities.

The offer still stands: If you donate $100 or more to one of these charities, we’ll be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books – Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideway Markets. Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both. (Email receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive. We can mail in the US only).

Over the next three days, I am going to share with you parts two through four of my essay on how wokeness (including DEI) is killing our wonderful country. You can read the full essay (all four parts) here.

Article available in Spanish here.

Wokeness Is Destroying America — One Student at a Time (Part 2)

[The topic I am about to discuss may have political overtones. You may decide to pigeonhole me as a member of a political tribe. Please don’t. I do not belong to a political party. I am registered as an independent and have voted for candidates belonging to three different parties in the last six presidential elections.] 

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” –George Orwell

I love the United States and want it to be strong and prosperous. I am embarrassed by the fact that it took a catastrophe in Israel to wake me up to the realization that American universities have become epicenters of “wokeness” and green shoots of socialism that are gradually destroying our awesome country.

I know what you may be thinking: Wokeness is the enemy? Really? Next, he’ll be picking on Winnie-the-Pooh. 

I don’t blame you. 

I looked up the definition of wokeness: “The quality of being alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination.” Sounds fair and innocent enough, right? Marvel should create a superhero: Wokeman — “fixing injustice 24/7, always stays woke.”

I am not a political science scholar, but I have an inkling how wokeness started. It was an aftershock of the equal rights movements that tried to fix the side effects of our society’s ugly past and bring equality to everyone. It came from a good, kind place in people’s hearts. However, I am a student of economics and have learned that ideas should not be judged solely on their intent but also on their outcomes. We are often preoccupied with the intent and ignore second order effects, the unintended consequences that often make things a lot worse. 

This is exactly what has happened to wokeness. 

Sometime, while we got up to the get the popcorn, the wokeness movie went from being a Marvel superhero flick to an Orwellian dystopian Animal Farm nightmare: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

Although the idea of elevating minorities may sound great on the surface, the US took a wrong turn and started turning into a country where the majority is often penalized for not being a minority. 

Which brings me to the college HQ of wokeness — DEI. I am embarrassed to admit I did not know DEI existed before October 7. If you think these three letters stand for some cool government agency, no, they are way cooler than that. They stand for “diversity, equity and inclusion.” 

How can anyone be against these three awesome words? 

To my great surprise, DEI has turned into antisemitism on college campuses. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman explains DEI’s role very well in this essay:

“Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology … one is either an anti-racist or a racist.”

Ackman, a Harvard University grad and major donor, goes on to say: “There is no such thing as being ‘not racist.’ Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy … that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.”

As a result, on some campuses the DEI objective became what Tabia Lee, a former equity director at De Anza College in California, to “de-center whiteness,” and thus it allowed antisemitism to spread. If you fall under DEI “protection,” you become part of a superclass that plays by its own rules. Since Jews are not classified as a minority, they have now been put into the category of oppressors.

Yet, Jews are indeed a minority — there are only 15.7 million of us in the world! That’s right, in the whole world. More than half of our population perished in the Holocaust – an event whose occurrence is now up for dispute not just in Iran but among the TikTok-educated younger generation here at home. (According to an Economist survey, 20% of 18-to-29-year-olds think the Holocaust is a myth.)

Growing up as a Jew — an underclass in the Soviet Union — I never wanted special treatment for being a minority. I just wanted society to be blind to the line in my passport that said “Jewish.” I don’t want my kids to be added to the DEI “superclass.” 

So, if you are attending an American college and are not classified as an oppressed minority under the protection of the woke, you will be treated by a different set of rules. As we have learned from the presidents of Ivy League schools, cries for your genocidal extermination will require “context” and the actual death of Jewish students before college administrators will act — all while you can be expelled from a university for using the wrong pronoun.

A lot of this starts in colleges, but it does not and will not stop at colleges. Colleges are the factories of our future. They are the production lines of future workers and thinkers.

People cannot control their gender, the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their sexual preference — this sort of discrimination was our sin of the past. People should not be punished for these traits; others should not be favored for them (this is the reverse punishment of others) — the current sin of woke. 

I am going to say what everyone knows but doesn’t want to admit — there are differences between groups of people. Blacks dominate the NBA — they account for 73% of all players. Whites are only 17%. (Something similar but less extreme is happening in the NFL.) Meanwhile, Asians account for only 0.4% of NBA players — they are clearly underrepresented. Yet we find the idea of creating an “equality” NBA by hiring 5’8” Asians so they can get crushed by 6’10” Black athletes laughable. 

However, in the effort to create “equality” in colleges — until the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023 — we were fine with reverse discrimination against Asian students to limit their admission to elite colleges, which, just like the NBA and NFL, were supposed to be merit-based. But Asians are neither a superclass nor a protected group; therefore, we didn’t care.

When we hire people based solely on their identity (not on their merit), we do not elevate them but rather bring them down. On some level they know that they got the job based not on personal strengths but on their superficial identity. 

This creates a victim and victimizer mentality. It is anti-evolutionary: People possessed by the victim mentality don’t progress or evolve; they see obstacles in their lives as someone else’s fault and thus not their responsibility to overcome. As the eminent English rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, if you are possessed by a victim mentality “you hand over your life to somebody else.”

Life is full of obstacles. History is often unfair, and not just to the DEI superclass. It has not been kind to Jews for centuries. Jews choose to not be victims but to be agents of change. This attitude is deeply ingrained into Jewish culture. Obstacles only make us stronger. If you have the attitude that obstacles are someone’s else fault, you’ll never try to grow beyond them. As Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor, said: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

America — the country of meritocracy — is turning into a country where your identity determines how you will be treated along the road of life. A person, be it a Supreme Court justice, a college administrator or an employee at the local DMV, should get a job not because of their identity but because of their accomplishments and their character. 

As a society, we must accept a hard truth: By acting solely based on our hearts and artificially trying to make things better for this or that group of people, we end up not improving things for them but instead creating different injustices. Everyone should be treated equally. Some people should not be more important (protected) than others. And yes, all lives matter, and that statement should not require context. Finally, we should stop living in fear of being canceled for saying the above. 

I was shocked to learn that DEI is already nesting in large corporations and our government. Imagine if air traffic controllers, people who have the lives of hundreds of others in their hands, were selected based not on their skills but on their DEI status. Well, you don’t have to imagine this very hard — it’s already happening. Think about that the next time you board a plane. 

It is not hard to visualize the consequences of someone hired solely based on their identity (not on their skill) colliding planes in the air and killing hundreds. If this woke cancer continues to spread through our economy, it will suck meritocracy out of it and weaken, or even worse, crash the economy. Unlike a plane crash, you won’t see it unfold on the news; it will happen slowly, one DEI hire at a time. 

I wonder how Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech would be received today on American campuses, especially when he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.” 

Orchestras have a perfect model for how to hire performers. During auditions, the jury sits in the audience. Each performer has a number assigned to them. They play behind a curtain; the jury cannot see them. 

We should copy that model. When I came to the United States in 1991, I was told that in this country we treat all people according to their merits and values, by what they bring to society. I miss that US. 

Oberon - Carl Maria von Weber

Today, I'd like to share with you the overture from the opera "Oberon" by German composer Carl Maria von Weber (1786-1926). Weber lived a short life; he died at 40. In fact, he composed "Oberon" shortly before his death.

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

In the introduction to the Almanac of my 2023 essays, I wrote that it is my moral responsibility to be an agent of positive change. My new, aligned me will not be avoiding important but difficult topics. 

If this essay does not make some readers upset with me, I will be surprised. If you are not reading people with whom you disagree, then you are locked in an echo chamber — you cannot blame YouTube or social media for showing only what you want to see. You are your own worst algorithm. 

My goal with this essay is to bring an important issue to the surface for those who were oblivious to it (as I was a few months ago) and to possibly change the minds of those whose minds are still changeable.

Article available in Spanish here.

