Phil Town

Pure Buffett-Munger value investing, simplified for retail investors. Phil calls it "Rule #1 Investing" after Buffett's famous rule: don't lose money.

The system boils down to four steps. First, find a business you understand — he calls this having a "meaning" for the company.

Second, check that the business has a durable competitive advantage — what Buffett calls a moat. Third, make sure management is honest and competent.

Fourth, buy it only when the price is way below what the business is actually worth — his "margin of safety." He teaches people to calculate a company's intrinsic value using growth rates and PE ratios, which is genuinely useful even if the formulas are simplified. He also teaches a "three circles" framework: Meaning, Moat, and Management.

If a company passes all three, you look at the price. If it doesn't, you move on.

He's a buy-and-hold guy who believes in concentrated portfolios — 10 stocks or fewer.

Joel Greenblatt

Greenblatt made his original fortune through special situations investing — spinoffs, mergers, restructurings, situations where a company goes through some event that causes normal investors to sell without fully understanding what they''re selling. His book "You Can Be a Stock Market Genius" is the definitive guide to this approach.

The core idea is that temporary confusion creates permanent mispricing.

His public-facing work is built around the "Magic Formula" — a systematic method of ranking companies by earnings yield and return on capital, then buying the cheapest, best-quality businesses and rotating the portfolio annually. He tested it on 17 years of data.

It worked. The appeal is that it removes emotion entirely: you run the formula, you buy the list, you don''t deviate.

It''s systematic value investing that any individual investor can implement with a screener and a brokerage account.

Phil Town

Phil's core belief is that anyone can learn to invest like Buffett if they're willing to put in the work. He rejects the idea that investing is too complicated for regular people.

He also rejects index investing — he thinks you can beat the market if you're disciplined about buying wonderful companies at attractive prices. He's big on the concept of "voting with your dollars" — investing in companies whose missions you believe in.

He frequently says the best investment you can make is in your own financial education. His whole philosophy is about empowerment: you don't need a financial advisor, you don't need Wall Street, you just need to learn the rules and follow them.

Joel Greenblatt

Greenblatt''s philosophy is that the market is not always right, but it''s right most of the time — and the times it''s wrong are predictable if you know where to look. Spinoffs are mis-owned.

Bankruptcy restructurings are under-analyzed. Post-merger stubs are ignored.

These are repeatable, structural mispricings, not random luck. His other core belief is that you don''t need complexity to beat the market.

The Magic Formula is simple by design. If something can''t be explained in a paragraph, he doesn''t trust it.

Phil Town

Conservative in practice. Phil preaches buying with a huge margin of safety — he wants 50% below intrinsic value, which is more conservative than even Buffett typically demands.

He tells students to sit in cash until they find something genuinely cheap, which means sometimes going months without buying anything. His actual risk management is basically "don't invest in anything you don't deeply understand." He also teaches technical indicators like the MACD and moving averages as timing tools, which is where he diverges from pure Buffett orthodoxy.

Buffett doesn't time. Phil does.

Joel Greenblatt

Greenblatt''s original risk approach was highly concentrated — Gotham Capital ran 5–8 positions, each thoroughly researched. His thesis was that if you truly understand the situation, concentration is not risky: it''s owning more of something good.

The risk came from being wrong about the situation, not from owning too few companies.

His later Magic Formula approach is more diversified — the formula builds a portfolio of 20–30 stocks — which reduces individual position risk while capturing the systematic returns from value and quality factors. For retail investors, he argues this level of diversification is sufficient if the selection process is disciplined.

Phil Town

Phil practices what he preaches about patience. He talks about sitting in cash for long stretches waiting for the right opportunity, sometimes a year or more.

He does not live a flashy public lifestyle. He reinvests most of his earnings back into his education business and his own portfolio.

He talks about spending hours a day reading about businesses, which tracks with the Buffett and Munger idea of being a learning machine. The weekly podcast forces him to stay current on markets and business news.

Joel Greenblatt

Greenblatt is notably private for someone with a significant public profile. He lives in New York, donates heavily to education causes, and has largely avoided the hedge fund celebrity circuit.

He taught at Columbia Business School for years — adjunct professor, not tenured — and treated teaching as a genuine side calling, not just self-promotion. His books are priced like paperbacks, not $997 courses.

That alone separates him from most finance educators.

Phil Town

His own origin story. Going from a $4,000-a-year river guide to a millionaire investor using nothing but books and discipline is genuinely compelling.

It's the perfect proof-of-concept for his entire teaching method. Whether his returns are as dramatic as claimed is hard to independently verify — he's not running a public fund — but the story has inspired millions of people to actually learn about investing instead of just parking money in index funds and hoping for the best.

