Bob Robotti has spent decades doing the kind of investing that is easy to describe but hard to practice: looking carefully where others are not looking, studying unfashionable businesses, distinguishing temporary difficulty from permanent impairment, and waiting patiently for value to surface. His career has unfolded across deep-value securities, cyclical industries, energy, housing, shipping, board service, and active ownership. Through it all, he has remained unusually committed to the bottom-up work of understanding real-life businesses.

One of the recurring lessons in Bob’s work is that investing is not an abstract exercise. It is not enough to say that an industry is cyclical, a stock is cheap, or the market is wrong. The real work is in understanding the business, the balance sheet, the capital cycle, the incentives, the industry structure, and the people making decisions. As Bob has put it, “There are no universals. There are only specifics.”

That idea runs through this program. It traces Bob’s early exposure to Tweedy, Browne, Walter Schloss, Joe Reilly, and Mario Gabelli; his founding of Robotti & Company; his development as a value investor in overlooked and capital-intensive sectors; and his long study of how markets misprice businesses when fear, institutional constraints, or short-term thinking obscure normalized earnings power.

We are deeply grateful to Bob for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community and the broader investment community over the years. His willingness to explain not only what he has done, but how he thinks, has made him an important teacher for intelligent investors. He has spoken with unusual candor about mistakes, cycles, patience, active ownership, and the emotional discipline required to stay with an investment when the market disagrees.

Our hope is that this special episode, Bob Robotti: Turning Over Rocks, will help more investors appreciate the depth of Bob’s approach. It is a program about value investing, but also about apprenticeship, temperament, independent judgment, and the enduring importance of doing the work.

For those willing to turn over enough rocks, the lesson is not merely that bargains exist. It is that the act of looking carefully, patiently, and specifically remains one of the investor’s most durable advantages.

We are delighted to share The Flawed Bulb, a special audio program on Chris Bloomstran, president of Semper Augustus Investments Group and one of the most rigorous, patient, and underheralded investors of his generation. The program is part of the MOI Global series on great investors whose lessons deserve a wider audience than the quarterly interview cycle allows.

The essay opens in the Grand Ballroom of the Yale Club of New York City at Latticework 2025, where Chris read a Joni Mitchell parody to a room of professional investors before walking them through the case that hyperscaler capex (on the order of $350-400 billion against less than $40 billion of corresponding revenue) is one of the largest bubbles in American history. From there, the piece moves backward to 1998, when a St. Louis patriarch who had bought GE for twelve cents a share in 1932 handed a 29-year-old Chris a family portfolio and the mandate that became Semper Augustus.

The through-line is a single word Chris has been defending for a quarter century: price. In November 2000 he wrote Price Matters and closed it with a sentence he has never really stopped arguing: the market has a way of fairly pricing stocks over long periods. Ten months earlier, in January 2000, he had written a related piece on Microsoft — predicting zero percent returns for fifteen years. Microsoft compounded earnings at 8.4% and sales at 10.1% over those fifteen years and still returned 0.6% annualized to shareholders. The company was always great. The price was the problem. When the price reset at 17× in late 2014, the same business compounded at 26.6% annualized for the next decade.

That is the argument, lived out across 26 years of client letters, letters that began at seven pages and have grown, without losing a single founding client, to 184. The essay and audiobook collect the ideas, cases, and stories — from the patriarch’s twelve-cent GE to the options-as-hidden-liability critique, from Ross Stores to the Berkshire Scorecard — into a portrait of a manager whose method is itself a kind of patience.

We are grateful to Chris for the wisdom and insights he has shared with the MOI Global community over many years.

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