We teach everyday people how to invest like Warren Buffett, in plain English.
Rule One Investing is an investing education company founded by Phil Town. We help you understand a business, figure out what it's worth, and buy it only when the price makes sense.
You don't need a finance degree to learn value investing. You need a clear process and the patience to follow it. That's what we teach.
Most people who find us have hit a wall somewhere. Maybe their money sits in funds with fees they don't fully understand, or an advisor never showed them how to judge a business for themselves.
Others tried to learn on their own and got buried in jargon and contradictory tips. If any of that sounds familiar, you're in good company. Most people were simply never given a framework.
Our name comes from Warren Buffett's best-known investing principle:
“Rule No. 1: Never lose money. Rule No. 2: Never forget rule No. 1.”
Prices go up and down, so we don't read that as a promise that a stock will never drop. We treat it as a discipline. Understand the business, never pay more than it's worth, and build in a Margin of Safety in case you got something wrong.
Benjamin Graham taught Buffett how to value a business, and Buffett and his late partner Charlie Munger used these value investing principles for decades at Berkshire Hathaway.
The stock market works like an auction. Some days Mr. Market is scared and sells wonderful businesses cheap. Other days he gets greedy and overpays, and our job is to ignore his mood and watch the gap between price and value.
Every business we teach you to evaluate goes through four questions. Together they're the Four M's, the core of every Rule One course and workshop.
Do you understand this business, and would you be proud to own it? That's your Circle of Competence. Phil's Three Circles exercise helps you find it by looking at what you're passionate about, what you're good at, and what you make or spend money on.
Does the business have a durable competitive advantage? A Moat works like the water around a castle, keeping competitors out. We look for six kinds: brand, secrets, toll bridge, switching, price, and network.
Take the toll bridge. To get across the river, you either pay the toll or build your own boat.
Then we check the Big Five Numbers. They show whether the Moat actually turns up in the business's results over time.
Are the leaders honest, owner-oriented, and driven by a clear mission? Even a strong Moat can wear down when the people running the business don't think like owners.
Is the price low enough to protect you? We calculate the Sticker Price, which is what the business is actually worth. Then we look to buy at a Margin of Safety price of half that.
Put all four together and you get what Phil has taught for decades: buy a wonderful business at an attractive price.
Rule One started with a river guide and a mentor. These days the teaching comes from Phil, his daughter Danielle, and a team of coaches.
Phil was a Grand Canyon river guide earning $4,000 a year when he met the mentor who would teach him to invest using the principles of Ben Graham and Warren Buffett. He left the river to learn from him, with no finance background and very little money.
He went on to become a self-made investor with decades of real-world experience, and today he manages a hedge fund. Before any of that, he served in the U.S. Army Special Forces.
Phil is a three-time New York Times bestselling author. Rule #1 and Payback Time both reached number one, and Invested, which he wrote with his daughter Danielle, reached number seven.
He's appeared on CNBC, MSNBC, Fox Business, CNN, PBS, and Yahoo Finance. He's also shared these principles on stage with more than 2 million people in arenas around the country. Read Phil Town's story for the full journey.
Danielle is Phil's daughter, and she didn't grow up wanting to pick stocks. She started where a lot of our students start, unsure where to begin and a little intimidated by the whole thing.
So she asked her dad the questions most people are afraid to ask out loud. That journey became Invested, the book she wrote with Phil about learning to invest through the principles of Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger.
Phil doesn't teach alone. Our coaches and analysts work with students in every workshop and follow-on course.
Our education team is led by Jamaal, Rule One's Head of Education, with Trent, a certified coach (CPCC), serving as lead instructor.
Austin brings one of the more unusual paths into investing. He went from combat controller to Transformational Investing instructor and Senior Fund Manager, and he co-hosts Phil's members-only course, Portfolio Manager Live. Senior Fund Managers Travis and Hunter, who holds a JD/MBA, round out a team that brings real-world investing experience into every class.
The Virtual Investing Workshop is live and online, so you can join from anywhere. You practice evaluating real businesses in small groups with Rule One coaches, and you get access to the EasySt app Phil uses to value companies.
We also teach in person at the Transformational Investing Workshop. Both formats have you working on businesses you choose.
More than 30,000 people from 56 countries have attended our workshops in person or online. They aren't Wall Street insiders.
Students often mention the quality of the coaches, the hands-on practice, and the community they find with people working through the same questions. You can hear from them directly in our student success stories. Individual results vary.
As Phil wrote in his first book:
“We're river guides and homemakers and business managers and teachers and lawyers and candlestick makers.”
We don't provide personalized investment advice, manage anyone's money, or pick stocks for you. We don't promise returns.
We teach a process. Success, for us, looks like a student who can sit down with a business and decide for themselves whether it's worth buying at today's price.
Phil Town founded Rule One Investing. He's a hedge fund manager and three-time New York Times bestselling author who left his job as a river guide to learn value investing from a mentor.
No. We're an education company. We teach you how to evaluate businesses yourself, and we don't manage money or give personalized investment advice.
No. Plenty of our students start from zero, just like Danielle did. Our step-by-step investing guide walks you through the basics.
If you're brand new, start free. The free investing webinar covers the basics, and the step-by-step investing guide lets you go at your own pace.
Want to try math? Pick a business you already know and run it through our free investing calculators. You don't have to buy anything to practice.
When you're ready to practice with coaches, join us at the Virtual Investing Workshop. Bring a business you're curious about.
Rule One Investing provides investment education and training only. We don't provide personalized investment advice, manage client assets, or guarantee investment returns. All content is for informational purposes. Consult a qualified financial professional before investing. Past performance doesn't guarantee future results. Individual results vary.
