Vitaliy Katsenelson

IMA CIO; long-term value investing and reflective essays.

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Books · 1

book

The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Vitaliy Katsenelson: Full IMA Client Dinner Talk and Q&A (2026)Vitaliy Katsenelson

Context

Vitaliy Katsenelson recommends this book as the best work on creativity he has read, using it to help his team and himself slow down and focus on being better creators.

“Don't start with the first chapter. Start. Start with the chapter called Patience.”

Movies · 2

Fiddler on the Roof

Norman Jewison · 1971

fuboTVMGM+ Amazon ChannelPhilo

Fiddler on the Roof and Value InvestingVitaliy Katsenelson

Context

Vitaliy Katsenelson values this film as a creative touchstone that helped him demystify financial valuation through the character of Tevye.

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Jiro Dreams of Sushi

David Gelb · 2011

Amazon Prime VideofuboTVPhilo

You Don't Need to Be an Expert to Hire One. You Need a Tunaman.Vitaliy Katsenelson

Context

Vitaliy Katsenelson recommends this documentary to illustrate the concept of obsessive, narrow specialization which he defines as the tuna man quality.

“Jiro explains that through trial and error over the years, he figured out that octopus tastes better if you massage it for exactly 45 minutes.”

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Vitaliy Katsenelson16d

Your Sophist Filter On CEOs, Cynics, and the Voice in Your Head

Around 155 BC, Athens sent the philosopher Carneades to Rome to plead for a fine to be lifted. He delivered a brilliant speech and swayed the audience. The next day he returned to the same square and delivered an equally impassioned speech making the opposite point, and swayed them all over again. Cato the Elder was in the crowd this time, and Athens paid the price. This essay is an excerpt from my book Soul in the Game. It's about building what I call a Sophist filter: the discipline of stripping the emotional coloring off other people's words, and off your own. In ancient Greece, Sophists

Vitaliy Katsenelson23d

My New Daughter

On August 30, 2026 we gained a daughter. My son Jonah married Molly after eight years and one week of dating, and the Wedding Politburo gave me exactly three minutes for a speech. (I kept it to 40.) This episode is the speech I gave at Jonah and Molly's wedding, along with the story of the rabbi who married them and my 12-year-old Mia Sarah's contribution to the evening. In the speech, I tell Jonah about the chess tournament he won at ten years old and then handed to his friend Kevin. I tell the story of how he talked his way into the St. Julien in Boulder for the price of a Motel 6, and how

Vitaliy Katsenelson1mo

Depressing Reasons Why I Am Bullish On Gold (Part 2)

The US is running a 6% budget deficit in peacetime. Peacetime is now over. Interest on our debt now costs more than defense. It crossed in 2024 and has stayed there. This is the second half of my letter to IMA clients, and it argues for an asset I spent most of my career politely ignoring: gold. The fact that I am writing this is a bit shocking to me. Gold falls outside my value framework. It has no cash flows. I have no idea what it is worth. What changed my mind is not something about gold, but many things about the dollar. The dollar's place as the world's reserve currency rested on three

Vitaliy Katsenelson1mo

Narrative Change (Part 1)

In mid-August 2026, the 30-year Treasury yield hit its highest level in 19 years, above 5.3%, and the 10-year touched 4.75%. What happened next did not shock me, but it worries me: the US Treasury bought back its own long bonds to push yields down, financing the purchase by issuing short-term Treasuries. Yields fell for a day and then went right back up. This is the first half of my latest client letter. I sat down to write about individual stocks and kept ending up somewhere else. I get a feeling we are having a Caliber 89 moment. Caliber 89 was the two-pound Patek Philippe pocket watch wit

Vitaliy Katsenelson1mo

You Are Responsible for What You Have Tamed

A client of mine left $100 million to his wife and two grown kids after cancer took him at 66. He was Yale-educated, second-generation American, ran the family business his Russian immigrant father started, and worked 16-hour days, seven days a week, in the basement. His son, days away from becoming a father himself, told me: "I don't want to be like my father." That conversation hit me hard. As a father who runs a business, I asked myself whether I'm doing the same thing to my own kids. A few days later I drove my 18-year-old son Jonah to the airport for a gap year in Israel, and he handed m

Vitaliy Katsenelson2mo

Chess Nights at Red Robin

After my daughter Hannah watched Queen's Gambit in January 2021, she said "Dad, let's play chess." With those fateful words, our lives shifted. Just over a year later, I could no longer beat my 16-year-old daughter. Neither could her 6'3 older brother Jonah. I wrote this essay a few years ago. Hannah is off at college now, Jonah is all grown up, and Mia Sarah is no longer eight. I did not want to change a word, because everything I felt on those Thursday nights is still exactly true. Once lockdowns lifted, Hannah wanted to play against live humans, and we discovered chess meetups happening a