Part 1: A Small Country with a Big Story

My relationship with Israel has always been complex. I am Jewish and was born in Soviet Russia but have lived in America for two thirds of my life. My family immigrated to the US in 1991 and has never looked back. (I pinch myself all the time because I get to live in this wonderful country.) I am an agnostic. Israel is supposed to be my historical homeland, the land of my ancestors — a very academic concept, since I struggle to relate to ancestors more than a few generations back, most of whom came from Belarus or Ukraine. 

After October 7, something changed inside of me. But it was not just the horrific events of October 7 alone. It was a combination of the massacre in Israel, which echoed the cruelty of the Nazis, and the demonstrations that took place in the US and Europe, as well as letters signed by Ivy league students, all condemning Israel before it had a chance to fire a single retaliatory shot at Hamas. 

Antisemitism, which I had gladly forgotten since leaving the Soviet Union, was once again on display. Israel went from being a merely theoretical place of safe harbor for Jews who are unwanted, to a very real, tiny island of refuge, as the world continues to repeat its difficult history with the Jewish people. 

I have never connected the survival of Israel to the wellbeing of my descendants. However, today I see this so clearly. If this tiny light of democracy, surrounded by a desert of darkness, goes out, it will not only mean the demise of the Jews there but also of those around the world. Unfortunately, history is on my side when I say this. 

Four of my good friends from Denver recently took time off from work and went to Israel to help. They told me they were shocked by what they saw when they got there. What really amazed them about Israel is how this country, which was so deeply divided over judicial reforms before October 7, came together and united. This country of eight million Jews turned into one big family, which is single-mindedly focused on winning the war and taking care of each other. 

On October 8, tech companies that had opposed the government on the issue of judicial reforms went to the government and said, “We’ll do anything we can to help.” Within a week, the Israeli government had AI software that could help identify Hamas terrorists. Tech companies created free “Airbnbs” where people can post, “I have a spare bedroom in Jerusalem for a displaced family that needs an emergency place to live.”

The Museum of Tolerance Jerusalem, which has been under construction for a long time and had a soft opening a few months ago, has been turned into a logistics center for all incoming aid to Israel. And there is a lot of aid coming from all over the world. Everyone I know (including my friends) who is traveling to Israel is bringing items, from socks to gun holsters, in duffle bags for soldiers. 

The population of Israel has increased by 3% since October 7 — not something you usually see happen in a country at war. In part that is due to reservists coming home from all over the world, but volunteers like my friends are also going to Israel, taking time off to help their historical homeland. 

My friends have been making sandwiches for the soldiers, cleaning houses for refugees to move into, and working in the fields collecting potatoes that are rotting because a large part of the population has mobilized. 

Billboards in Tel Aviv no longer display advertisements but instead show images of hostages taken by Hamas, with a single message: “Bring Them Home!” The country is calm and determined; people want the hostages to come home, and they want to destroy Hamas. Micah Goodman, an Israeli philosopher, said, “Israel is a small country with a big story…. Big enough to give you meaning and small enough for you to have influence on it.” 

This is why Israelis are so at peace with the awful reality of going to war. When they wake up every morning, they know they can make a difference for their county. They have a purpose. This war in Gaza is not “eye for an eye” retaliation but the elimination of a terrorist regime which, if given the chance, will repeat the cruel events of October 7 across the whole of Israel and then go after other infidels — the rest of the non-Islamic world. 

High (unintended) civilian casualties in Gaza are heartbreaking, but I keep asking myself, what choice does Israel have? Hamas continues to launch rockets into Israel daily and has been doing so for years. Show me a developed country on this planet that would tolerate that. Hamas just massacred 1,200 Israelis — the group’s leaders are not shy about repeating that October 7 is just the beginning. 

What would the US do to protect its citizens if we were attacked? We have an answer for that — just look at what we did after 9/11. What would France do? We have an answer for that, too. In 2015, ISIL terrorists killed 130 French citizens. France bombed Syria for months. I don’t remember any calls for restraint or a proportional response. I don’t remember the UN condemning the US or France for unintended civilian casualties. I also don’t remember the US or France dropping leaflets or making phone calls warning Afghans or Syrians about the locations of attacks. Israel is always judged by a different (and impossible) standard than any other country.

My friends have talked to IDF soldiers who have told them: “You cannot imagine how careful we are at trying not to shoot civilians, especially kids. I have kids at home. I don’t want to be desensitized to the crying of my kids.” The humanity that is often lost during war isn’t lost in Israel.

The IDF is liberating Gazans from Hamas; unfortunately, it is doing it in a densely populated area. It is trying very hard to spare civilian lives, which is incredibly difficult — Hamas fighters are not wearing uniforms. A 16-year-old kid in front of you can be a civilian or a suicide bomber. A 20-year-old Israeli-American soldier from Atlanta was stabbed to death in Jerusalem by a 16-year-old Hamas fighter. 

This war is taking place on the borders of Israel, but this is not just Israel’s war. The war against Hamas is a battle between good and evil. The evil will not stop with Israel. Islamic extremists want to rebuild an Islamic caliphate all over the world. The Middle East, Europe and the US are next. We are the infidels — yes, if you do not accept Muhammad as your prophet and role model, you are an infidel. Our lives and values do not matter to them. We must either bend the knee or die.

Israel will prevail in this war; Israeli Jews have nowhere to go. But I realize that for my historical homeland to survive, the US, which welcomed me with open arms and has been my home for 32 years, needs to prosper as well. I’ll discuss that next.

Part 2: Wokeness Is Destroying America — One Student at a Time

[The topic I am about to discuss may have political overtones. You may decide to pigeonhole me as a member of a political tribe. Please don’t. I do not belong to a political party. I am registered as an independent and have voted for candidates belonging to three different parties in the last six presidential elections.] 

“If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.” –George Orwell

I love the United States and want it to be strong and prosperous. I am embarrassed by the fact that it took a catastrophe in Israel to wake me up to the realization that American universities have become epicenters of “wokeness” and green shoots of socialism that are gradually destroying our awesome country.

I know what you may be thinking: Wokeness is the enemy? Really? Next, he’ll be picking on Winnie-the-Pooh. 

I don’t blame you. 

I looked up the definition of wokeness: “The quality of being alert to and concerned about social injustice and discrimination.” Sounds fair and innocent enough, right? Marvel should create a superhero: Wokeman — “fixing injustice 24/7, always stays woke.”

I am not a political science scholar, but I have an inkling how wokeness started. It was an aftershock of the equal rights movements that tried to fix the side effects of our society’s ugly past and bring equality to everyone. It came from a good, kind place in people’s hearts. However, I am a student of economics and have learned that ideas should not be judged solely on their intent but also on their outcomes. We are often preoccupied with the intent and ignore second order effects, the unintended consequences that often make things a lot worse. 

This is exactly what has happened to wokeness. 

Sometime, while we got up to the get the popcorn, the wokeness movie went from being a Marvel superhero flick to an Orwellian dystopian Animal Farm nightmare: “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” 

Although the idea of elevating minorities may sound great on the surface, the US took a wrong turn and started turning into a country where the majority is often penalized for not being a minority. 

Which brings me to the college HQ of wokeness — DEI. I am embarrassed to admit I did not know DEI existed before October 7. If you think these three letters stand for some cool government agency, no, they are way cooler than that. They stand for “diversity, equity and inclusion.” 

How can anyone be against these three awesome words? 

To my great surprise, DEI has turned into antisemitism on college campuses. Billionaire investor Bill Ackman explains DEI’s role very well in this essay:

“Under DEI, one’s degree of oppression is determined based upon where one resides on a so-called intersectional pyramid of oppression where whites, Jews, and Asians are deemed oppressors, and a subset of people of color, LGBTQ people, and/or women are deemed to be oppressed. Under this ideology … one is either an anti-racist or a racist.”

Ackman, a Harvard University grad and major donor, goes on to say: “There is no such thing as being ‘not racist.’ Under DEI’s ideology, any policy, program, educational system, economic system, grading system, admission policy … that leads to unequal outcomes among people of different skin colors is deemed racist. As a result, according to DEI, capitalism is racist, Advanced Placement exams are racist, IQ tests are racist, corporations are racist, or in other words, any merit-based program, system, or organization which has or generates outcomes for different races that are at variance with the proportion these different races represent in the population at large is by definition racist under DEI’s ideology.”

