Worried about losing money when investing? You’re not alone.

In just 30 minutes, we’ll look at where you are now (cash, existing investments, or just ideas) and walk through how a simple, quality-focused approach to investing could work for you.

Maybe you picked up a book, or watched a Youtube video… Somewhere along the way you heard the infamous advice on what to do: “buy quality, diversify, think long-term”. That advice is genuinely correct. Nobody serious disagrees with it.

The problem is that everyone already knows it.

The suit running a $40 billion fund knows it. The guy on Reddit knows it. It's the bare minimum. And in a world where everyone has access to the same sources (i.e. earnings calls, conference transcripts, media headlines), the information edge is basically gone.

The real edge, if you have one, is behavioural. And behavioural edges are extremely rare, because they require you to consistently act against your own instincts.

François Rochon has been doing this for 32 years. His fund, Giverny Capital, has averaged a 14.7% annual return over that stretch. That’s the kind of number that sounds modest at a cocktail party but is absolutely staggering when you look at the results on a chart and compare to the overall market. In his 2025 annual letter, Rochon returns to a theme he knows well: that long-term success in the stock market comes down to three qualities.

Rationality. Humility. Patience.

These are hard enough to practice in everyday life. But try doing it when your savings are on the line, the market is down 15%, and your uncle is telling you he sold everything last week. That's a different game entirely.

Which is exactly why we built RatedA: not to tell you to be more rational, humble, and patient, but to hand you a system that already is.

To succeed in the business world, you have to be able to look at the world as it is. It’s so easy to believe in things that would favour you. It’s human nature. At some point, you’ll have a difficult time differentiating between what you want and what really is.

There is a truism that goes like this: narrative tends to follow stock price, not the other way around. All this means is that when a stock goes up or down, investors start looking for reasons to explain why it moved. This is eerily similar to the psychological phenomenon of confabulation, where the brain unconsciously fills in memory gaps or fabricates explanations for things it does not understand, often with coherent, detailed, but entirely false stories.

Let’s look at a practical example coming straight out of our portfolio: Alphabet at the start of 2025. The stock dropped 30% (down to 17x earnings) because investors had collectively decided that ChatGPT was going to eat Google Search alive. Reasonable thing to worry about, on the surface. Except there was this publicly available document, published every three months, called Google's earnings report. And those earnings reports showed that from the moment ChatGPT launched in late 2022 to the moment GOOGL hit its sentiment low in April 2025, Google Search revenues had steadily grown from $40 billion to $51 billion per quarter.

The disruption narrative was everywhere. The disruption itself was… not really happening? Eventually, Google released a better version of Gemini, growth re-accelerated, and investors "discovered" what the numbers had been saying all along. The stock doubled in the following six months.

This is not some rare edge case. Adobe today is selling off despite posting strong numbers quarter after quarter, because the market has decided AI is an existential threat to its business and is furiously looking for evidence to support that view. Tesla has spent years doing the opposite: trading at extraordinary multiples on the strength of a narrative that consistently outruns the underlying financials. Both situations have the same root cause: investors deciding what the story is, and then fitting the evidence around it.

Rationality means waking up every day and trying to see the world as it is, not as you'd like it to be or fear it might be. Maybe that means using RatedA’s Value Rating, which is anchored to a company’s quality and valuation, not sentiment or momentum.

There is so much emotion in markets. But when you can set that aside, when you can just look at the facts, it turns out to be a rather significant advantage. Most people, even professionals, cannot consistently do it, because it goes against our instincts.

Here is what years of investing does to a person: it makes them humble, whether they like it or not. You will miss stocks you should have bought. You will hold stocks you should have sold. You will be brilliantly right about the business and completely wrong about the timing. The market has infinite ways to prove you wrong, and it will use most of them on you eventually.

We’ve had our fair share of mistakes in the portfolio, one of the more recent ones being Evolution. This online gambling tech company experienced a boom in demand thanks to the digitisation of casino operators following the COVID pandemic.

We added Evolution to the model portfolio at the start of 2025 thinking it looked like a great contrarian buy; growth was starting to slow down, the company was encountering various operational and legal issues, and investors were starting to sell aggressively. Turns out, management was not able to find solutions to the issues that were plaguing its largest geographies: cyberattacks in Asia, regulatory headaches in Europe. We ended up selling the position a year later at a 30% loss.

30% loss sounds bad, but let me tell you, it could’ve gone a lot worse. There were many times during that year when the stock kept falling and we almost “doubled down” on the position. The only thing stopping us? Learning from previous similar experiences where we kept adding to a stock as it kept falling and the valuation kept contracting because “if we liked it at $50, then we sure must like it at $40, and at $30, and at $25”.

Anyway, because we never made the Evolution position any larger, that 30% didn’t hamper our results too much: the portfolio actually beat both the MSCI World and S&P500 benchmarks by quite a large margin during that time.

The point of this story is to illustrate why humility is so important in the investing game: you need to be able to look at your mistakes head on, study them, to be able to learn from them. It’s so easy to start feeling like hot stuff when you outperform the market and your peers for a year or two, and to let your guard down.

But every great investor understands that you will still make mistakes 40% of the time, maybe even more. As such, it’s always a good idea to re-evaluate your investments periodically, whether they are doing really well or really poorly. On our database, we re-assess every company’s Quality Rating at least once a year to help with that.

Let’s think about it in the most basic way possible. If you buy someone’s business which isn’t listed on the stock market, how long would it take to assess whether the investment thesis is playing out or not? At the very least, a few quarters. Most likely, a year or a few. Enough time to look at the actual results and compare them with the past. But it’s human nature to look at a stock price move and let that be the determinant of whether our investment is going well or poorly.

Sometimes, it takes years to be rewarded with your investments. Take Euronext, one of our portfolio companies. We purchased at about €75 in July 2022, and 18 months later, the shares were trading at €65 (a 13% drop in 18 months). That’s a tough loss for a long period of time. But during this time, the revenues and free cash flow were trending up, the company’s mission of consolidating the European financial markets was coming to fruition, so we decided to be patient. In the following 18 months, the stock more than doubled.

It’s so easy to get into the mindset of wanting every stock we buy to go up right away. The best way to be patient in the stock market is to focus on what’s happening in the company, the fundamentals. At RatedA, we figure that as long as the company’s Quality Rating remains on the higher end (A-B), then it’s probably a good idea to keep holding on to it and let management execute on its strategy. It’s why we have been able to hold on to Broadcom through it becoming a 12-bagger, or why we still hold on to MSCI despite the stock price going nowhere over the past five years. Genius in the stock market is disguised as patience.

Most investors lose not because they're unintelligent, but because the game is specifically designed to exploit human instincts. To be successful, you will need a framework that keeps you rational when the market is irrational, humble when you're tempted to double down, and patient when everything in you wants to act.

Instead of trying to be a monk, you can rely on tools like RatedA that will push you in the right direction and make it easier for you to apply these qualities, because the system was built with them in mind.

The RatedA Portfolio is beating the market. You could too.

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