From Twinkies to Rolexes (IMA Client Dinner 2024 Video)
Once a year, we host what the IMA team gently calls “client appreciation week.” This week is very special to me, as I get to meet people who have entrusted their life savings to us.
IMA teams, including yours truly, block out our calendars and have one-on-one meetings with our clients. IMA has approximately 350 clients living all over the US and in ten different countries. The pinnacle event of the week is our annual client meeting, where I answer questions from clients over dinner.
Today I am going to share the Q&A session from the IMA Annual Client Meeting held in Denver on March 21, 2024.
This was a wide-ranging Q&A session. We discussed:
- What will happen to our portfolio and the stock market if Biden or Trump is elected
- Why I should not travel to London
- Why our portfolios are full of Twinkies and cockroaches
- My fascination with the luxury watch industry
- What will make the US stop running huge budget deficits
- How derivatives can help reduce risk in your portfolio
- The impact of EV adoption on our investments in oil and natural gas
- Our buying process
- Why melting ice cubes could be a good investment
- Whether the US dollar will remain the global reserve currency
- Why overnight success sometimes takes years
- Our thoughts on the cable and tobacco industries.
Of course, we also discussed my failures and lessons learned from them.
We encountered a slight technical difficulty and my answer to the question on our hedged UBER position was truncated. I’ll share with you an excerpt from the client letter that discusses this hedge in great detail soon, so that should not be a significant loss.
For those of you who like straining your eyes more than your ears, here is a slightly edited AI-generated transcript of the video. You can also watch the Q&A session from IMA 2023 Annual Client Meeting here.
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 You can get unpublished bonus chapters by forwarding your purchase receipt to bonus@soulinthegame.net.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.