As a result, on some campuses the DEI objective became what Tabia Lee, a former equity director at De Anza College in California, to “de-center whiteness,” and thus it allowed antisemitism to spread. If you fall under DEI “protection,” you become part of a superclass that plays by its own rules. Since Jews are not classified as a minority, they have now been put into the category of oppressors.

Yet, Jews are indeed a minority — there are only 15.7 million of us in the world! That’s right, in the whole world. More than half of our population perished in the Holocaust – an event whose occurrence is now up for dispute not just in Iran but among the TikTok-educated younger generation here at home. (According to an Economist survey, 20% of 18-to-29-year-olds think the Holocaust is a myth.)

Growing up as a Jew — an underclass in the Soviet Union — I never wanted special treatment for being a minority. I just wanted society to be blind to the line in my passport that said “Jewish.” I don’t want my kids to be added to the DEI “superclass.” 

So, if you are attending an American college and are not classified as an oppressed minority under the protection of the woke, you will be treated by a different set of rules. As we have learned from the presidents of Ivy League schools, cries for your genocidal extermination will require “context” and the actual death of Jewish students before college administrators will act — all while you can be expelled from a university for using the wrong pronoun.

A lot of this starts in colleges, but it does not and will not stop at colleges. Colleges are the factories of our future. They are the production lines of future workers and thinkers.

People cannot control their gender, the color of their skin, their ethnicity, or their sexual preference — this sort of discrimination was our sin of the past. People should not be punished for these traits; others should not be favored for them (this is the reverse punishment of others) — the current sin of woke. 

I am going to say what everyone knows but doesn’t want to admit — there are differences between groups of people. Blacks dominate the NBA — they account for 73% of all players. Whites are only 17%. (Something similar but less extreme is happening in the NFL.) Meanwhile, Asians account for only 0.4% of NBA players — they are clearly underrepresented. Yet we find the idea of creating an “equality” NBA by hiring 5’8” Asians so they can get crushed by 6’10” Black athletes laughable. 

However, in the effort to create “equality” in colleges — until the Supreme Court struck down affirmative action in 2023 — we were fine with reverse discrimination against Asian students to limit their admission to elite colleges, which, just like the NBA and NFL, were supposed to be merit-based. But Asians are neither a superclass nor a protected group; therefore, we didn’t care.

When we hire people based solely on their identity (not on their merit), we do not elevate them but rather bring them down. On some level they know that they got the job based not on personal strengths but on their superficial identity. 

This creates a victim and victimizer mentality. It is anti-evolutionary: People possessed by the victim mentality don’t progress or evolve; they see obstacles in their lives as someone else’s fault and thus not their responsibility to overcome. As the eminent English rabbi Jonathan Sacks said, if you are possessed by a victim mentality “you hand over your life to somebody else.”

Life is full of obstacles. History is often unfair, and not just to the DEI superclass. It has not been kind to Jews for centuries. Jews choose to not be victims but to be agents of change. This attitude is deeply ingrained into Jewish culture. Obstacles only make us stronger. If you have the attitude that obstacles are someone’s else fault, you’ll never try to grow beyond them. As Marcus Aurelius, the Stoic philosopher and Roman emperor, said: “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.”

America — the country of meritocracy — is turning into a country where your identity determines how you will be treated along the road of life. A person, be it a Supreme Court justice, a college administrator or an employee at the local DMV, should get a job not because of their identity but because of their accomplishments and their character. 

As a society, we must accept a hard truth: By acting solely based on our hearts and artificially trying to make things better for this or that group of people, we end up not improving things for them but instead creating different injustices. Everyone should be treated equally. Some people should not be more important (protected) than others. And yes, all lives matter, and that statement should not require context. Finally, we should stop living in fear of being canceled for saying the above. 

I was shocked to learn that DEI is already nesting in large corporations and our government. Imagine if air traffic controllers, people who have the lives of hundreds of others in their hands, were selected based not on their skills but on their DEI status. Well, you don’t have to imagine this very hard — it’s already happening. Think about that the next time you board a plane. 

It is not hard to visualize the consequences of someone hired solely based on their identity (not on their skill) colliding planes in the air and killing hundreds. If this woke cancer continues to spread through our economy, it will suck meritocracy out of it and weaken, or even worse, crash the economy. Unlike a plane crash, you won’t see it unfold on the news; it will happen slowly, one DEI hire at a time. 

I wonder how Martin Luther King Jr’s “I Have a Dream” speech would be received today on American campuses, especially when he said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but the content of their character.” 

Orchestras have a perfect model for how to hire performers. During auditions, the jury sits in the audience. Each performer has a number assigned to them. They play behind a curtain; the jury cannot see them. 

We should copy that model. When I came to the United States in 1991, I was told that in this country we treat all people according to their merits and values, by what they bring to society. I miss that US. 

Part 3: The Socialism of Grades

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of the blessings. The inherent blessing of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” –Winston Churchill

Socialism is a terrific idea in theory. Who would not want everyone in society to have a house with a white fence, the job of their dreams, 2.5 kids and a dog? But plain vanilla socialism has failed every single time it has been implemented, and it turned each of those countries into a totalitarian state: Cuba, the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia, Venezuela — the list goes on.

In a socialist state, success is pushed down, and failure is elevated — this is how equality of outcome is created. In the Soviet Union’s version of plain vanilla socialism, we were taught to hate the wealthy and empathize with the poor. This empathy was easy for us because everyone (with the exception of the tiny ruling-class bureaucrats) was poor. 

Capitalism does not offer the sexy, utopian promise of socialism, but it works in practice. Capitalism has lifted billions out of poverty; but it is now under threat, ironically, from those who have benefited the most from it — academics. Universities  have been among the biggest beneficiaries of the wealth created by capitalism. 

As I am writing this, I am reminded of Margaret Thatcher’s “Socialism is a great idea until you run out of other people’s money.”

Universities used to be spartan gyms for our minds, places where opposing ideas collided and gave birth to new ones and where our thinking got challenged through healthy debate. This growth came with healthy pain, the type that accompanies and stimulates intellectual growth.

Today, many universities have been turned into day spas, where for $300,000 a student’s mind will be pampered and coddled. Now they are “safe places” from opposing ideas, which are considered as microaggressions. This is where free speech goes to die, unless it calls for the genocidal extermination of Jews; then you can speak your mind.

College administrations are afraid to upset their spa customers (sorry, I meant students). They are not focused on challenging their thinking (the point of education) and producing the brightest but are instead fixated on making students feel better about themselves and giving them their money’s worth. 

I was not surprised to learn that socialism is slowly poisoning our universities, but I was surprised by its new avenue — the socialization of grades. Professors at a local law school are required to grade to a B+. When professors submit their grades, if the average is below a B+, the system will reject it. The university is afraid of making students feel bad about a low, albeit deserved, grade and wants every student to have a high grade-point average upon graduation. 

However, what is inflation for one group is deflation for another. This practice punishes hardworking students, as their work may result in a lower grade than they deserve, compared to classmates who are preoccupied with attending “TikTok University” during lectures. 

Universities are on a quixotic mission to right a wrong — they are fighting against grade inequality. This is what socializing (equalizing) outcomes looks like. In fact, this seemingly innocent practice of equally high grades has the familiar ring of a Karl Marx slogan that I heard endlessly in the Soviet Union: “From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Law students need a B+, so they get a B+. 

With each graduating class, our capitalistic (equal-opportunity) society is being slowly diluted by equal-outcome dogma (socialism).

Grade inflation is happening in virtually every college across the country, but colleges should not receive all the blame for this, as unfortunately it starts in high schools, which are suffering through super grade inflation — grades have gone up while reading and math skills have fallen (with minorities experiencing the largest grade inflation). 

Bad (deserved) grades are a necessary part of education. How else would you know that you had not learned something as well as you thought you did? I failed English as a freshman in college. I had been in the US for two years. My English was objectively horrible. I’m glad I didn’t receive special (woke) treatment for being “fresh off the boat.” I studied a lot harder, retook the class and passed it my senior year. If I had not, my English would not have improved and I would not have written several books or received national awards for writing.

