March 2026 Random Ramblings

All right, hello and welcome to the another value podcast. I'm your host Andrew Walker. You're about to listen to my monthly random ramblings where I just pop on and ramble about four or five things happening in the market that I'm thinking about investing for about 30 minutes. I just ramble, ramble, ramble, ramble, ramble. Today I talk about you know, first has to start with just the markets in general and you know, I'm if you see me on the video I'm just waving my hands in the air to refer to the markets with a lot of volatility, but I I say this every month. I just I find them very strange very strange. After that, I want to talk about software and you know, obviously we're coming on the heels of the SAS-pocalypse, but I have been thinking about software and people's track records as it relates to software and kind of how it's boosted people's track records and what that means and how to think about it over the past 15 years. Then I'm going to dive into I've got a rule that I've mentioned a few times on the podcast. If a stock doesn't go anywhere for 3 years, it's time to look in the mirror and say, is it me or is it the market? And you know, it might be you after 3 years, but there are exceptions to that rule and I've had some stocks recently where I exited after about 3 years and then they ripped higher and like, man, do I need to reassess this rule? So just kind of thinking and developing that framework. And then the last thing I'm going to talk about again, the markets. I have seen so many stocks go go down 30, 40, 50% on earnings, bad news, whatever. And I've owned stocks both this year and in the past that have gone down 30, 40, 50% on earnings. So I just want to talk about I spent some time talking about my thoughts on sizing and kind of changing your sizing after big down moves or big up moves in a stock and you know, I know to use me personally, a lot of times I'll come in and the stock will be down way down and I'll just kind of not do anything. And that's not the right answer. It's very unlikely that the exact number of shares you had that created a 10% position on Tuesday, the stocks down 50% on Wednesday, that exact number of shares that now get you to about a 5% position, it's very unlikely that that is the right number. So just some thoughts on that. Anyway, we're going to get there in 1 second. As always, you can reach out to me if you want to talk about this or anything else. We'll get to the ramblings in 1 second, but first, word from our sponsors. Podcast is sponsored by Fiscal AI. Fiscal.ai is the complete stock research terminal for fundamental investors. 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That's fiscal.ai/yav as in yet another value, YAV, to get 2 weeks free with no credit card required and you'll get 15% off of any of their paid plans if you choose to upgrade and sign up for it. Again, that's fiscal.ai/yav and there'll be a link in the show notes as well. All right, hello and welcome to the another value podcast. I'm your host Andrew Walker here today all by my lonesome for my monthly random ramblings of a complete lunatic. Before we get into that, you know, it's in the name, but it's just random rambling, so please remember nothing on this podcast is investing advice, consult financial advisor, do your own diligence. See the full disclaimer at the end of the podcast or there's a link in the show notes legal disclaimer. Hey, also before I hop into it, I will let you know that if you could rate, review, subscribe to this podcast wherever you're watching or listening to it, you know, Spotify, YouTube, iTunes, wherever you're watching or listening to it, it actually really does help, you know, more viewers means it's easier to get guests on. When you go to somebody and say, I've got 500 million people watching this podcast, they're more likely to come on than when you tell them and say, hey, it's me and my mom, we watch these it's just the two of us listening to this podcast. So any of that would help. Anyway, again, and my mom doesn't even listen to this podcast. I'm sure she would if I asked her, but she ain't exactly into niche finance investing advice. So not investing advice, niche finance investing talk. So let's dive into it. Look, I am recording this the afternoon of March 20. The markets are just about to close, so you can keep that in mind, although it doesn’t matter. I’m going to start rambling about the markets, then I’m going to talk a little bit about software, and I want to talk about a rule and all sorts of stuff.

Markets. I feel kind of silly because, in my last random ramblings in February, I said that, love him or hate him, Donald Trump is volatility personified. I was seeing a lot of things where I thought he kept putting us to the brink of things, and I said that at some point the man was just going to keep amping things up as we got closer to the midterms and all that sort of stuff, and as he got more and more into the lame-duck portion of his presidency.

He is volatility personified. It could be on the upside, and he could pull something great out, or it could be on the downside. Eventually, he’ll do something he can’t walk back. He likes to walk back things that are negative, but eventually you do something you can’t walk back.

Well, a couple of weeks later, we bombed Iran. Whether you view that positively or negatively, it’s certainly been negative overall for the markets because we’ve got a perhaps energy crisis looming. Energy infects everything in the economy. You could have a recession, all sorts of stuff, and as soon as the bombs were going off, I thought, “Man, I said it on the podcast. I said volatility personified, but I don’t think I was quite positioned for this much volatility.”

