TIP781: My Portfolio & Current Market Conditions w/ Clay Finck & Stig Brodersen

You're listening to TIP. Every year, I sit down with my friend and co host Clay Fink to reflect on his portfolio and how his investment process continues to evolve. We discuss which companies he added and how his framework around quality, valuation, and long term compounding has matured. We talk about investing alongside exceptional founder operators, how narratives around AI and motorcycles can divert wildly from intrinsic value, and why some of the hardest decisions in investing aren't about what to buy, but what not to sell. In the second half of the episode, the conversation goes far beyond stocks. We explore how value investing principles shape Clay's view on money, career choice, happiness, and building a life with margin of safety. If you're curious how long term investing, personal values, and thoughtful relationships intersect, I think you'll really enjoy this conversation. Since 2014 and through more than 180,000,000 downloads, we've studied the financial markets and read the books that influence self made billionaires the most. We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected. Now for your hosts, Stig Brodersen and Play Fink. Welcome to The Investor's Podcast. I'm your host, Stig Brodersen, and today I'm here with my friend and co host Clay Fink. Clay, how are you? Stig Brodersen (zero zero three:thirty): Hey, Stig. Doing great. Daniel Gole (zero 0 three:thirty): Fantastic. And so let's just jump right into it. We're going to talk about your portfolio and all that happened here in 2025. Well, perhaps whenever someone is turning in, it might be 2026, but we want to look at your portfolio here in 2025 and see everything that's been going on, and I know that you added a few stocks to your portfolio. Now, was this a question of the stocks being on your watch list and then hit a price target, or did you learn perhaps new mental models and then solve some stocks in a different light? Robert Leonard (zero fifty three:forty nine): Yeah. So going into the year, I did want to further expand my portfolio and add a few more quality companies. But in previous years I had a fairly strong bias against large cap US companies. And this led me to invest outside The US in great businesses like Constellation Software, Topicus, Dynopolska. And I still believe these are all great businesses, but are a bit relatively less well known and just not on everyone's radar. And I've expanded my horizons a bit this year as I've really gained more of an appreciation for just how dominant many US franchises are. And part of this is speaking to several of the guests that I do here on the show. So this year I added shares of Meta Interactive Brokers and Booking Holdings to my portfolio. So I covered booking on the show earlier this year in 2025 and added shares during the tariff tantrum during the spring. And meta and interactive brokers are more recent additions to my portfolio. …