The Art of Boring™ was created for curious and passionate investors. We share strategies, frameworks, and insights to help readers and listeners make better investment decisions. Our aim? To provide some bottom-up, long-term investing signal to cut through the short-term noise.

  • Language matters in investing | EP16

    Institutional portfolio manager, Rob Campbell, explains the concept of suitcase words: words into which people attribute—or pack—multiple meanings. He discusses how honing our language skills can contribute to better investing outcomes.

    September 12, 2018

  • Playing the plan: Mawer’s emerging markets equity portfolio | EP15

    Peter Lampert, lead portfolio manager of Mawer’s Emerging Markets Equity Fund, discusses the current investing environment for emerging markets, the importance of resilience, and reviews portfolio holdings in beer, security systems, and bakery ingredient distribution.

    August 29, 2018

  • Canadian lifecos: More than just insurance

    Canadian insurance companies are no longer just in the business of selling insurance to Canadians. They function more like financial conglomerates, and that, for investors, is potentially a good thing.

    August 22, 2018

  • Playing the plan: Mawer’s U.S. equity portfolio | EP14

    Co-manager of Mawer’s U.S. equity portfolio, Grayson Witcher, discusses the impact of rising corporate debt levels, the importance of relationship building with management teams, and how fighting bias is key to Mawer’s investment process.

    August 15, 2018

  • Defensiveness: A suitcase word

    Given how often “defensive” enters into the investing lexicon and that it can mean different things to different people, aiming for a greater degree of precision in its definition may help to reduce misunderstanding or generalized historical bias.

    July 18, 2018

  • Quarterly update | 2Q 2018 | EP11

    This episode features insights from the past quarter by Greg Peterson, portfolio manager of Mawer’s balanced and global balanced strategies.

    July 12, 2018

  • Process before proceeds

    In theory, investors should improve at least linearly over time as they make and learn from errors. But in practice, there seems to be little evidence of this (only few active managers beat the market over longer time periods).

    June 12, 2018