The beauty of the Declaration of Independence is that you are guaranteed the “pursuit of happiness” — you are given an equal chance to pursue it. You are not guaranteed the outcome, just the opportunity. There is enormous value, and yes even happiness and meaning in the pursuit of happiness. This pursuit will often take you down a harder road, but it will result in the best version of you and bring a sense of pride and accomplishment. 

Part 4: How to Save America and Israel

“Waste no more time arguing what a good man should be. Be one.” –Marcus Aurelius

October 7 awakened me; it changed my relationship with Israel, and this country of my ancestors became dear to me. But as importantly, it opened my eyes to the decaying of the country that I love, that has been my home for 32 years — the US. 

The US is becoming a laughingstock of the world, deservedly so. We are still the strongest democracy in the world. People still want to move here, but we are resting on the laurels of our past glory, which was achieved by elevating meritocracy and excellence. Our successes and our grocery stores full of food have gone to our heads and are turning us into a society focused only on pleasant outcomes, independent of how much work we put in.

We are a society that is losing its pragmatism. We used to be a country of practical, innovative problem solvers, and now we are turning into a country of useful idiots, where a tiny woke minority leads us into self-immolation.

Israel will not exist 50 years from now without a strong US. I have to fight for the US – it’s a two-for-the-price-of-one type of deal: A strong United States that supports Israel is mandatory for Israel to survive. 

I learned an important lesson from longtime Berkshire Hathaway vice chairman Charlie Munger, who recently passed away. I have been attending the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting since 2008. At these shareholder meetings, Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger would sit on stage in a giant sports arena and answer questions from shareholders for five hours. Buffett would usually have the first chance to answer the question, and then he would direct it to Munger. 

If the question was controversial, Buffett would go into politician mode and give a non-answer answer. Munger would say what he really thought and didn’t care if his answer upset someone who disagreed with it. Buffett was shackled by the fear of public opinion, while Munger was free. 

Munger said, “I think that one should recognize reality even when one doesn’t like it; indeed, especially when one doesn’t like it.” And thus, he told the truth because it mattered more than someone’s hurt feelings or criticism of him. 

Buffett was afraid, Munger was not.

The most important thing is that we should stop being afraid. This is how the loud minority gained their power. The silent majority — that’s most of us — is afraid to speak up and is thus being accused of bigotry or racism. We are afraid of being canceled, and in the process, we stay quiet while the woke minority is killing our country. 

Fighting against antisemitism and the woke cancer is one and the same fight, as we are fighting the same enemy. 

I cannot tell you how much I did not want to write this essay. But I had to. I could not write anything else until I darkened these pages with my thoughts. I realized I can no longer have tunnel vision. As my son Jonah reminded me, with greater power comes greater responsibility. 

Yes, this is the time to fight. Each of us has a different role in this fight, and we all have different strengths. Israelis are fighting Hamas. Some of my friends have gone to Israel and joined that fight, lending a hand wherever it’s needed (farming, cleaning, feeding soldiers). 

I have another Jewish friend who was never involved in politics. He told me that after October 7 he realized, “I won’t need money in the concentration camp.” He is now contributing to opposition campaigns to replace antisemitic politicians.

If you are a donor to universities, work to defund those with DEI departments that are promoting racism and inequality. Redirect your money toward universities that promote free speech, the ones whose objective is not to coddle our youth but to challenge their thinking. If you want to change society’s future, change its universities. 

We all have special gifts. Use them. Fight for what is right, while we still have something to fight for.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

Download PDF

A few years ago, the IMA team started a new tradition. At the end of the year, we gather all of the essays I had written throughout the year, organize them by topic, sprinkle in some art, nip and tuck them into a single PDF, and voila, we have an almanac.

Our hope is that this almanac will allow new readers to explore my past essays and dedicated readers to revisit any essays they may have missed originally.

I love working on this project for this moment, for right now. While writing this intro, I reflected on the passing year through the lens of the essays I’ve written. In 2023 I published 32 essays (I just counted them). Judging solely by quantity, this was my most prolific year. I wrote 22 essays in 2021 and 28 in 2022. (Although, in defense of those years, I was writing and then releasing a book during that period.) 

I have to confess; writing is a very capricious adventure. I have little control over where the stream of thoughts that passes from my subconscious to my conscious awareness will take me. I just have to show up and be ready to be the vessel for it. Just as you cannot reenter the same river twice, I cannot write the same essay twice. 

If what I just said has a metaphysical feel to it, so be it. I have been writing for twenty years. Almost every single time, when I read what I just wrote, I get a hard-to-describe feeling somewhere between wonder and amazement. Not because what I wrote is so brilliant, but because the lack the ownership I experience for the sentences that came out of my own mind. I did not know I was going to write them when I sat down to write. It’s a surreal experience. 

I can relate so much to what Jhumpa Lahiri (supposedly) said: “Writing is a transcendental experience, where I am both the creator and the created, author and character, writer and reader." 

Rereading my essays, I relive the year again; they are tiny bookmarks of my life, which makes the almanacs bookends of the year. As I am reliving 2023 through my essays, I find that four of them had lasting impacts on me, which I want to highlight here.

The Real Country of Contrasts: Our Trip to India (page 108) . In January, my then-17-year-old daughter Hannah and I went on a ten-day trip to India. Hannah, who, like most teenagers, is a part time student at TikTok University, told me a few days ago that she had been informed on TikTok that most men think about the Roman Empire on a daily basis. She said, "The trip to India is my Roman Empire; I think about it daily.” 

I personally don't think about the Roman Empire every day (maybe only when I think about the gradual decay of the US – okay, so maybe more often than I care to admit), but Hannah and I do think about this trip to India daily. It has recalibrated the lenses through which I look at the world. I cannot wait to go back to India again.

Life is a Walk – Santa Fe (page 149). My family started a tradition in 2013 when my father and I took my then-12-year-old son, Jonah, to Santa Fe. We have gone every year since, even during the pandemic. I have been writing and adding to this essay since 2013, including something new after each trip. This year, I added a section titled "Life is a Walk." 

Santa Fe has become a special place for my children, where they have spent time with their grandfather and father. It holds wonderful memories for them. On this year’s trip, I noticed a shift in my kids: These trips have changed them, and art has become part of the internal fabric of their being.

You Are – What You Think About (page 54) This essay is very short, but it had a significant impact on me. Though the initial purpose of the essay was to explore how much we should think about the economy, this paragraph really made me reexamine many aspects of my life:

There are three versions of ourselves: what people think of us, what we think of ourselves, and who we actually are. There is a saying, “Don’t tell me what you care about, show me how you spend your time.” We are at peace when who we think we are and who we actually are largely overlap. We are even more at peace if the two overlap in the version we’d like to be. 

The alignment of who you want to be and who you actually are is one of the most important secrets to happiness in life. When your behavior is misaligned with your values, when what you do day in and day out is misaligned with what you want to be and to be doing, and when the version of yourself you show to the world is very different than the real you, you will experience dissonance – an internal conflict. 

And then there's Fyodor Dostoevsky's advice in Brothers Karamazov: "Above all, don't lie to yourself. The man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he cannot distinguish the truth within him or around him, and so loses all respect for himself and for others."

This is why meditation is so important; it is a way for us to listen within ourselves for this dissonance. 

My Father – a Life Worth Living (page 156). This was the most important and most difficult essay I’ve ever written, for several reasons. It was my way of mourning the loss of one of the most important people in my life. I wanted the world to see who it lost – an incredible responsibility. Writing about my father’s life made me go back to dark corners of my own life. I squeezed out every ounce of myself for four weeks to get it right. 

This essay has changed me. Mark Twain said, “The two most important days in your life are the day you are born and the day you find out why.” Writing this essay, examining my father’s life, inadvertently turned into an examination of my own life and a better understanding of my “why.”

