Welcome To Mispriced Markets
I am a private investor who has been enthusiastically pursuing the fine art of value investing for over 28 years. I have designed this website to serve as a resource for those investors following or wishing to follow a similar path. I have no official financial credentials to lend any legitimacy to this project. What I do have, though, is an astonishingly good track record...
My Personal Track Record
33% average annual returns over 28 years.
Growth of $10,000
If my portfolio had been a mutual fund and someone had invested $10,000 in it in 1996 and hadn't added or taken any money out along the way, they would have seen their money grow to just over $34 million 28 years later.
To see a full and complete accounting of my journey through the markets, check out the Track Record section of this website. Here, I offer up a detailed discussion of my performance along with a record of all the stocks I've bought and sold over the years.
My Story
I didn’t set out to make my fortune in the stock market. I emerged from what seemed like an eternity of schooling with diploma in hand and quickly discovered that I did not really have a burning passion for the career I had chosen. My hastily conceived plan B was to live a modest life, set some money aside from an early age to give it time to compound, and then work as little as I could get away with.
As it happened, the universe had different plans for me. In looking for somewhere to invest my initial savings, I stumbled across Peter Lynch’s book “One Up On Wall Street” where he made the case that, contrary to popular wisdom, the odds were not stacked against the little guy. Quite the opposite in fact. Individual investors had a lot of advantages over the Wall Street professionals and should not be shying away from taking matters into their own hands. He went on to lay out the value-based approach he had used during his career to dramatically outperform the markets.
I took Peter Lynch’s teachings to heart and started investing my own money in value-priced stocks. This was the late nineties and the market was on fire. I was lucky enough to enjoy some dramatic successes very early in my investing career. These are what gave me the capital and the confidence I needed to retire from the official workforce at the precocious age of 34 and devote my life to the study and practice of value investing.
In the years since, I've continued to outperform the market by a wide margin, beating the benchmark Russell 2000 index by over 12% annually. That kind of performance is almost unheard of on Wall Street and is what prompted me to launch this website.
I want to do for a new generation of young investors what Peter Lynch did for me. Investors face an overwhelming onslaught of information and advice. Some of it well meaning. Most of it self-serving. A lot of it just plain wrong. I realise that with this website I am adding my voice to the din. But unlike the majority of talking heads out there, I have the numbers to back me up. Value investing isn't for everyone. It requires a peculiar kind of contrarian mindset. But if you're the kind of person that loves hunting down a good bargain, then you may have found your market niche.
My goal for this website is to help other investors enjoy the kind of success I have been able to achieve in my career by freely sharing my experiences and whatever knowledge I may have accumulated along the way. After spending nearly three decades scouring the markets for mispriced opportunities, I am still learning new tricks. Come join me on this journey.
This website has two main sections...
Value 101
If you are new to investing or are curious to see the approach that I’ve taken to consistently beat the market, I’d encourage you to check out my series of tutorials, found under Value Investing 101. Here, I explain my core investment philosophy, lay out the basic framework I follow and dive into the nuts and bolts of how to go about analyzing a new stock.
Trading Journal
For 6 years, from 2018 to 2024, I blogged about every stock I bought or sold in my own personal account in real time. I tried to be as transparent as I could; highlighting my wins as well as my losses. This was a truly tumultuous and challenging time for investors, encompassing, as it did, the covid pandemic and its aftermath. When I tallied the final results, I had tripled the value of the portfolio and had once again outperformed the market by a wide margin. Even though the trades are now all in the past, hopefully readers can find some useful insights in this Trading Journal that will aid them on their own investing journeys.
Feel Free To Reach Out
I thoroughly enjoy the whole process of value investing. I love searching through the market looking for those rare, overlooked gems. I love the challenge of going head to head with the market and coming out on top. I'm fascinated by the constantly changing and evolving market landscape and the endless variety of interesting companies out there that I can learn about. This website is a pet project of mine and is meant to be fun. Hopefully some of the passion that I feel for this strange pastime comes across in my writing. If you have any questions or just want to chat, please don't hesitate to send me an email. I love hearing from my fellow investors.
John Cole
mispricedmarkets@gmail.com