We were delighted to welcome Yuval Taylor of Fieldsong Investments to The Zurich Project 2026, and we are grateful to him for sharing his wisdom and insights so openly with the group. While Zurich Project proceedings are kept confidential by default, Yuval has kindly approved the sharing of his audio replay, talk script, Q&A transcript, and slide deck.
Yuval is an unusual figure in this community. He came to investing at fifty, after thirty years as an editor in publishing houses and as the author of three non-fiction books published by W. W. Norton. He later worked at the financial technology firm Portfolio123 and made enough from his own investing to retire with his wife in 2022. Over the eleven years he has run his system, he has achieved a ~40% CAGR with no down calendar year.
His talk, titled “No Idea” Investing, makes a deliberately provocative case: he runs a concentrated, fundamentals-based portfolio using nothing but algorithms. More than half of his fund sits in seven companies, the kind of safe, boring, inexpensive firms Lynch and Munger would have favored, yet he has never written an “idea” piece, never spoken with management, and never asks whether a business has a moat.
The intellectual core is his 2015 realization that ranking stocks across as many factors as practicable beats screening them on a few rules. His guiding principle is to evaluate every investment from every angle possible. He likens the method to building a fantasy basketball team, scoring each company on every metric and combining the results by weight. The system spans more than 200 factors across valuation, quality, stability, and momentum, run on both Compustat and FactSet data.
He argues that not meeting management is an advantage, not a limitation. It removes the risk of being deceived, of growing too attached to sell, and of passing on a cheap turnaround because the people are unpleasant. He is candid about AI, drawing a sharp line between LLMs, which he uses only as a sounding board, and machine-learning models, which he finds inferior to ranking systems. He is equally candid about his past mistakes, from missing accounting manipulation to chasing unstable growth.
The Q&A goes further than the talk. Yuval details his current top holding, his sell discipline, his view that factor inversion in the U.S. is pushing him toward European and Canadian names, his capacity constraints, and the single change he believes idea investors should make: switch from screening to ranking.
This session rewards close attention, especially for fundamental investors who assume the quantitative world has little to teach them. To go deeper, listen to the full audio replay, download Yuval’s slide deck, and read the complete talk script and Q&A transcript.