As I was thinking about my father’s life, I realized that he always stood up for what he believed was right, no matter the consequences. I also realized that my father’s life was a blueprint for mine. I want my life to be a blueprint for my kids. I want my kids to experience the same pride when, hopefully a long time from now, they examine the life I lived.

Most importantly, I realized I want to be an agent for positive change in the lives of others. 

My first responsibility is of course to my family, especially my kids. Kids don’t come with an instruction manual, so I am doing the best I can. I am sure I can do better, and I will. 

I am doing that at IMA, too – I am constantly trying to improve as an investor. 

Then I have my writing. This is where this essay about my father changed me the most. I have a large audience and thus a large responsibility. I found I was holding back. I was not afraid to write about important, difficult, often divisive topics that were important to me, but I was held back by my default programming flaw – I like to be liked. 

Up to now I had for the most part avoided these topics. I stuck to the “safe” ones – the stock market, philosophy, classical music, life. Even my views about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, while they may not be mainstream in Russia, they are in the US. 

However, when you go through life trying to be liked and avoid upsetting other people, you may end up standing for nothing. I don’t want to look back at my life and think I held back, that I didn’t stand up for what is right, that I didn’t make the positive change I could have because I didn’t want to make some people upset at me.  Unions: From Stimulant for the Economy to Cancer (page 86) was an essay I should have written a decade ago. I am sure it upset some readers and even lost me some.  

My father's death changed me. The events of October 7th in Israel and the antisemitic marches that followed around the world, before Israel even had a chance to respond, have also changed me.  I wrote about this change in essays about Israel (see page 5).  I am a different person now; my self-censorship is gone, I’ll stand up for what (I think) is right, regardless of the consequences.  This doesn't mean that I'll only be writing about sharp topics, not at all. But I won't be avoiding them either.

2023 was a year of alignment, an important year when I figured my “why”.  I am more aligned with what I want to be in this life.  As Marcus Aurelius said: "Waste no more time arguing about what a good man should be. Be one."

If you would like to download my previous almanacs, here is a link for 2021, and here is a link for 2022.

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Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

Broadening the aperture of how you look at life

Today I want to share with you a video of an interview:

The interview took place in April 2023 at Temple Sinai here in Denver. The focus of the discussion was on my book Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life. The living characters of the book are from my family, so having them in the audience was a bit surreal. 

The highlight of the interview came at the very end when my nine-year-old daughter, Mia Sarah, heckled me. You have to watch it, but she said, "When you say that you are being present while driving us (her and Hannah) to school, it is a total lie." Yes, bringing people you are writing about into the audience has its own risks. 

There is a postscript to this story: The reason Mia Sarah felt that I was not fully present when I was in the car with her is because for the last year, Hannah had a learner's permit and was actually driving us to school. I sat in the passenger seat up front and Mia Sarah sat in the back. As I look at the situation, I was not fully present, at least from Mia Sarah's perspective. I was trying to ensure that we didn't die from Hannah's driving – my focus was on the road and Hannah.

After the presentation, I made a course correction. By that time, Hannah had significantly improved as a driver. I sat in the back, right next to Mia Sarah. Our trip to school became like an Uber ride. In fact, Mia Sarah and I would jokingly rate Hannah after every ride. Mia Sarah would deduct points if Hannah did not open her door or offer her a bottled water. We would have a good laugh about it. If you now ask Mia Sarah if I am fully present, there is a chance she may say “yes.”

This interview is very special to me for two reasons. First of all, my whole family was there; and second, I was interviewed by an incredible person, my friend Rabbi Ray Zwerin. 

There are rabbis, and then there is Rabbi Zwerin. I respect him immensely, and not only for his accomplishments, which are many: 

He founded one of the most successful synagogues in Denver, Temple Sinai, which has been a significant net positive in the lives of thousands. (My wife Rachel and I were married there by him.) He also founded the Denver Jewish Day School, which all of my children have attended (my daughters are still enrolled there). He was the driving force behind the creation of a Babi Yar memorial in Denver to honor the memory of the tens of thousands of Jews killed by Nazis in Kyiv. He also established an organization that advocated for the immigration of Jews from the Soviet Union. In addition to all of these accomplishments, he founded and ran a successful publishing company.

All his great accomplishments aside, I respect him because, like my father, Rabbi Zwerin is a person who immediately comes to mind when I think of someone who is a lifelong learner – a student of life. After retiring from Temple Sinai, he has continued to learn and create. He has written two novels, edited his sermons into a book, and continues to write essays. 

He is constantly in awe of the world, and even at the age of 87, he approaches learning with the same enthusiasm as a 17-year-old. I receive emails from him a few times a week, where he shares things he finds fascinating, like Akshardham (a Hindu temple in New Delhi) or some discovery in science, etc.

I feel like I need to preface what I am about to say with this – I am agnostic. In the Soviet Union, all religions were banned, as they competed with Soviet propaganda for mental real estate. Rabbi and I go for a walk a few times a month, but during these walks, which often last over three hours, we have plenty to discuss, and religion rarely comes up. 

I have read his book 40 Years of Wondering. It is a compilation of his 100 best sermons, delivered on high holy days at Temple Sinai from 1967 to 2004. There is an incredible amount of wisdom in it. Again, this is coming from a person whom you’ll only find in the religion section of Barnes & Noble because one of his books was misplaced there. (You have to watch the interview to get the joke.)

Also, as a part-time writer, I was in awe over how great Rabbi’s writing is. He is clear, thoughtful, and witty. What also sets this book apart is that it sends you on a fantastic journey down history's memory lane. Many sermons were given more than half a century ago (their wisdom is evergreen); and when Rabbi gave them, he related them to the current events of the time (the Moon landing, the Kennedy assassination, etc.).

This book does not attempt to persuade you to convert to Judaism (otherwise, I would not have read it). Instead, it aims to bring enlightenment to your life. The source of wisdom is not solely religious texts. As you will see, it is common for Rabbis  to draw lessons from science, history, and philosophy, as well as other religions. 

In fact, when I was reading this book and thinking about Rabbis and other religious people, I observed that religion can either broaden or narrow one's aperture of how you look at life. I have a deeply religious acquaintance who says that "All wisdom is in the bible," and as a result he has closed himself off from the world around him – art, philosophy, science, wisdom from other religions; he has no use for any of it. Rabbi and this book are examples of what a wide aperture looks like. 

Here are a few excerpts: 

How many of us sacrifice time and health, pushing and pulling, even sacrificing our own integrity and sense of values and ideals in order to achieve success? Once there, we often find an emptiness because in the reaching, the scratching and clawing to achieve our form of world conquest those ideals have changed and so have we.

And

One who does not stand for something will not survive the challenge to his or her personal integrity. And one who does not fully understand what it is they stand for is of little worth to themselves, and is indeed a detriment to family and community. But one whose commitment is rooted in knowledge and matched with patience and persistence can withstand the challenges of any time and any place.

Rabbi even brings wisdom from the movie Zorba the Greek, with Anthony Quinn, to his sermon:

Zorba summarizes his philosophy in a sentence or two. “Life is what you have while you’re waiting to die.” Zorba adds, “The only death you die is the death you die each day by not living.” Do not wait to live. Take life as the blessing it is, and in the enjoyment thereof, defeat death.

Interestingly, I don’t always agree with what Rabbi wrote. I am not sure he agrees with everything he thought decades ago. Changing your mind is a sign of growth. But this book contains an abundance of wisdom, and it certainly made me think.

One the last thing. I encouraged Rabbi to start a Substack. This way you can read and listen to his essays and excerpts from 40 Years of Wondering online. You can subscribe and read his Substack for free, here. Also, you can buy his book on Amazon.

Charlie Munger passed away a few days ago. The world has lost a very special person. I will try to write what I learned from Charlie. This video, which was recorded a few months ago, touches on it a little.

Salute to Israel

On October 22, 2023, the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra held a special concert “Salute to Israel” to honor the victims of the October 7th massacre.  It performed Hatikvah and Beethoven’s 3^rd Symphony “Eroica”.  

I have heard Hatikvah many times before but this time it had a very different, special meaning to me. 

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

With your help, we have raised over $281,000 (across multiple charities) to help Israel cope with the Hamas atrocities.