Joel Greenblatt

The Gotham Capital era from 1985 to 1994 is the biggest win. Approximately 50% annualized gross returns for a decade.

The exact mechanics varied — spinoffs, workouts, value situations — but the result was one of the most consistent runs of outperformance in hedge fund history. Some of his best individual trades came from spinoffs: companies that are spun off from larger parents tend to be misunderstood and mis-owned (institutional investors who didn''t want the spinoff dump the shares), creating a window to buy quality businesses at a significant discount.

That insight was the core of his original edge.

Phil Town

The education business model creates an inherent tension. When your income comes from teaching investing rather than from investing itself, critics ask: if the method works so well, why aren't you just doing it full-time?

Phil's answer is that he likes teaching. Fair enough.

But the $2,000+ workshop prices and upsells into coaching programs make some people wonder whether the students are the product, not the strategy. His simplified formulas also sometimes lead beginners to false confidence — running a DCF model doesn't mean you understand the business.

Joel Greenblatt

Greenblatt has been relatively quiet about specific losses, which is either admirable discipline or good PR management. The honest critique of his career is the second-act problem: Gotham Asset Management''s quantitative value approach has had meaningful periods of underperformance, particularly during the 2010s when growth stocks dominated and systematic value investing struggled badly.

From 2014 to 2020, value strategies broadly failed to deliver. He has remained committed to the approach — which is consistent with his philosophy — but it means some investors in his funds had a rough decade.

Phil Town

Phil Town was born in Portland, Oregon in 1948 and served nearly four years in the US Army, including the Vietnam era. Around 1972 he was living in a tent in Flagstaff, Arizona, leading whitewater trips on the Colorado River.

In 1980 a rafting trip he ran for Outward Bound trustees nearly capsized, and one of the passengers told him he could be doing better and pointed him to value investing. He says he turned $1,000 into over $1 million in five years.

He then pivoted into teaching. Rule #1 came out in 2006 and hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list, and Payback Time did the same in 2010.

In 2013 he founded Rule One Partners, a hedge fund. He built an education business around workshops, online courses, YouTube and the InvestED podcast with his daughter Danielle.

His approach is basically Buffett for beginners. Find wonderful companies at attractive prices and hold them.

Joel Greenblatt

Joel Greenblatt grew up in Great Neck, New York, and was a finance nerd from early on. He went to Wharton for undergrad and then stayed for his MBA, which tells you something about how much he liked it.

He started Gotham Capital in 1985 with a $7 million seed investment from Michael Milken (yes, that Michael Milken), which is either a great origin story or an awkward one depending on your view of junk bond history.

Gotham's results were absurd. From 1985 to 1994, the fund returned approximately 50% annualized gross returns before returning outside capital to investors.

He made himself and his partners wealthy, then essentially closed the fund to outside money because he didn't need it. He then spent the next decade teaching at Columbia Business School and writing books that made his investing approach accessible to ordinary people.

In 2009 he started Gotham Asset Management, a new vehicle that runs quantitative value strategies.

Phil Town

Rule #1 Investing, his education company offering courses, workshops and coaching on value investing, plus the Rule #1 Investing YouTube channel. In 2013 he also founded Rule One Partners, a hedge fund based in Georgia.

The InvestED podcast is co-hosted with his daughter Danielle Town. He has essentially built a media business around teaching people how to fish rather than fishing for them.

Joel Greenblatt

Gotham Capital, his original hedge fund from 1985, is the thing the legend is built on. 50% annualized gross returns for a decade is one of the best long-duration track records in investment history.

He returned outside capital in 1994 because managing too much money would have crushed his returns — which is a sign of someone who actually understands investing, not just fundraising.

Gotham Asset Management, launched in 2009, runs quantitative value strategies using his "Magic Formula" approach. It manages several billion dollars across multiple funds.

The track record since 2009 has been solid but not legendary — large-scale quantitative value investing is a different game than the special situations work that built his original reputation.

He is also on the board of Harlem Children''s Zone, a nonprofit he cares deeply about, and has donated tens of millions to education initiatives.

Phil Town

Phil Town has no formal finance education. He graduated high school in 1966 and, after four attempts at college, earned a BA in philosophy from the University of California, San Diego.

His investing is entirely self-taught through books, starting with The Intelligent Investor and working through Buffett's shareholder letters, Munger's speeches and the classic value investing texts. He is arguably the best advertisement for his own philosophy.

You do not need a finance degree to learn this stuff.

Joel Greenblatt

University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), BS in Economics, 1979. University of Pennsylvania (Wharton), MBA, 1980.

He then started law school at Stanford and quit after a year to go into investing. The double Wharton is unusual.

Most people do one or the other. He did both in consecutive years, which suggests either extraordinary efficiency or an extreme affinity for Philadelphia.