Vitaliy Katsenelson2mo

Today’s Market = 1999 Capex + 2008 Credit

Anthropic's revenue has grown nearly 10x a year, three years running. Its losses are accelerating with it. And here is Dario Amodei in February: "If my revenue is not 1 trillion dollars, if it's even $800 billion, there's no force on earth, there's no hedge on earth that could stop me from going bankrupt if I buy that much compute." The AI rollout has felt like déjà vu of the 1999 telecom bubble. It is starting to feel like that bubble is being supersized into something closer to what led to the 2008 financial crisis. Trillions in data centers, financed through the same opaque vehicles that b

Vitaliy Katsenelson2mo

You Don't Need to Be an Expert to Hire One. You Need a Tunaman.

My wife and I are taking a perfectly good 25-year-old house and spending 20% of the purchase price on a sizable remodel. Parts of it are going back to the studs. I had never done a big remodel, I knew nothing about construction, and I was shocked by how many landmines, wrong decisions, and outright deceptions we had to avoid just to start. Strangely, the experience gave me incredible empathy for the smart, highly educated people who walk into a financial firm like mine: lawyers, doctors, engineers, businesspeople trying to decide who will manage their life savings. They feel what I felt. A mi

Vitaliy Katsenelson3mo

Most People Don't Want to Write They Want to Have Written

I was at a conference in Switzerland. A reader came up to me and asked, "Vitaliy, I've been reading your articles for years. I'd like to write. How should I start?" This question spilled into a long conversation over dinner. When I told him what almost two decades of writing have taught me, his face fell. He'd tried it. He'd spent weeks staring at the computer and written complete garbage. Welcome to my world. In this piece, I work through what I told him over that dinner. Frustration and empty pages are par for the course. Quantity and quality are joined at the hip. "Writing is rewriting" i

Vitaliy Katsenelson3mo

You are not as smart as you think you are

Lately, I've been getting this powerful feeling that everything I touch turns to gold. Every time I buy a stock, it goes up. Did I finally figure out the stock market game? Did I find a secret way to follow Will Rogers' advice: Buy stocks that go up, and if they don't go up, don't buy them? No. I didn't get much smarter. I was simply a willing participant in the latest cyclical bull market. A bull market makes you feel smarter than you are, the same way a bear market makes you feel dumber than you are. This piece is a small excerpt from my first book, Active Value Investing (2007), which I l

Vitaliy Katsenelson4mo

Guy and I

My dear friend Guy Spier did an almost hour-long interview with CNBC's Becky Quick. It is an interview I wish had never happened, or, if it did, for a different reason. Guy has been diagnosed with glioblastoma (GBM), one of the deadliest cancers. In January, Guy returned money to his investors, closed his fund, and wrote a must-read letter. I first heard of Guy at Charlie Munger's Daily Journal meeting, when a friend pointed to his silhouette and whispered his name with a deference that made me take note. Our friendship actually began a few years later in Trani, Italy, where my brother Alex m

Vitaliy Katsenelson4mo

This Is Your Captain Speaking - Buckle Up

I am on the flight from Denver to San Francisco with my twelve-year-old daughter when I write this letter to IMA clients about the craziness I am seeing in the markets. The turbulence on the flight gave me the pilot analogy. The rest came from what I see in valuations. This market is starting to feel incredibly bubbly, approaching circa 1999. The similarities are eerie. Intel and Corning, darlings of 1999, are at multidecade highs at nosebleed valuations. Walmart is trading at 50 times earnings again, the same multiple that produced no returns for shareholders from 1999 to 2014. And Nvidia, t

Vitaliy Katsenelson4mo

Fiddler on the Roof and Value Investing

It was 2006, my fifth year teaching a graduate investment class at the University of Colorado at Denver, and I had stopped preparing for lectures. One day I opened the syllabus and found discounted cash flow analysis on the menu. I started with: "Imagine you are a farmer about to buy a cow. How much would you pay for that cow?" A few days later, on a Saturday morning, I was sitting in my basement working on the valuation chapter of my first book, Active Value Investing. I was stuck. Valuation can be a very dry and boring topic. After staring at a blank screen for hours, I started listening to

Vitaliy Katsenelson4mo

Vitaliy Katsenelson: Full IMA Client Dinner Talk and Q&A (2026)

Vitaliy Katsenelson, CEO and CIO of IMA (Investment Management Associates), shares his full remarks and client Q&A from the 2026 IMA Client Dinner in Denver. In this conversation, Vitaliy talks about how IMA has grown from $100 million in 2020 to over $800 million today while staying obsessed with the same things, why he treats IMA as his "Sistine Chapel" rather than a profit machine, and the two values that guide everything the firm does: quality and kindness. He also takes questions from clients on: - Why the portfolio has expanded from 20 to roughly 30 stocks, and how AI changed his thin