The reason I mention that is that the markets are strange. I feel like I’ve been saying for probably 2 years that markets are weird, but it’s just weird. Again, I’m recording this on March 20, and intra-month, the Russell is down 7% and the S&P 500 is down 5%. CNN Fear & Greed, which I like as a quick offhand measure, says we’re in extreme fear right now, and the VIX is around 26.

I saw something that said we’re more oversold right now than we were at the depths of the April tariff crisis. I strongly doubt that, but you’re seeing all these things that suggest there’s some real fear and churn in the market. On one hand, I see that. I feel like I’m seeing stocks blow up left and right.

On the other hand, the Russell is only down 2% on the year, and the S&P is only down 4%. We’re literally touching all-time highs on everything. Does that feel like extreme fear? Absolutely not. Does that feel like the right amount of decline for, “Hey, we’re going into a war and maybe having an energy crisis”? Absolutely not.

Does that feel like the right amount of decline for how many stocks I see? Maybe it’s just, “Hey, Andrew, you follow crappy companies and they’re all down,” but for how many companies I see down 20%, 30%, 40% so far this year—50%, 60%, 70%, I’ll keep going higher and higher—it doesn’t feel right.

Again, I feel like I’ve been saying this every month for 2 years, but these are just strange markets. I did a podcast that I still need to post at some point, saying that one of the things about games is that as they evolve, they actually get stranger and stranger. They start to look less and less normal.

I think of basketball. The optimal strategy has become that you either shoot directly at the basket or directly behind the 3-point line, and everything else is kind of excised from the playbook. I wonder if that’s just what’s happening with markets. As they get even more evolved, maybe it’s just, “Hey, Andrew, you’re seeing weird stuff because markets are increasingly weird.” That’s kind of the next level of gameplay. I don’t know.

Speaking of stocks down 20% or 30%, I’ve been writing and thinking about the SaaSpocalypse and software stocks a lot. I don’t want to talk about those, but there is one thing I have been thinking about.

If you and I rewound to early 2008—if you remember, peak oil was from 2004 to 2007, and oil prices went screaming higher, peaking at, I think, around $150 a barrel in early 2008—but if you and I rewound the clock and went to early 2008, and we saw somebody who had a great track record, and we looked and said, “Hey, this guy is an energy specialist,” …

I think we would rightly talk to each other and say, “Hey, is this guy really good, or has he just been enjoying a lot of tailwinds over the past 5 years?” Similarly, if you and I rewound the clock and went to somebody in late 1999 who was all-in on internet investments and was crushing the indices, I think we would rightly look at each other and say, “First, it’s always the scoreboard, right? If you put up great results, scoreboard, scoreboard, scoreboard. You only get one life; that’s all that matters.”

But when you’re thinking about sustainability, performance, all that talent, and all that sort of stuff, I think it does matter when you’re allocating. If we went to late 1999 and there was a guy who was all-in on internet stocks, had been following the internet for 10 years, and that’s all he did, and he had a great track record, I think we would rightly look at each other and say, “Is he great, or was he enjoying a lot of beta?”

I have been thinking about that with software and GARP companies. I think for the past 15 years, until basically the start of this year, it was an unbelievable time to be investing in growth and GARP companies. Software had 1,000 different benefits, and there were some that struggled, but in general, if you invested in a software company—and I say software, but internet companies had a lot of these tailwinds, and GARP companies had a lot of these tailwinds—interest rates were coming down, and all these sorts of things. If you invested in any of those, you probably had a great track record.

The reason I chose this example is because it went on for so long. From 2010 to 2025, you had a great long-term track record. I have been wondering over the past couple of months, as you’ve seen a lot of these especially software companies, but also GARP companies—growth at a reasonable price companies—imploding. A lot of the people who built up great track records from the 2010s to today, I think that after this year, if these stocks don’t rebound, the track record is going to look a lot different. I have been wondering, “How do you assess that?”

Was it just—were they the energy investors from 2004 to 2007? It was a longer time horizon, but because it wasn’t a commodity, right? The reason you ding energy investors is because it’s a commodity. They’re investing in a commodity; they can’t control the price. So, yes, when they did great from 2004 to 2007, they were probably investing in smaller-cap companies that were more leveraged to energy prices.

Nobody would accuse a GARP or software investor in 2011 of having commodity exposure, right? But when you think about it, a lot of them built great track records, and you can throw me in here if you want. I don’t know. I’ve had some not-so-great success in my GARP and software stocks. It’s not what I do anymore, and when I have dipped my toe into it, it has generally proven not to be my strong suit.

