Everyone is born curious.
Often the most productive minds are those that allow themselves to wander and explore seemingly irrelevant ideas that later turn out to have immense investment implications. Everyone is born curious, but many outgrow it. 13D strives to keep its readers curious.
I have always been most comfortable when I am alone in an investment decision and no one agrees with me. Much of my 30-plus years in the investment business has been spent developing tools that help me think in an original way. Above all else, I strive for a flexibility of mind, which is fostered through continual learning. The ability to filter out short-termism is fundamental to maintaining the presence of mind which allows one to keep sight of the larger picture.
Kiril Sokoloff
Chairman and Founder of 13D
Our History
Founded in 1983 by Kiril Sokoloff, 13D’s original, eponymous project allowed subscribers to piggyback on the ideas of the investment greats—the Warren Buffetts and Carl Icahns. At the time, 13D filings (notifications filed with the SEC when a company or individual purchased a 5% share in a public company) were totally ignored. Sokoloff saw their immense value as thousands of U.S. public companies were selling way below their break-up value and visionary investors were generating huge returns.
Over the decades, 13D has continued to apply a unique and open perspective in order to find investment opportunities for its clients. Our research is not generated behind closed walls - it’s generated on the streets of cities and towns around the world and over dinners with today’s most promising thought leaders. We read and re-read the lessons of history - they are integral to making sense of the world today.
Mission Statement
- We try to decipher the complexity of the world and simplify it.
- We try to understand the direction technology and disruption are heading.
- We look for an extreme consensus to take a contrarian position to. We enjoy and thrive in change, especially secular change.
- We look for anomalies—what should be happening and isn’t or what isn’t and should be — because they are helpful in predicting the future.
- We interpret agnostically what the markets are telling us. Our favorite mantra: “It’s your biases that kill you.”
- We search for the best cutting-edge health treatments and technologies to share with others.
- We tell truth to power. Our goal is to raise human consciousness.
- We study cycles and the lessons of history as applied to the present. History repeats because human nature hasn’t changed.
- We read extensively because knowledge is a competitive advantage and we want to share it.
- We study investors’ last profound trauma because it will impact how they behave in the future.
- We try to spread compassion and empathy. Compassion is good for business. Our greatest joy comes when we hear a client write “you have made me a better person, a better parent and a better spouse.”
- We aim to be an inspirational voice in the world. William Faulker’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech is one of our mantras. “I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet’s, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.”
And so these men of Hindustan Disputed loud and long, Each in his own opinion Exceeding stiff and strong, Though each was partly in the right And all were in the wrong.
John Godfrey Saxe
The Blind Men and the Elephant