It Pays to Think Independently

Welcome to The Independent Thinking Newsletter, where businessman, financier, and author Marcelo Marini sets aside time from his demanding professional schedule to write to his readers—pulling back the curtain on the business and financial world to share reflections and insights on business, finance, and independent thinking.

Marcelo Marini examines the realities behind companies, capital, and decision-making. In these pages, he highlights costly mistakes made by individuals and organizations, uncovers overlooked opportunities, and explores how the business and financial world actually works.

Each week, the newsletter publishes a letter on business, finance, and independent thinking. A monthly edition provides Excerpts of his Wealth Strategist Letters, available exclusively to Private subscribers.

Read by a select group of business owners, entrepreneurs, and investors globally, its audience includes millionaires and billionaires, global music figures, hedge fund managers, high-net-worth individuals and ultra-net-worth individuals, bankers, founders of global banks and conglomerates, and senior executives across industries.

Problems, and Opportunities

Over the past ten years, this newsletter has presented strategic perspectives that often anticipated trends in business, finance, behavior, and markets.

Here, you will find problems and opportunities many business owners and investors have yet to recognize—costly errors that erode capital, weaken businesses, and compromise decision-making.

As a longtime reader and friend of this newsletter often says:
“Mr. Marini is always 10–15 years ahead.”

People, behavior, and asymmetries.

People’s behavior create asymmetries, in the markets, as a matter of their behavior, and lack of understanding of how money, business and finances really works.

We don’t try to recommend stocks, investments or a portfolio to follow… you don’t need that. All we do is try to write ideas that we find meaningful for your good fortune… and we do this with integrity.

We like the take of Thales de Miletus instead of the Aristotle's way, so we don’t want to be right all the time, we just prefer not to depend on luck.

Here there are many mistakes, errors, and misconceptions that took us hundreds of hours to write and hard working years to comprehend. So you can try to avoid the traps that compromise, time, capital and decision making...

We wrote about Tesla (2018), Apple, Amazon, NVIDIA long before they were priced for perfection. Issue 212, Issue 314, Issue 134 and Issue 453 explored what made these companies structurally different.

We tracked emerging sectors like gaming, biotech, space and Data Centers… that became de AI boom later… in Issue 279 and Issue 398 we called it Investments of the Future, as you can see… they really are.

We wrote about traditional businesses like Coca-Cola’s new vision before it became obvious in our own unconventional way—they were shifting from soda to a multi-brand strategy, the brand of brands, and we were there, in Silicon Valley event we caught the vision. Issue 166 (2021) and Issue 169 showed the early moves into water and coffee.

We thought about COVID recovery using fractal geometry… although for some it may be hard, it’s definitely worst not to think independently — Issue 44 (2020)

We covered gold and silver when few were paying attention (2020)—Issue 138 and Issue 273 focused on their role as long-term stores of value.

You would’ve found over 15 essays about Bitcoin between 2020 and 2024—starting with the foundations of Digital Money, as we called it. From Issue 136 through Issue 413, we followed key developments—well before institutional adoption.

And long before it was popular, we wrote about thinking independently. From Issue 89 in 2020 to Issue 486 in 2025, we explored cognitive discipline, decision-making, and mental structure…

We continue to try to find meaningful ideas to share with our dear readers, sometimes to laugh, to be perplexed, and mostly, to reveal what is behind the claps…

About the Author

Marcelo Marini is a businessman, financier, and author. He brings a strong record of strategic and operational excellence, deep sector knowledge, and international experience across the industries in which he operates.

We bring expertise in business management, corporate finance, advanced financial statement and business performance analysis, value creation, capital structure and dividend policy, financing and investment decisions, risk, return and capital budgeting, financial planning, cash management, mergers and acquisitions, advanced valuation techniques, restructuring, and governance issues related to agency problems, complex legal conflicts, financial distress, debt management, and leverage.

For over a decade, his weekly writings have reached a select group of readers across more than 15 countries. Now, this is the only place where his work is published.

Reader Voices

“Notorious knowledge in the field, inspiring, awesome.” — Executive
“Rational and surgical.” — Entrepreneur
“For over ten years, Marcelo has been my main reference in matters related to business and finance.” — Entrepreneur
“Disciple of W. Buffett, B. Graham & M. Marini (not necessarily in this order).” — Entrepreneur, Investor
“A little weekend reading: Marcelo Marini wrote about the difference between investors thinking for themselves versus just blindly following the crowd” — The Berkshire Beat

Editorial Notes

Please note that if an article appears in another language, we kindly ask the reader to “Translate” using their browser as some articles from 2015–2020 are being remounted from our original Diaries.

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Editorial Approach

The publication does not provide investment advisory, portfolio management, or any type of securities recommendations. Its focus is on understanding businesses, financial dynamics, and decision frameworks to avoid large operational and capital allocation mistakes, prevent capital erosion, and cultivate independent judgment. We are not here to tell you what to do, but to help you question assumptions—and think independently.