I just wonder because it was longer-term. Again, this was a 12- to 15-year thing, and because there wasn’t the commodity aspect to it, and there wasn’t a pure bubble-mania aspect to it as there was with the tech crisis, I don’t think people were questioning the track records as much. But now you see it, and maybe it’s because I’ve got gray hair starting to come out of my head. You hear people talking about how their track record was only built during 1 cycle.

Once people start going to 10 years, you kind of start ignoring that cycle, but it was generally an up-and-to-the-right cycle. It’s just something I’ve been thinking about as the bloom has come off a lot of these former investor favorites.

And now, maybe I’m a prisoner to the moment, right? Maybe this is the greatest buying opportunity in history. You are seeing insider buying at some of these software companies where you’ve never seen insider buying before. You are seeing aggressive buybacks starting at some of them where you’ve never seen aggressive buybacks before. So, the companies are starting to signal that maybe they see the value. Maybe this is a temporary dip.

Nine months from now, somebody’s going to throw this podcast in my face and say, “Hey, Andrew, you were talking about how their track records aren’t going to look that great. You were a prisoner to the moment. It was a buying opportunity. They held through, and the stocks are 10x since then or something.” I don’t know.

I should also note that I’m not trying to hate on any one investor or any particular group of investors. It just struck me as interesting. Again, with the oil stuff, we would have said, “You rode a commodity tailwind.” With the internet stuff, we would have said, “You rode a bubble.” But because many of these software companies were not in a bubble, and because the way you invested in many of them was with a business mindset and all this sort of stuff, I don’t think anyone—or maybe I haven’t heard it—but I don’t think a lot of people have really looked at the track record and thought about the underlying drivers behind it.

Maybe we’re all just riding 1 big beta wave. That was kind of a bummer. Again, I’m not trying to call anyone out or anything specifically. I’m sure I get emails all the time. I’ll do something on a stock or a hypothetical investor, and somebody will say, “You were definitely talking about this company or this investor.” I’ll be like, “I don’t even know that company, man. I don’t even know that investor.” In my head, I’ll be thinking about that investor, not this investor.

But I’m not trying to call anyone specifically out. It’s just something I’m thinking about. These are random ramblings, and I will ramble.

Let me go to another thing, kind of the counter to this. I’ve mentioned a few times on this podcast that I kind of have a rule now. If you’re invested in a stock, and 3 years is my rule, you’re invested in a stock for 3 years and it hasn’t gone anywhere—it’s just kind of muddling along—it might be time for you to look in the mirror and say, “Maybe it’s not the market. Maybe it’s me.”

I’m not saying this is foolproof, but when I look at stocks where I’ve held them for a long time and not done that well, I think the history says that after 3 years, if it hasn’t worked, you really need to re-underwrite the thesis and everything. Again, you can quibble with a lot of things there. Maybe 3 years is too short. Maybe it should be 5 years. Maybe you need to evaluate a lot of other things.

But I do think it’s kind of a useful rule. I’ll have people all the time who send me an interesting pitch. I’ll read it, and they’ll be like, “Oh, this is really interesting.” Then they’ll say, “Full disclosure, this has been my largest position for 12 years. The stock is down 20% over those 12 years, but now is the time.”

Then I’m kind of like, “You know, I don’t want to be the person who’s waging the same war for 10 or 12 years.” There are thousands of stocks out there. We don’t have to fight the same battle in 1 stock. We can go find something new. At some point, I am missing something. I am the problem. There’s something wrong with this business, or I’ve been overlooking some risk. There’s some reason.

So, that’s kind of my rule, and I’ve had a lot of people reach out when I said that rule. They really enjoyed it, and we’ve had some good discussions.

But there is another side to the rule, right? I will look at a company that I used to have a big position in, and there are companies I punted on a year ago or 18 months ago. I look at them now, and they’re way higher.

I’ll be like, “Whoa, what the heck is happening here?” I have been wondering, when I talk about my 3-year rule, I don’t have backtests that say definitively that 3 years is the marker or something. But if you’re going to look at something you sold 12 months ago and now it’s way up, and you’re going to say, “I’ve got this great 3-year rule,” well, how do you marry the 2?

I don’t know. Actually, I have 1 suspicion. A lot of the companies that I punted on, let’s call it 12 to 18 months ago, that are way higher have ridden a big Iran tailwind. I used to have a lot of energy exposure, and now energy and commodities have screamed higher.

That is something to think about as well, right? I kind of bought these things in, let’s say, 2023, thinking, “Hey, the cycle is toward the low. These things look cheap on an asset-value basis.” Then in 2025, we started approaching the 3-year point. I was kind of like, “Well, they haven’t really worked. There are other attractive things in my book. I am not an expert in energy. Maybe it’s time to exit.”

