The talent is out there. I'm a former fund manager, and I...

The talent is out there. I'm a former fund manager, and I actually met Steve whilst I was unemployed and he was promoting the IPO of the FASF. I had a coffee with him and although I didn't ask for a job outright, the insinuation that I'd take a job if he offered me one was made pretty obvious. He could've offered me $50k a year and I would have taken it!

He asked me what my best stock idea was at that time and I said Silex. He never really asked too many follow up questions about why I thought it was a good pick, and I got the impression that he'd written me off as a speculator on the basis of that question.

My reasons were that at the time, it was trading at a discount to its cash backing, it had proprietary technology that is probably truly one of a kind, and probably completely world-beating (nothing is ever certain when you're talking about tech related to national security), and the industry in which it operates was at the time unbelievably depressed. I knew that Uranium prices were going to make a big comeback sooner or later, which Silex would ride. Its tech added huge potential upside, whilst the fact that they were so well capitalised meant that downside was limited. Although none of this was discussed.

Fast forward six and a half years and although my thesis hasn't (yet) played out quite as planned (Silex had a capital raising, and Uranium prices haven't really yet skyrocketed the way that I expected they would), the stock has still tenbagged from the time of my coffee with Steve. I still hold SLX and the rest of my portfolio has performed comparably to the FASF (which isn't surprising considering that at one point I held over $1m in FOR units and on top of this, I'd cherry pick ideas from value managers like Steve).

The problem isn't in the lack of talent floating around, it is in the lack of talent-spotting talent (think of Julian Robertson or John Templeton), which is a very different skill to stock-picking talent or FUM-raising talent.