The offer still stands: If you donate $100 or more to one of these charities, we’ll be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books – Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideway Markets. Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both. (Email receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive. We can mail in the US only).

By the way, holidays are coming. Donate to these charities, and we can mail signed books directly to your friends as holiday gifts. Everybody wins!

Once every three months, Stanley – IMA’s marketing guru – and I sit down for a video session. Stanley asks me questions and for about three hours, I answer them. Then, he turns this long video into short (6-9 minute) video clips. If you have questions you want Stanley to ask me, email them to sg@imausa.com.

Over the last six months, I have been exploring (i.e., writing about) a very interesting topic: the value of scarcity and the pitfalls of abundance. I love this scarcity/abundance framework and I can see how it can improve the quality of our lives. It will be a featured discussion in Soul in the Game Volume 2, whenever I finish it.

In this video, you get a small glimpse into this framework. I hope you enjoy it and also subscribe to my YouTube channel.

Bach’s Concerto No. 1 in D Minor

I have to admit that a love for Bach’s music is fairly new to me. I felt Baroque music lacked emotion and was somewhat boring. Then one day I was perusing YouTube and stumbled on a video of Glenn Gould playing Bach’s Concerto No. 1 in D Minor. I don’t know if it was Gould or Bach, but I was mesmerized by this piece and listened to it nonstop for a week. This was Glenn Gould’s first public performance. He is introduced to the world by the one and only Leonard Bernstein, who is also conducting the concerto.

Composing music is somewhat similar to writing a play – you can be as descriptive or undescriptive as you want to be. Bernstein makes this point in the lecture preceding the performance. A playwright may write, “John walked into the room and said ‘Hello Martha.” Imagine if you were the director and that is all you had to stage this scene. You don’t know how old John is or how he talks. How he looks. You know nothing about the surroundings. There is a lot of blank canvas to fill in here.

Or the playwright could describe John as a middle-aged, balding, overweight New Yorker wearing dirty jeans with giant holes in the knees, limping slowly into an empty room whose linoleum floor is barely covered by smelly red carpet and whose walls have been carelessly smeared with peeling white paint. The more descriptive the playwright is, though, the less creativity and imagination are left to the director.

Though to civilians (like yours truly) all scores look intimidatingly the same, a composer also has the option to either just provide the outlines of a story and a few snatches of dialog, or to go to the extra mile in describing how the music should be played. The more descriptive is composer is in the score, the less room for creativity he leaves for the conductors and performers.

Mahler was incredibly precise with his music: He described every little innuendo of his symphonies. Bach was not descriptive at all. He left a huge space for interpretation of his music, and you can clearly hear that in this concerto.

Glenn Gould’s performance is vastly different from any other performance of this concerto. He plays it noticeably slower and accentuates the notes significantly more – his performance evokes melancholy where others deliver energy. Gould could not, however, have been able to slow down the concerto on his own; he needed an accomplice: Leonard Bernstein.

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

With your help, we have raised close to $225,000 (across multiple charities) to help Israel cope with the Hamas atrocities.

The offer still stands: If you donate $100 or more to one of these charities, we’ll be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books - Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideway Markets.  Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both.  (Email receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive.  We can mail in the US only).  

By the way, holidays are coming.  Donate to these charities, and we can mail signed books directly to your friends as holiday gifts.  Everybody wins!

Next week I will revert to my more traditional essays where I share my thoughts on AI.

If yesterday’s, or this essay is not your cup of tea, you can catch up on my thoughts on the economy, China, oil, the unions, and “art or craft.”

Don’t Let History Repeat Itself

Article available in Spanish here.

I am a value investor who typically writes about topics such as stocks and the economy and ventures into softer, “life” topics like classical music, parenting, and philosophy. Why did I intentionally step into a topic that will likely not make me many friends and possibly alienate some subscribers and maybe even a few clients? 

Why did I write this? 

Subconsciously I always wondered what I would have done if I were a Jew living in Germany on November 9th, 1938. Kristallnacht, the night when Germans attacked Jews across the country – a pogrom. Hundreds of synagogues were destroyed, Jewish businesses and hospitals were ransacked, thousands of Jews were arrested. Would I run? Would I fight? Would it make a difference? 

In Soviet Russia, I kept my true nationality – my being Jewish – to myself. (I did not know that there was such a thing as the Jewish religion until I was 18, but that is a topic for the future.) In America, I have always embraced my Jewish identity with pride. But now, for the first time, I am afraid for the future of my kids and wondering if they will have to hide their identity like I did. For the first time in over 30 years, thoughts of hiding my Jewishness cross my mind. I absolutely hate these thoughts. 

To my shock, my wife asked me if we should get a gun. And for the first time, I am actually considering it. I talked to a lot of my Jewish friends, and to my surprise a lot of them are getting them. 

For the first time, I understood on a tactile level why Jews always lived in small communities. And this was also the first time I had to worry that Israel – a nation created to be a place where Jews were safe from antisemitism – might no longer exist. I am shocked that the United Nations has not passed a resolution condemning Hamas for their brutal killing of civilians, but with ease passed a resolution that condemned Israel for the deaths of Palestinians due to the collateral damage of war. 

I am also shocked by the anti-Israel demonstrations we see all over the world. There are twenty Arab nations surrounding Gaza, yet none of them want to take in Palestinians. Even Egypt, which shares a southern border with Gaza, does not want to take them or to help them. Ironically, Israel has done more for Palestinians than any Arab nation. (It provides them with water and electricity, for starters.) 

The world equates a shining light of democracy in the Middle East, Israel to the barbaric organization, Hamas. The world puts them on the same moral scale. Israel has incredible military might and nuclear weapons. If Hamas had Israel's military power, it would have killed every Jew three times over just for kicks. “Death to Israel” is what these sadists think about before they have breakfast. It is in the founding documents of Hamas – destroy Israel. 

You don’t see Israel leveling Gaza the way the Allies destroyed Dresden during WWII or the way the US firebombed Tokyo and then dropped atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, obliterating the populace. The IDF is going out of its way to avoid civilian casualties, putting their soldiers at risk to provide safe corridors for Gazans. I don’t recall any other army taking similar actions to protect civilians. This includes the US in Afghanistan and Iraq (though feel free to correct me). 

Israel is a state created for Jews, but there are 1.5 million Arabs living in Israel who are Israeli citizens and have the same rights and protections as Jews. Take any Middle Eastern country, and you'll see that the Jewish population has declined by 99.9% over the last five decades. The common thread here is the antisemitism that I had not thought about for decades but that is now out in the open. The pretext for Kristallnacht was that a German diplomat was assassinated by a 17-year-old German-born Polish Jew. Yes, the pretext – the antisemitism was there just waiting for a spark. 

However, I am not only concerned about my descendants. This world makes no sense to me. When George Floyd was killed, the world was engulfed in demonstrations. Most were peaceful (many of my Jewish and non-Jewish friends marched in them – and I’ve never divided my friends into these categories before). But many caused downtowns to burn, destroying private property. And we as a society appeared to be fine with that. Many were afraid to speak out because they were scared to be accused of being racist. I wrote it off as a diminished mental state caused by the pandemic lockdowns. 

More than a thousand Israeli civilians were slaughtered in extremely sadistic ways on October 7^th. However, even before Israel had a chance to formulate a strategy of how to respond to this horror, people took to the streets with terrorist flags and chanted "gas the Jews." Please tell me, does any of this make sense? Are we now a society with clear double standards? Have we simply traded one form of racism for another? The whole point of racism (and discrimination) is to treat people differently – and usually worse – because of their identity (their skin color, race, sexual orientation, what have you). 

Just imagine if the policeman who killed George Floyd had received a medal and was celebrated in mass marches, instead of being sent to prison. This is exactly what these marches in support of Hamas feel like. And should feel like to anyone. Our goal is to become a society where every life matters. Yes, I said it. Cancel me! All life matters! 

