TIP705: The Quiet Winners: Unveiling Hidden Value w/ Adam Wilk

We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network

Stig Brodersen

Education, Investing, Business

4.6 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 9 March 2025

⏱️ 75 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

On today’s episode, Kyle Grieve chats with Adam Wilk about the powers of incremental improvement, what he learned as an NBA scout about finding hidden value, why making the investing process more labour intensive has led to outperformance, the hidden difficulties of identifying quality in small-cap stocks, how to utilize aspects of special situation investments to find hidden compounders, the shared qualities found in Adam’s best investments, and a whole lot more! Adam Wilk is the Founder and Portfolio Manager of Greystone Capital Management, LLC, leading a concentrated small and micro-cap long-only strategy. With a background in professional sports, including roles as a scout for NBA teams like the Spurs and Rockets, Adam honed skills in talent evaluation, data analysis, and risk management. His passion for value investing began in 2013, inspired by Warren Buffett’s writings, leading to a career pivot and the creation of Greystone. Adam shares his investment insights through research reports and his blog, Pound the Rock Investing. IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN: 00:00 - Intro 04:14 - How small bits of incremental progress lead to outsized returns over time. 07:51 - Key insights in finding undervalued assets that he learned from looking for undervalued talent for an NBA team. 10:00 - Why making the investing process labour-intensive creates differentiated insights. 15:48 - Why keeping costs low in a fund decreases sensitivity to market volatility. 19:58 - Why identifying quality in small caps comes with inherent difficulty compared to more discovered businesses. 20:35 - Why change in expectations is such a powerful catalyst. 31:13 - How special situations can cause underappreciation of a quality business and obscure upside. 33:55 - Insights into how to evaluate and underwrite management teams. 35:22 - Some of the biggest lessons Adam learned about management from his greatest investment mistake. 49:28 - The qualities that have shown up in Adam's biggest winners. And so much more! Disclaimer: Slight discrepancies in the timestamps may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, Kyle, and the other community members. Buy The Warren Buffett Portfolio here. Follow Kyle on Twitter and LinkedIn. Check out all the books mentioned and discussed in our podcast episodes here. Enjoy ad-free episodes when you subscribe to our Premium Feed. NEW TO THE SHOW? Get smarter about valuing businesses in just a few minutes each week through our newsletter, The Intrinsic Value Newsletter. Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Follow our official social media accounts: X (Twitter) | LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook | TikTok. Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here. Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services. Learn how to better start, manage, and grow your business with the best business podcasts. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Netsuite SimpleMining CFI Education Unchained Hardblock Found Fintool The Bitcoin Way Shopify Vanta Onramp PrizePicks TurboTax Fundrise HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Spotify! It takes less than 30 seconds, and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to TIP. The consensus is that small cap stocks are not synonymous with market
0:06.3	beating returns among the investing community. But Adam Wilkes Fund, Greystone Capital Management,
0:11.0	has invested exclusively in microcap stocks and has returned 23.8% net of fees since inception
0:16.7	versus the S&P 500's annualized returns of 17.7%. So that general thinking is prone to error.
0:23.6	Today, Adam and I will discuss some of these holes in thinking, why they exist,
0:27.6	and how investors with an open mind can take advantage of these market areas with higher inefficiencies.
0:32.6	Adam is a very interesting investor because he comes from a unique background I have just never seen
0:37.5	from a professional investor. His initial goal was to become the general manager of a professional
0:42.3	basketball franchise. He scouted for one of the best run organizations in all of sports,
0:47.4	the San Antonio Spurs. While there, he learned how to scout for talent in hidden places.
0:53.3	He also discovered that while it can definitely be harder to find talent in the harder to find
0:58.0	pool of the later rounds of the draft, it was still possible to locate winners that
1:02.0	other scouts often overlooked.
1:04.0	You can probably already see the parallels between this and value investing.
1:08.0	Value investing is about finding excellent investment opportunities where
1:11.5	nobody else is looking. Adam has used his knowledge to help find some exceptional investments.
1:17.6	It all starts with microcaps. This is an area in the market with very few eyes on it precisely
1:22.4	because many funds simply can't invest in it. Once Adam identifies an interesting business, he'll then go deep into
1:29.0	learning more about management. We'll go over why Adam places such a significant emphasis on
1:33.9	management. Hint, it was due to one of the biggest investing mistakes he ever made, which will
1:38.3	also cover in depth. Another competitive advantage Adam has observed is his ability to make his
1:43.8	investing process as
	...

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