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 periodical updates edition provides his current views and analysis. Monthy Strategic Value Creation analysis are 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, with more than two decades of experience in business operations, corporate finance, governance, and value creation.
He holds senior leadership, board and director positions across multiple public and private institutions. Mr. Marini holds a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and an MBA in Corporate Finance from Fundação Getulio Vargas (FGV), along with advanced training in Global Supply Chain Management Strategies and Architectures from UC Berkeley Extension in California, USA, among others.
He brings expertise in business operations, corporate finance, advanced financial statement and business performance analysis, value creation, capital structure and dividend policy, financing and investment decisions, risk, return, 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.
He successfully implemented global standards of management, quality, and finances, ensuring organizations are structured for sustainable success.
He have represented institutions and businesses, including serving as Guest Consul at the Startup Embassy in Silicon Valley and the Organization of American States (OAS) in Washington, D.C.
His business-oriented investment approach, applied to his own portfolios, has produced results that, over time, compare favorably with those of some of the most widely recognized investors.
For over ten years, he has written weekly to readers in more than fifteen countries, sharing insights on business, finance, and independent thinking.
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.
This site is an Amazon Associate. Purchases made through Amazon links may earn an affiliate commission.
How to stay up-to-date?
You won’t have to worry about missing anything. Every new edition of the newsletter goes directly to your inbox. Once you log in you will have access to all the paid content.
Free subscribers
The best way to get access to our free content is by subscribing to our Mailing list.
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.