BLM has clearly turned into an antisemitic organization of hate. It is one thing to support the plight of the Palestinian people, but it is a completely different matter to put a paraglider on the logo, one day after 1,500 innocent civilians were sadistically slaughtered as paragliders swooped down on Israel. If I was a member of BLM, I’d cancel my membership, just as I would if I was part of a Jewish organization that put the KKK hood on its flag. 

We fear being canceled for speaking our minds. That fear runs deep in our society. If we touch any topic that pertains to a protected minority, we risk having our professional career ruined. We start sheepishly self-censoring ourselves. 

Visit your local synagogue on any high holiday and you’ll see armed to the teeth security as if the President was in town. You never see this type of security on high holidays at mosques or churches. Why? Jews represent less than 2% of the US population. Yet, half of all religion-based hate crimes are directed towards Jews. This hate-crime statistic is based on 2022 data from the FBI. Can you imagine what that figure is today, after October 7th? You’d think universities would be concerned about the safety of all of their students. 

Diversity and equity offices in our colleges value the lives of people of color, LGBTQ+ people, and women, but if you are a Jewish young man at an Ivy League school and are mugged by a mob, locked in the library, or afraid to come out of your dorm room, you are out of luck. Your skin is white, you are straight, and you are male. Sorry.

Given hate crime statistics and the surge in antisemitism, how much sense does it make for our country's vice president to come out with a "National Strategy to Counter Islamophobia"? Antisemitism is skyrocketing, reaching new highs, and the message you send is "Let's fight islamophobia"? 

We should stop categorizing people as we do endangered species. Yes, this is coming from a Jew, and there are only 15 million Jews in the world, or 0.19% of the world's population. All lives should matter. Yes, I said it again – you can cancel me twice. And no, hate speech inciting violence towards any group should not be tolerated. All students on campus should matter. 

So, October 7th feels like a Kristallnacht moment for me. Writing only about investing, the economy, classical music, and parenting when the world around you is crumbling, when your kids are scared and confused, is impossible now. 

I know young adults who have gone to Israel to fight to protect it from evil. I have friends who have put their lives on hold and gone to Israel to volunteer to help that country in any way they can. My pen is my gift. This is how I can make a difference. If I don't stand up now, then when? When my family is sent to the gas chambers?

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of IMA. He is the author of Soul in the Game – The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House). His essays can be read on investor.fm.

Wagner’s Lohengrin

I’ve been conflicted about listening to Wagner’s music for a long time. He was a raging anti-Semite and a horrible human being. Hitler’s love for Wagner’s music made Wagner even less likable. (But of course, by this logic, if Hitler loved Offenbach’s music would it make Offenbach’s music taboo? But then again, if I had nearly died in a concentration camp I’d probably feel differently.)

In 1981, Zubin Mehta performed an excerpt from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde as an encore in Israel. Until then Wagner’s music had not been performed live in Israel. Mehta made a short speech in which he said that Israel was a democracy where all music should be played, and if Wagner’s music offended some people they were free to leave. Two orchestra members and some of the audience left, and the piece was played to its end.

There is no right or wrong answer as to what one should think about Wagner’s music. It is a deeply personal matter. If Wagner’s music elicits negative emotions, then one should not listen to it. However, at the same time, we probably should not judge those who do choose to listen to it. This piece that I am about to share with you, I heard for the first time in one of my favorite movies, The Great Dictator, starring, written, and produced by the most Jewish non-Jewish actor, Charlie Chaplin. My kids have watched this movie a dozen times (If you haven’t seen it, I highly recommend it).

Click here to listen.

The Great Dictator was probably one of the first anti-Hitler movies, made in 1940 before Germany invaded Russia. I wish Stalin had watched it; he might have been less naïve about Hitler’s intentions and more prepared for war with Germany. I was surprised to find that the stunningly beautiful music in the “globe” scene was not written by Charlie Chaplin but by Richard Wagner.

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.

I usually look forward to waking up every morning. My family is still asleep. I make a cup of coffee, put on my headphones, and write. But I wasn't looking forward to mornings over the last week while I was working on this and tomorrow’s essays. It took me to a dark place where I did not want to go.

I was not planning to write much on this subject. But then a week ago, a client called me. He was very upset, almost panicking, not about his portfolio but about his son being subjected to antisemitism at Cornell University. My heart was already filled with anger and sadness. This call and then reading the news about the state of the US campuses have triggered flashbacks (which I tried so hard to suppress) of experiencing antisemitism in college in Soviet Russia. I could not sit still; I felt that it was my duty to stand up for what I believe and put my thoughts on paper. 

Tomorrow, I’ll send you additional thoughts on this topic. Then next week I will revert to my more traditional essays, and I’ll share my thoughts on AI. 

If this or tomorrow’s essays are not your cup of tea, you can catch up on my thoughts on the economy, China, oil, the unions, and “art or craft.”

With your help, we have raised close to $220,000 (across multiple charities) to help Israel cope with the Hamas atrocities.

The offer still stands: If you donate $100 or more to one of these charities, we’ll be delighted to mail you a signed copy of one of my books - Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life or The Little Book of Sideway Markets. Donate $200 or more and we’ll send you both. (Email receipt to Barbara at pa@imausa.com and indicate which book you’d like to receive. We can mail in the US only).

By the way, holidays are coming. Donate to these charities, and we can mail signed books directly to your friends as holiday gifts. Everybody wins!

Israel is Not Hamas’ Final Solution

Article available in Spanish here.

In 2011, my then 10-year-old son Jonah and I visited the Holocaust Museum in Washington, DC. 

The two-story room with the wall of photos brought tears to my eyes. Hundreds of family pictures and portraits from a small Lithuanian town that was home to 4,000 Jews for nine centuries. These people looked like my relatives. A young man in his thirties looked just like my uncle at that age, a 15-year-old kid looked like Jonah in five years, a Hassidic man almost exactly resembled my cousin who is a rabbi in Rego Park, Queens, and so on. The Nazis killed every single Jew in that town, in two days. Nine centuries of history and tradition were wiped from the face of the Earth in just two days! 

Jewish history is littered with senseless and gut-wrenching pogroms (massacres) like this. For centuries Jews were killed for no other reason than they were Jews, had their own different religion, and their own different customs and traditions. In a sense, the Nazis simply continued the long history of pogroms, though on vastly larger, industrial scale. 

After World War II, a miracle happened – the Jews got their own state. Unfortunately, it was in a hostile neighborhood. Israel, a tiny nation of musicians and scientists who have given so much to this world, was surrounded by twenty Arab countries, which normally could not stand each other but which could finally agree on something – they wanted Israel gone, for no other reason than that they hated Jews. 

Jews, now Israelis, had to put down their violins and pens and learn how to defend their country from its neighbors, who attacked it on the day it was born and have kept trying to erase it from the map since. “Jews”, as Golda Meir said, “had a secret weapon: They had nowhere to go.” Against the odds, each time Israel was attacked (and it was never the attacker), it prevailed.

When I left the Holocaust Museum, I felt incredible sadness but also relief. Relief that my kids and future generations would never have to experience anything like this again. Yes, the words never again have a special meaning to Jews. Never again are we going to be weak and to be slaughtered because we are different.

But then came October 7^th. Hamas, with sadistic creativity that made the Nazis look like amateurs, in just a few hours slaughtered 1,500 Jewish civilians. The Nazis tried hard to hide their atrocities. Not Hamas; jihadists celebrated theirs, live-streaming their sadism for the world to see. If only they loved life as much as they loved death, and had used their creativity to bring light instead of darkness, Gaza would have been another gem in the Middle East.

In chess, there is a concept called a "forced move," where a king, when in check (attacked by an opponent's piece), is left with no alternative moves and is forced to make a single, predictable move. 

The brutality of this massacre by Hamas forced Israel to move. Hamas knew Israel would have no choice but to invade Gaza (which Israel had previously vacated in 2005) to rid it of Hamas. The problem with forced moves is that they are the worst and only moves. Israeli parents did not want to send their sons and daughters to die in Gaza, but the words never again are forever fresh in their minds, and memories of the Holocaust are still a deep, aching pain in their hearts. 

