There is a lot of noise in the market and very little timeless wisdom.
That’s why I decided to create a new section at Brazil Stocks: a curated collection of the best interviews ever given.
Over the years, I’ve learned more by reading and rereading interviews like these than from many classic investment books. Quite often, it’s in a simple answer, almost hidden in the middle of a conversation, that the most valuable insights emerge.
The idea is not to focus on short-term predictions, but on mindset, methodology, and principles that continue to work over time.
Today’s interview is with Thiago Ribeiro.
Throughout the conversation, Thiago describes an investment philosophy centered on margin of safety, capital preservation, and reading cycles: he seeks heavily discounted stocks, prefers cyclical businesses to act counter-cyclically, adjusts position sizes as price and upside change, and keeps the portfolio dynamic to increase or decrease risk as his convictions evolve. He also makes it clear that he tolerates volatility well, avoids excessive concentration when he doesn’t see sufficient premium, and that, for him, the focus should always be on risk/return and protection against permanent capital loss.
Enjoy.
From January 2022 to September 2023, his historic performance will be the envy of anyone.
His portfolio returned 78.3% in the period, versus 2.53% for Ibovespa.
This guy knows how to generate real value.
Shall we meet him?
BZ: Thiago, could you tell us a little about yourself?
TR: First of all, thank you very much for the invitation, and I was quite honored by Yuhzô’s nomination to speak here.
I was born in Rio de Janeiro, but I did high school and college in Brasília.
I studied law and I am a lawyer, although my professional trajectory has little to do with my university education.
I started investing at 18 after receiving 5,000 reais from my mother as a birthday gift.
I wanted to know what to do with that money, and those 5,000 reais were the starting point of the journey.
Since then, I haven’t stopped being interested in and studying the subject continuously and intensely.
During college, I interned at large law firms and realized that wasn’t what I wanted to do.
In short, I wanted to be on the other side of the counter.
I lived in Brasília, and after graduating in law, the vast majority of people pursue public service exams, and I didn’t want that path.
Nothing against it, but it wasn’t what I desired.
At the same time, although I was passionate about investing, working at the country’s major asset management firms seemed a distant prospect, both because I lived in Brasília and because of my university education.
The natural path, I thought, would be to join a company I admired as a trainee.
The first trainee program I applied for was at Lojas Renner, and I was lucky enough to be accepted.
I was a trainee at the company and later took over a store in Rio de Janeiro as a store manager.
Zero glamour, but a LOT of personal learning.
Working in Rio de Janeiro, I was now closer to the country’s leading asset management firms and decided to send an email to three firms I greatly admired, telling them a bit about my story and passion for investing, asking them to introduce me and discuss investments.
At the time, all three received me, and one of them, after a few conversations, invited me to work with them.
And here was the hardest decision I ever made in my life: not accepting her invitation and going to work at a bank in an interesting process for retail executives that included an MBA at Insper, and that was another very interesting period of my life.
To make a long story short, during that whole period, saving approximately 70 to 80% of what I earned, I decided to leave my job to manage my capital and provide consulting services to people who were already seeking my help to manage their resources.
I became a CVM consultant and for the past 4 years I have dedicated myself entirely to managing my own resources and those of my clients. I serve both individuals and companies that work with investments (family offices and CVM consultancies). In the case of companies, I mostly act as a technical consultant in variable income assets.
I am completely passionate and obsessed with what I do and today, looking back, I think the decision not to go into asset management was the right one, although I am sure that the experience of working at an asset management firm would have been very educational.
BZ: What is your strategy for making money on the stock market?
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