Those things had a lot of cycle to them, and the cycle has really boosted them. And that’s not all I’m saying.

That actually comes to the next point. One thing I’ve thought about with a forever war—and maybe this is the brilliance of Buffett and something he wrote—is that in the forever war, where you hold a stock for 10 years and it goes nowhere, 1 thing that helps is growth, value, and value creation.

I would say it this way: If you buy a business and it’s growing and creating value, Buffett’s line is, “Time is the friend of a wonderful business.” The nice thing there is that if you wait 3 years—you buy it, and the stock price doesn’t go anywhere for 3 years—the value has increased over that time.

So, you buy it at 20, you think it’s worth 40, and the stock is at 20 3 years later, but now you think it’s worth 55. Versus a lot of the companies I tend to deal in, admittedly, which are much smaller and crappier companies with hair on them, the timing is really critical. So, you buy it at 20, you think it’s worth 40.

You fast-forward 3 years, and it’s at 20, but you still think the value is 40, right? So, it’s not creating any value.

I think about this kind of like—when I was a kid, we used to do time capsules. You would dig a hole, bury something, and say, “People 10 years from now or 100 years from now will dig this up.” If you had a time capsule that had $1,000 in it, and you bought it when it was buried, right? If you bought that time capsule for $100, you are guaranteed a 10x return. You unlock that time capsule tomorrow, and you get $1,000. Best return, insane IRR—the best investment of all time. You turned $100 into $1,000 overnight. Outside of getting lucky at the casino, where do you do that? Nowhere.

But if you buy that time capsule and it doesn’t unlock for 100 years, yes, you’re guaranteed a 10x return, but that’s a 3% IRR. That’s a sub-3% IRR, right? So, with these crappy businesses, when you buy them and say, “It’s worth 40, and it’s trading at 20,” it’s all about the timing. It’s all about that unlock.

Maybe the answer to the 3-year rule is also that you’ve got to marry the catalyst, the valuation, and everything. Investing is complex. I get told by some friends all the time, “I just want simple rules that I can always follow.” The unfortunate thing about investing is that there is no simple rule. It is very much marrying art and science, gut and math, and all this sort of stuff. There is no simple rule.

But I do think there is something to that. The 3-year rule might matter more when you’re buying the smaller companies that I keep using as a synonym for companies that aren’t great businesses, right? They don’t throw off lots of free cash flow, and they aren’t increasing their value. The 3-year rule is: “Hey, you bought it, you couldn’t unlock the value, and it might be time to move on,” because you don’t want to be stuck there forever.

Versus a great business: You buy it, and in 3 years, the value is higher. The great thing is that value just keeps compounding. That’s a bit of a ramble, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about.

Let me make this my last ramble here: position sizing. I mentioned big blowups earlier—stocks reporting earnings and going down 40%, or stocks reporting earnings and, let’s be an optimist, going up 40%. I’ll use myself as a model for this because it happens to plenty of investors, and I’m thinking about some investors I’ve talked to recently when I say this. I’m using myself as the model because this is absolutely a problem I run into.

You go into an earnings report, or some other news event, owning 1,000 shares of a stock, and the stock is trading at 10, right? Then the stock goes down 40% on the day, or up 40%—choose your number. I know I have an instinct to do nothing: to digest, to think, and not just that day, right? I’m not saying you have to day-trade the moment the news breaks. But I have an instinct to do nothing the next day, the day after that, and for the next month—to sit on it and not change.

I can guarantee you that’s the wrong thing, right? If a stock is up or down 40%, your sizing in the stock has changed materially, and the news on the company fundamentals has absolutely changed materially, whether you’re willing to admit it or not. It’s really unlikely that if you went into that day owning 1,000 shares—owning whatever it is, a 3% position, a 5% position, or a 10% position—that the same share count and sizing are right for the new news.

If it’s down 40%, a 10% position is now a 6% position. If it’s up 40%, it’s now a 14% position. It’s really unlikely that the specific share count and sizing you had going into it are the right sizing for the new news.

It’s kind of crazy to say, “Hey, it was right to be a 10% position yesterday. The stock’s way lower, the risks have increased, so the right position is a 6% position today.” Lo and behold, I don’t have to trade a thing because I’ve come into a 6% position.

This is something I’m pushing myself to do. The biggest losers I’ve ever had have been stocks where I invested in them on one thesis, and then the stock went from 10 to 8. I said, “Hey, I invested in this because I thought it was a good business. I thought it would get that value boost. I thought it would increase value over time.”