Pause and think: The United States lost 2,996 people in the 9/11 terrorist attack. We scorched the earth to destroy Al Qaeda. Israel's population is only 9.3 million people. The 1,500 casualties Israel suffered would be equivalent to 45,000 people in the US. Can you imagine the response if the US lost 45,000 people in a terrorist attack?

Can you imagine what the US response would be if Mexico had kept launching rockets into Texas, Arizona, and California for over a decade? The Mexicans would already be speaking only English and hamburgers would be their staple food. But this is the reality Israel faces year after year after year. It’s why most Israeli houses have bomb shelters. They have been heavily used over the past month, as Hamas and Hezbollah have barraged Israel with more than 8,000 rockets since October 7. The unceasing rocket attacks alone belie Hamas’ calls for a cease fire.

Hamas knew that Israel, as any other nation that must protect its citizens, would respond to assure nothing like this could ever happen again. “Let’s have peace” (a ceasefire) or a “proportionate” response would not be on their minds. 

Then there is the issue of the Palestinians. 

Hamas, the elected government of Gaza, cares even less about the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip than it cares about the lives of the terrorists in its army. One of the Hamas commanders was asked why they didn't let the Palestinian populace hide in their tunnels. He answered that it was the responsibility of the UN to take care of the Palestinians. Hamas has taken two million Palestinians and 244 Jews as hostages. 

This is why they are launching missiles at Israel from hospitals and schools and hiding in tunnels. They are restricting fuel to their own hospitals, which are running on generators. They are stealing humanitarian funds from their own people and have shot those who tried to flee from the war zone to the south of Gaza. 

Today Israel is fighting two wars, against Islamic jihadists and public opinion. One war it will win while paying a high price in casualties; the other one it is losing. 

Israel, the only real democracy in the Middle East, values all life and goes out of its way to avoid harming innocent civilians. However, it is at war with an enemy that welcomes death and uses Palestinian citizens as human shields. This is Hamas' intention: It is willing to lose the battle over Gaza to turn Western allies and potential Israeli friends (such as Saudi Arabia) against Israel. 

Hamas is fine with putting Palestinian lives in the line of fire from the Israeli Defense Forces. The lives of Palestinians, in their minds, are no price to pay to destroy Israel. If Hamas would put down their weapons, there would be peace. If Israel puts down their weapons, there would be no Israel. 

Hamas is playing up to a weak, self-doubting Western world, turning us into useful idiots. The West has been conditioned to think of itself as oppressors, especially if someone has a darker skin color. The West’s collective guilt from centuries of colonial past is there for Hamas to exploit. We lose objectivity and the ability to reason. If we were to look at a chess board, we’d automatically assume that the white pieces were at fault. 

It is shocking to see Al Qaeda and ISIS flags at these demonstrations in Europe, on the same streets where these terrorists killed and injured thousands of Europeans over the last twenty years in shootings and suicide bombings. Europeans have already forgotten the attacks in Madrid in 2004 (191 killed), two attacks in London in 2005 (52 killed), the attack in Brussels in 2016 (32 killed), and many others (the list is long). And what about the thousands killed by Al Qaeda on 9/11? 

There is no difference (none!) between the flags of Al Qaeda and ISIS and the Nazi swastika, except that the Nazi banner was raised by light-skinned Germans and Islamic jihadists flags are paraded by darker skinned terrorizers. 

Our "colonial" guilty conscience is willing to overlook the atrocities committed by Al Qaeda and ISIS followers and the values they represent. Yes, values matter. We forget, or are unwilling to assert, that our Western values are better than theirs because they represent enlightenment – liberty, democracy, equality, freedom of speech, due process. I am not apologetic about it – yes, they are better. Not all values are created equal. 

The jihadists are winning the hearts and minds of university students. 

University campuses are becoming cradles of antisemitism. Jewish students are being bullied and threatened. Even before the bodies of 1500 slaughtered Jews had time to cool, instead of condemning terror, students jumped into anti-Israeli demonstrations. Several dozen Ivy League school clubs signed a letter blaming Israel for the massacre. 

Again, just pause and think about it. I keep coming back to 9/11, but imagine if US students went out onto the streets with Al Qaeda flags and Ivy League organizations signed letters in support of Saudi Arabia (or Iran). Just realize how absurd this is.

In their demonstrations, students are chanting "From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”. I have a suspicion that most of them don’t understand what this slogan really means. Israel is located between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, and thus there would be no Israel and no Jews. They are basically chanting “Death to Israel.”

What is even more incredible is that the university administrations, instead of assuring their campuses are places where students’ views are challenged (this is how we grow) and ideas are debated, has turned them into "safe places" where opposing ideas or use of a wrong pronoun are treated as acts of violence. Yes, these are the same universities that are afraid that culturally appropriated Halloween costumes will offend their students. These universities have a surprisingly high tolerance for antisemitism and hate speech that incites violence towards Jewish students. These universities are normalizing antisemitism.

I experienced antisemitism in the Soviet Union when I was a cadet in college. It was always normalized from the top. A joke from my commanding officer, in front of other cadets, about my Jewish roots was like a starting pistol for other cadets in the college to make fun of my heritage, and it led to perpetual bullying. Yes, this is what antisemitism feels like – perpetual bullying by one’s society. It gets worse. After a while, you get a feeling that you belong to a lower caste than everyone else and have an inexplicable feeling of guilt for... I’m still not sure for what.

A university administration struggling with its colonialist past should just try to imagine that its Jewish students have dark skin and treat antisemitism with the same vigor as they would treat any other form of racism. They shouldn't have a special "endangered group" list like Harvard University, where the diversity and equality office protects only people of color, women, and LGBTQ+. Instead, they should protect and defend all students - regardless of religion, skin color, or sexual orientation - from racism and discrimination. All students matter!

A poem by German pastor Martin Niemoller, on the wall at the end of the exhibit at the Holocaust Museum, has always stuck with me:

First they came for the communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a communist
Then they came for the socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me

I am shocked that I even have to say this: Don’t be fooled; the version of Islam propagated by the jihadists of Hamas and ISIS is not a peaceful religion. It promotes a dystopia of hatred and intolerance that wants you to either join it or be beheaded or burned in the ovens. 

First, they’ll come after the only light of freedom in the darkness of the Middle East, but they won't stop there. They think their values are superior to ours. They will want the rest of the Western "infidels" to bend the knee, too. Jews are their first stop but not their final solution. 

If you are standing still when they come for the Jews, remember the words of the pastor: 

"And there was no one left to speak out for me."

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of IMA. He is the author of Soul in the Game – The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House). His essays can be read on investor.fm.

Má Vlast

Today I would like to share with you Má Vlast by Bedrich Smetana (1824–1864). My daughter Hannah and I were listening to this piece a few days ago in the car when she said, “Dad, this sounds just like the national anthem of Israel.” We looked it up, and Hannah was absolutely right. The intertwined history of the main melody of Smetana’s Má Vlast (“My Homeland,” also known as Moldau) and the Israeli anthem is complex. A predominant theory is that the melody was composed by Italian composer Giuseppino Del Biado, who lived in the 17th century. Then it was turned into a folk song that spread throughout Europe. Smetana, a Czech composer, popularized it in Má Vlast. 

Samuel Cohen, a Romanian Israeli immigrant, is given credit for creating “Hatikvah” (“The Hope,” Israel’s national anthem). Cohen claimed that he heard the melody as a child in a Romanian/Moldavian folk song. In the late 19th century it was adopted by Jews as the anthem for the Zionist National Movement. Though it was an unofficial anthem since the creation of Israel in 1948, “Hatikvah” was officially adopted as the national anthem only in 2004. (I guess Israel wanted to try it out for 56 years to see how it felt.) 

As I was reading about Moldau I got a bit confused: Why would Czech composer Smetana call a piece about his Czech motherland Moldau? Well, after some digging I discovered that Moldau is the German name for Vlatava – the longest river in the Czech Republic. 

Click here to listen.

Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO at IMA, a value investing firm in Denver. He has written two books on investing, which were published by John Wiley & Sons and have been translated into eight languages. Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House, 2022) is his first non-investing book. You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.