Last year, the IMA team started a new tradition of creating an almanac of articles I wrote in the departing year. You can read the 2021 almanac here.
This year’s almanac is divided into four sections – I’ll touch on each section below.
Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
As I reflect on 2022, the most important event of the year, at least for me, is Russia’s barbaric invasion of Ukraine. In the past, when people sensing my accent asked me where I was from, I unhesitantly answered, from Russia. Today, I am overwhelmed with embarrassment for the country I left 31 years ago, and thus I answer that I am from the USSR. This is factually correct: Russia as a country did not exist when on December 1, 1991, my family boarded a Pan Am flight from Moscow to NYC.
Today’s Russia has no qualms behaving like the Nazi Germany I was taught to hate in Russian schools even before I could read. I wrote a series of essays about this war that you’ll find in the “Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine” section.
Investing
The stock market bubble that I’ve been writing about for the last few years is finally bursting. For the first time in almost a decade, it feels like common sense has stopped being a painful headwind and is turning into a tailwind.
Paying any price for the stocks of companies that were growing revenues but had no hint of profitability and were diluting shareholders by giving away 10% of shares in stock-based compensation every year is an approach that has stopped working.
Investors are discovering that the price you pay matters, eventually. Many of these companies are down 70-80% from their highs and are still expensive.
Rising interest rates are making value investing great again!
In the “Investing” section, I discuss the economy, inflation, deflation, individual stocks, the housing market, and a lot more.
Life & Philosophy
I was going to create a separate “Philosophy” section in the almanac. Then I realized that it’s often difficult to find the line where life ends and philosophy begins. Philosophy doesn’t exist in an esoteric bubble, it is inseparable from life. The word philosophy is unnecessarily intimidating – it should not be. After all, it translates from Greek as love of wisdom.
In 2022 I published Soul in the Game: The Art of a Meaningful Life (Harriman House). Writing a book is like having a child, and just like having children, writing this book changed me. I realized that in my actions I now have to answer to a higher authority – the better version of me that appears in the pages of the book.
So far the reader feedback I have received has been overwhelmingly positive. Soul in the Game is achieving what I hoped it would do – have a positive impact on readers’ lives.
The most frequent response I get from readers is “I wish I’d read it years ago.”
That is exactly what John Mauldin said at a recent CFA Colorado event where we shared the stage. John is a friend and the gifted writer of one of the most-read newsletters on economics in the country. At the event he said that he was buying a copy of Soul in the Game for each of his ten kids for Christmas. He really wants them to read it, and thus he’ll pay his kids if they read it and can have a 15-minute conversation with him about the book.
I don’t know if I’ll write another book, but I keep on writing this one. I’ve already written six new chapters that I’ll be sharing with folks who bought Soul in the Game and registered their purchase by emailing bonus@soulinthegame.net (you can email your receipt or just a picture of you holding the book). I’ll be releasing new chapters to “unregistered” readers at a later date. We also added a bonus section, where you can read several chapters excerpted from Soul in the Game.
Music
I wrote a lot less about classical music this year than I normally do. The book launch and writing about the war in Ukraine consumed a lot of my writing time. I intend to rectify the situation in 2023.
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My team puts a lot of effort into creating a marvelous almanac. As with everything we do at IMA, they had soul in the game while creating it. If you are pleased with the way it looks, thank the IMA team. You can simply reply to this email with your comments, and I will share them with the team. My contribution to it is just limited to the articles and the introduction you just have read.
Feel free to share this almanac with your friends, enemies, random strangers and of course, your kids.
I hope you enjoy the almanac and prosper.
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.
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