RWH056: Calm Amid The Storm w/ Christopher Begg

You're listening to TIP. Hi there, welcome back to the Richer, Wiser, Happier podcast. Our guest today is one of my favorite people in the investing world, an extremely thoughtful hedge fund manager named Christopher Begg. Chris is the co-founder and chief investment officer of East Coast Asset Management, which has produced superb market beating returns over the last 16 years. Chris also teaches the prestigious security analysis course at Columbia Business School.

That's the same course that Benjamin Graham taught back in 1951, when the star student in the class was an aspiring stock picker named Warren Buffett. Over the last thirteen years, Chris has taught more than a thousand students at Columbia, and his guest speakers in the class have included a who's who of famed investors like Nick Sleep, Todd Combs, Howard Marks, and Seth Clarman, along with brilliant thinkers like Ian McGilchrist and Peter Kaufman, Chris has an unusual lifestyle, splitting his time between a small town in Massachusetts and a home in the jungles of Central America, where he spends a fair amount of time surfing, playing tennis, meditating, reading voraciously, and hanging out with his family and friends. It's all part of his pursuit of a an unusually spacious life that's balanced, joyful, and rich in the deepest sense of the word.

One reason why this lifestyle is possible is that he owns an extremely concentrated portfolio of high quality businesses that he can typically leave alone for many years, getting out of the way so they can continue compounding without too much meddling. At the moment, he owns only eight stocks. He is also unusually patient when it comes to making any new investment. He typically waits for rare opportune moments when the long term potential of an exceptional business is temporarily obscured by clouds of uncertainty. That uncertainty allows him to invest at a hefty discount,

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