🗣️ Investor Talk #5: Kris

Founder - From Growth To Value

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: Kris @FromValue
Age: 46
Residence: Belgium
Invests since: 2013 (individual stocks)

𝗜𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
I have a rather broad and meandering background. I am a Master in English, Dutch and Media and Communication. My first job was as a reporter at a local TV station. After that, I worked in the Belgian Parliament for three and a half years and then I became a teacher to students of 16 to 18 years old.

When my wife was pregnant, I got some sort of primal feeling of having to gather for our unborn child, but initially, I didn’t know what to do. After focussing on investing in single malt whiskey and art, ideas my wife didn’t like, I stumbled on stocks. I had done some investing already, but through my bank and not in individual stocks. I knew nothing about it.

So of course, I made every single mistake you can think of: too much activity, leverage, value traps, you name it. It only made me more determined to find my way and I started studying ferociously. I read dozens of books, listened to hundreds of podcast episodes and read thousands of articles on sites like Seeking Alpha. There you can also comment on articles and follow people and in 2016, somebody wrote something like: “Hey, I follow you because your comments are often more interesting than the article you comment on and almost as long. Why don’t you start writing articles?” And I did. My first Seeking Alpha article was published in February 2016.

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝘀 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗶𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝘀𝘁𝗿𝗮𝘁𝗲𝗴𝘆?
One of the things that annoys me most on Twitter is that people act as if there is only one good way of investing and it happens to be theirs. I agree with Joel Greenblatt when he says that the best investment strategy is the one you can stick to.