Avoiding the Crowd welcomes Brian McCann, full-time private investor, better known as @Bootstrap68 on Twitter. Maj and Brian have been friends and fellow MicroCap investing colleagues for many years now, so it was only a matter of time that Brian would jump on the podcast to do what he and Maj do best, talk MicroCap stocks and investing. Join in and be a fly on the wall as they discuss how Brian’s investing journey continues to evolve. Please enjoy!

A passage from the conversation:

Brian McCann on the beginning of his investing journey

I was a precocious child. So, I’m a career switcher. I had a long corporate career. I actually worked in logistics and supply chain for 16 years for The Gap. And I’ve always been interested in investing, but never really had the time to pursue it, I felt.

Somewhere along the way I started to…it’s probably fairer to say that I was interested more in money than investing, because I always saved money and hoarded money up. And as a result, then I would go out and try to invest it. Generally speaking, what I did was lose it all.

At a certain point in time, I decided I needed to get more serious about actually saving and investing properly. I started to learn more about personal finance and that kind of thing. And I was always the one “geeking out” about the 401k at work and people were asking me questions.

So, I kind of developed a love of personal finance from that and decided I was going to switch careers and become a financial advisor.

Kind of in parallel with that, I was also experimenting with picking stocks and doing horribly bad at it. But eventually (I was actually dating my wife, she was my girlfriend at the time), I stopped and visited her at her apartment one time and she had a book on our bookshelf called The Warren Buffett Way. And I kind of knew about Warren Buffett, but I didn’t know anything about him really. You know, you’ve just heard of him and knew he was a good investor.

I asked her if I could borrow the book and she said, “sure”, so I borrowed the book, and I read it. It was like light bulb went off, right? So, for a long time, I kind of identified as a value investor. But really, what I think that book taught me was fundamental analysis, like how to look at companies as businesses. And that’s really where I got interested in stock picking.

Kind of at the same time I started my financial advising firm. I also started to get interested in stock picking. And so, it’s kind of those two that have been kind of parallel paths for me. I’m definitely a part time investor, but I spend a lot of time on it…it varies highly. A lot of my process is actually built around the fact that I’ve not had a lot of time to do analysis and spend on investing. I have a lot of short circuits in my research process and things like that, or maybe lack a of research process is a better way to say it.