With so many exciting companies to choose from, I chose to analyze… a grocery store. Discover why Ingles Markets’ real estate provides it a competitive advantage, its balance sheet provides strategic optionality and the company is materially undervalued.

Call it momentum or fear of missing out, but speculators can’t help chasing yesterday’s winners. We gravitate towards popular investments because they feel validating, which is also why the altar of ‘what’s working’ is always well attended.

Some people enjoy games without keeping score, but I’ve never been one of them. At the age of eight, I began carrying a scorebook to the College World Series, diligently logging pitch counts, unforced errors and sacrifice flies. I refused several lemonades, lest a trip to the men’s room result in a missed out. Most fans were content knowing who won or lost, but I preferred the more authoritative scorecard. It made games feel historically significant.

Small cap managers get this question a lot. I can’t think of a segment of financial services asked to justify its existence as often. Just once, I’d like to hear someone ask a large cap manager why they should own stocks. My guess is it rarely comes up.

Early last month, I attended an alumni reunion for the University of Wisconsin’s Applied Security Analysis Program. While Madison isn’t exactly a hotbed of global finance and lacks the reputational cachet of the Ivy League, the Hawk Center has produced an inordinately high number of successful investors, many of whom are household names.

Easing like Sunday Morning. It is often said that markets climb a wall of worry. Follow them long enough, and economic history can seem like one long series of crises, bust after boom, boom after bust, repeated ad infinitum. Investors have faced uncertainty and calamity since time immemorial, only to rise again, frequently surmounting the seemingly insurmountable.