Author: Mike Darmiento
I am a undergraduate student at the University of Chicago studying Philosophy and Political Science. My two great interests are value investing and philosophy. I strongly believe in a value investing approach that follows the mold of investors like Klarman, Marks, Abrams, and Singer. My favorite investing books are Margin of Safety, The Most Important Thing, and Security
Analysis, and my primary area of interest within value investing is distressed debt.
As a avid reader, I try to find links between classical texts and the principles of value investing. As Klarman writes, “Investing is the intersection of economics and psychology.” Many of the psychological elements inherent to investing are not unique to investing, rather they have been taken from the philosophical canon and applied to financial markets; these concepts include cognition and its biases, prudence, ethics, rationality and decision making, and crowd psychology, among many others.
Therefore, in this website I hope to shed light on and analyze these connections. Experienced investors will likely find none of the conclusions I make to be revolutionary, nor is that my intention to be so. My goal is to trace modern investment principles to their roots in the philosophical intellectual tradition and to illustrate how investors today can still learn from these classical authors and texts.
In terms of the logistics of running this website, I am aiming to do at least one post per week, though it will likely vary from time to time due to exams and the like. I will always try to quote and cite as many relevant passages from the text so that the readers can see where I draw my analysis from. In terms of which texts I will cover, there is no predetermined order and it will likely be highly influenced by what classes I am taking at the time and which texts I deem relevant to investing.
