🗣️ Investor Talk #35: Sam Hollanders
Co-Founder - Chess Capital Fund
Welcome to Investor Talk — where we interview successful investors to uncover their journeys, strategies, and the lessons they've learned. Get inspired by real stories and gain valuable insights to sharpen your own investment approach.
Every interview follows the same set of sharp, insightful questions — such as “What is your investment strategy?”, “What are your highest conviction stocks?”, and “What’s the biggest investment mistake you’ve made?”
In this edition, we have the pleasure of interviewing:
Name: Sam Hollanders
Age: 44
Residence/Country: Belgium
Invests since: 1999 - yes indeed, I began right in the middle of the dotcom bubble, though that wasn’t a defining moment for me. From the start, I was guided toward value investing. Later, I explored other approaches—technical analysis, trend following, day trading, options trading—but eventually returned to value investing in 2004. So, I often consider 2004 as my true start as an investor.
𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
I started investing thanks to a professor who compared a bankrupt Belgian video rental chain, SuperClub—which failed due to fraud—with the fast-growing and reputable Belgian supermarket chain, Colruyt. Seeing how the balance sheet and annual accounts could reveal these differences made everything click for me.
At that time, I was working in my parents’ photo and multimedia stores, which my sister and I later took over. But a fire had been ignited; I became obsessed with the stock market, which at that time I believed to be easy money. This led me to explore day trading, trend following, option strategies and so on.
I can’t remember exactly when I started reading about Warren Buffett. In my twenties, "getting rich slowly" didn’t seem appealing, but reading about value investing, Buffett, Graham, and Fisher kept drawing me in. The real transformation happened when I read The Little Book That Beats the Market by Joel Greenblatt. His focus on price in relation to quality made everything click. From that point, I felt free to blend strategies, moving between the approaches of Buffett, Graham, Walter Schloss, Philip Fisher, Charlie Munger, and Greenblatt with his special situations in You Can Be a Stock Market Genius.
My father often urged me to manage more money on behalf of the family. In 2007, he entrusted me with some of his bank funds, and I sold them all by mid-2007. By mid-2008, I was panicking because I hadn’t found anything worth buying and was considering returning the money. A few months later, in October 2008, I was fully invested. Watching the portfolio drop further over the next five months scared me as it wasn't my money, but by the end of 2009, I had made more money in the stock market than I had working in our stores.
𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆?
When I say "value investing," I truly mean value investing. I like quality and growth, but I don’t like paying a premium for it.