Vitaliy Katsenelson4mo

What to Do When a Stock Drops 25

A client emails me: stock XYZ has declined 25%, is the thesis broken? It's a fair question, and the honest answer is one I want to walk through carefully, because the same client letter brought a second question wearing different clothes: how do you tell the difference between patience and stubbornness when a position isn't working? Both questions get at something I think about constantly: how to hold a position through doubt without either flinching at noise or hardening into ego. Daily liquidity in the stock market is both a feature and a bug, and most of the job of being a long-term invest

Vitaliy Katsenelson4mo

Greg Abel Takes Over Berkshire Hathaway: My Thoughts After Omaha 2026

Greg Abel Takes Over Berkshire Hathaway: My Thoughts After Omaha 2026 - Ep 290 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on my FREE weekly email newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/ Adam Anderson's interview - AI-generated summary: https://x.com/vitaliyk/status/2056704702323229068 The Intellectual Investor Breakfast 2027 signup form: https://forms.monday.com/forms/460b2f5a0da2d4ec7928242b1480ae01?r=use1 📚 Get my books: Soul in the Game - https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets - https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing - https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A WHO AM I: Vita

Vitaliy Katsenelson5mo

Why the S&P 500 May Return Zero for a Decade | Vitaliy Katsenelson

Vitaliy Katsenelson answers questions from a packed room at the Intellectual Investor Breakfast 2026 in Omaha, the morning of Berkshire Hathaway's annual meeting. Over 800 attendees, 90 minutes of unscripted Q&A, no slides, no pitch. Vitaliy is the CEO of IMA, a Denver-based value investing firm, and the author of Active Value Investing, The Little Book of Sideways Markets, and Soul in the Game. Forbes once called him "the new Benjamin Graham." This is the full conversation. Topics include why the S&P 500 may return close to zero over the next decade, what Greg Abel taking over Berkshire Hat

Vitaliy Katsenelson5mo

What the Iran War Reveals About the Dollar, Gold, and the End of US Exceptionalism

The US dollar accounts for 58% of foreign currency reserves today, down from 70% two decades ago. The US government's freezing of roughly $300 billion of Russian central bank reserves turned the dollar into a political weapon and undermined the comfort countries (even adversaries) had in it. Central banks are now accumulating gold as if preparing for an Indian wedding. The Iran war, an unraveling of post-WWII alliances, and a US borrowing 6% more than it earns are all reacting to the same underlying shift: the assumptions behind US exceptionalism are quietly being rewritten. I walk through wh

Vitaliy Katsenelson5mo

Q&A Series: On Firing Clients, Sizing Positions, and Ignoring Book Value

Q&A Series: On Firing Clients, Sizing Positions, and Ignoring Book Value – Episode 288 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on my FREE weekly email newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/ 📚 Get my books: Soul in the Game – https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets – https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing – https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) in 2012. Forbes Magazine called him “The New Benjamin Graham.” He’s written for publications including Financial Times, Barron’s, Institutional Investor, and Forei

Vitaliy Katsenelson6mo

Q&A: The Antifragile Investor: Balancing Geopolitics, Identity, and the Cost of Growth

Q&A: The Antifragile Investor: Balancing Geopolitics, Identity, and the Cost of Growth - Episode 287 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on my FREE weekly email newsletter: https://investor.fm/sign-up/ 📚 Get my books: Soul in the Game - https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets - https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing - https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) in 2012. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." He's written for publications including Financial Times, Barron's, Institutiona

Vitaliy Katsenelson6mo

Uber and Self-Driving Cars: The Utilization Problem Nobody Talks About

Uber and Self-Driving Cars: The Utilization Problem Nobody Talks About - Ep 286 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on my FREE weekly email newsletter: https://investor.fm/signup-for-articles/ 📚 Get my books: Soul in the Game - https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets - https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing - https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) in 2012. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." He's written for publications including Financial Times, Barron's, Institutional Investo

Vitaliy Katsenelson6mo

What AI, Tariffs, and Global Uncertainty Mean for Your Portfolio

What AI, Tariffs, and Global Uncertainty Mean for Your Portfolio - Ep 285 📩 Join 100,000+ readers on my FREE weekly email newsletter: https://investor.fm/signup-for-articles/ 📚 Get my books: Soul in the Game - https://amzn.to/43CF73v The Little Book of Sideways Markets - https://amzn.to/3QWTlqZ Active Value Investing - https://amzn.to/3u8zn3A WHO AM I: Vitaliy Katsenelson is the CEO of Investment Management Associates (IMA) in 2012. Forbes Magazine called him "The New Benjamin Graham." He's written for publications including Financial Times, Barron's, Institutional Investor, and

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