Now it’s at 8. I don’t think it’s as good a business anymore, but now I think, “Hey, it’s a little too cheap. It’s probably too cheap. When I invested at 10, I thought it was worth 30. Now I think it’s worth 20, but it’s at 8, so there’s plenty of upside. Now I’m in it on a value-ish thesis.”

Then they report another earnings result, and now it’s at 5. I say, “I don’t think it’s a good business anymore. I think this is a crappy company, but now it’s worth 5. I think its strategic value to an acquirer who would come in and fire everyone is 12 minimum, and I think the board’s going to do this.”

Then it goes from 5 to 3. I say, “Now it’s just a liquidation play.” All of a sudden, you’ve ridden a stock from 10 to 2, and you’ve changed your thesis the whole way. Those are the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made and the biggest losses I’ve ever taken.

A really nice way to change that is that you have to re-underwrite. When you go from 10 to 8 in the example I just gave—a 20% decline—it’s very unlikely that your position sizing is correct now, right? You have to say, “Hey, do I want to be adding, or do I want to be subtracting?”

If you force yourself to either say, “I must add,” or, “I must subtract,” you can force yourself into action. If the answer is subtract, the right answer might just be to blow out of the whole position. If the answer is add, doubling down is very risky, and you have to be very careful with that. But if the answer is add, you really need to re-underwrite the position.

That’s something I’ve been thinking about, and I thought I’d share it with people. I’m always happy to swap thoughts, but we’re in a rough environment. Things are blowing up left and right. I guess we’re always in a rough environment—it’s the stock market. The stock market is hard.

If you had a company that you owned and you had, I’m just going to make numbers up, a 10% position, and the stock goes down 40% without you trading the stock at all, I’m going to push you and say, “Hey, that’s probably not optimal.” I would guess the right answer is that you should probably be selling the stock and reducing your position.

Again, nothing here is investment advice. I’m just saying that if you’re sitting there saying, “Hey, this thing was a 10% position after earnings, but now I’m here for the value, and I think a 6% position is right,” I think you’re probably kidding yourself. It probably should be a 0% position, and you should come back next month and reevaluate, or you should be redeploying.

There are exceptions, obviously. I think the biggest exception is sizing. If you have a 10% position and it’s up 50%, all of a sudden it’s roughly a 15% position, and you think the answer is to add. It’s really hard to add once you start getting to a 15% or 20% position. You start running into risk-weighting issues, sizing issues, and all that.

There is something to saying, “Hey, I should be adding, but I just can’t for sizing reasons.” That’s absolutely a thing. On the other side, I mentioned that doubling down is risky. One of the greatest risk tools I’ve heard people talk about, and that I try to use, even though it can be very hard, is at-cost limits.

You say, “Hey, I will not put more than 5%, 8%, or 10% of the book into something at cost.” Even if you have 5% of the book in something at cost at 100 and it goes down to 10, you literally cannot add to it because you’re maxed out at cost, even though it’s now a 50-basis-point position.

I would say, again, once something goes from 100 to 10, it’s probably just time to sell. Once something goes from 100 to 40, it’s probably just time to sell. But at-cost limits can be a really useful tool to avoid doubling down.

The famous thing is: Start off with a 1% position, double down, double down, double down. All of a sudden, you’ve lost 8% of the book on something that started as a 1% position, and it just keeps going down and down and down.

The other nice thing about at-cost limits—and I’m trying to be better about not doubling down and about implementing this—is that you have to start talking to yourself about what the path looks like from here. If 5% at cost is your limit, do you want to be at 5% right now? Or do you think this is a valuable stock and want to have a little bit of room?

Maybe you think earnings might be volatile. Do you want 3% at cost now so that if earnings come out and the stock is weak, even though you think the business is getting better, you’ve got another 2% to add or trade?

I think I’m going to wrap it up there. There was some other stuff I wanted to talk about, but it’s a ramble, and this has been about 30 minutes. It’s been a ton of fun.

I’m excited. I believe March 20 is the first day of spring, and I’m excited for the weather to get better. I’m going to be out there trying to run a little bit more and get some of my running cardio up because I do like to lift, but you don’t care about that. What am I saying?

Look, I appreciate all of you listening.

I think we’ve got some great podcasts coming up in the near future. As always, I’m happy to talk about anything I’ve mentioned on the podcast, anything I’ve talked about with other guests on the podcast, or anything I talk about on the blog. Reach out to me. I’m not too hard to find.

Don’t forget to leave that like, subscribe, review, wherever you’re watching or listening to it. And I’ll talk to you on some podcasts next week and on another random rambling in the month of April. A quick disclaimer: Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the hosts may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial advisor. Thanks.