You Can’t Clone a Soul
In the value investing community, “cloning” is often framed as the ultimate technical shortcut. The logic is enticing: identify an investor with a superior track record, scan their 13F filings, and replicate from the portfolio what you wish. It is an exercise in curated efficiency—an attempt to extract the “best” ideas while bypassing the grueling labor of primary research.
However, this mechanical approach often falters at the first sign of structural stress. When a specific conviction—perhaps a position in Alpha Metallurgical Resources (AMR)—drops 20% on a macro headline, the cloner finds themselves holding a ticker symbol without the underlying architecture of belief. As Iain McGilchrist explores in The Master and His Emissary, this is the fundamental failure of the Left Hemisphere’s “machine” thinking. It treats an investment as a discrete, transferable data point—a copy—rather than an expression of a deeper, holistic understanding.
“Do not seek to have things done quickly; do not look at small advantages. If you seek to have things done quickly, you will not reach the goal.”
Confucius
To McGilchrist, there is a profound difference between copying and imitation. Copying is the domain of the Left Hemisphere; it is atomistic, rote, and concerned with “re-presentation.” It views the world as a collection of static things that can be moved from one spreadsheet to another. When you copy a trade, you are attempting to download a result while discarding the process. You may have the entry price and the ticker, but you are entirely blind to the “how.”
The danger in replicating only what you wish from a portfolio is the illusion that an investment is a standalone object. In reality, a position is merely the tip of an iceberg, supported by a massive underwater structure of the investor’s past experience, scar tissue and the way they attend to the world, etc. The Left Hemisphere sees the tip and mistakes it for the whole; it ignores the “why” simply because the “why” cannot be easily quantified or categorized.
True imitation, by contrast, is a Right Hemisphere phenomenon. McGilchrist describes it as “empathic identification.” It isn’t about duplicating an action, but about “inhabiting” the mind and spirit of the person you are observing. In investing, this means putting in the work to understand the spirit of their conviction.
This conviction is the soul of the investment. Just as a body without a soul is a shell, a portfolio position without its underlying meaning is hollow. You aren’t just buying a stock because another investor bought it; you are working to see the metallurgical coal cycle through their eyes. You are attempting to feel the weight of their past cycles and understanding how their specific goals etc, – shape their real-time decisions. You are attempting to inhabit the animating spirit that gives the numbers their meaning.
“The kind of attention we pay actually alters the world: we are part of the process by which the world comes into being. If we attend to it in a certain way, we find certain things.”
Iain McGilchrist
Conviction cannot be cloned because a soul cannot be downloaded. It is an emergent property of a lived relationship with the facts—the ability to sense when a thesis is breathing versus when it has begun to decay. The Left Hemisphere’s attempt to “clone” is like a builder who replicates the lines and paint of a seaworthy boat without understanding the internal joinery or the strength of the keel. It looks identical in the calm waters of the harbor, but it lacks the structural integrity to endure the open sea. When the gale hits, the copy is exposed for what it is: a shell without the substance required to survive the test.
If we want to truly follow a great investor, we must move beyond the mechanical copying of the “Emissary” and return to the imitation of the “Master” (in the hemispheric sense). This requires a shift in focus from the ticker symbol to the spirit of the investment. It means realizing that a 13F filing is not a shopping list, but an invitation to inhabit a different perspective.
Ultimately, the goal of imitation is to reach a point where the idea is no longer external to you. By imitating the “why” and the “how,” the investment becomes an extension of your own embodied knowledge. You don’t just own the stock because someone else does; you own the conviction that makes owning the stock possible. This is the difference between being a machine that follows rules and an investor who understands the nature of the game.
“To the extent that we believe we can skip steps, avoid the process, magically gain power through easy formulas, or find the right manipulative tricks, we move against this grain and reverse our natural powers. We become slaves to time—as it passes, we grow weaker, less capable, and more trapped in our limited patterns.”
Robert Greene
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