Someone asked me recently, during a talk with finance students, what separates investing from speculating. I gave them the textbook answer: thesis, time horizon, knowledge of the asset. But the real answer came to me this week, unintentionally, courtesy of Colombia’s Gilinski family — who turned roughly $170 million into a stake worth more than $700 million in six months.

It’s not the first time they’ve pulled this off. They did it with Nutresa, with Sura, with the Four Seasons hotels in Bogotá, with Panama Pacifico. But the GeoPark move is the fastest and cleanest one to dissect the method from, so let’s do that.

What actually happened

On March 5, Colombia’s Gilinski Group bought, through Colden Investments, 12.87 million GeoPark shares at $8.31 each: $107 million for a 20% stake in the oil company. They didn’t stop there. Over the following weeks they kept buying in smaller tranches until, by the end of March, the combined stake between Colden and another of their vehicles, Spaldy Investments, reached 25.8%. By April they hit 28% — the threshold that gave them the right to nominate three of GeoPark’s nine board seats. On July 14, Gabriel Gilinski, Dorita Gilinski and Camilo Martínez took those board seats. Total investment for this phase: roughly $170 million.

Then, on September 2, came the move that actually multiplied the value: GeoPark confirmed a 25-year contract with PDVSA to operate the Bare Block in Venezuela — 15.7 billion barrels of oil in place, with production potential scaling from 11,000 to as much as 95,000 barrels per day. GeoPark paid for that asset by issuing 42.1 million new shares at $12.22 each. The result: Gilinski’s stake jumped from 28% to 56.3%, and today it’s worth more than $700 million. They also hold the option to launch a tender offer for up to $100 million more, pushing their stake to roughly 64%.

What nobody mentions when they repeat the number

This wasn’t luck, and it wasn’t a single big bet. It was a sequence. They stepped in when the asset was cheap, in a sector they know cold — this isn’t the first oil company they’ve touched. They scaled the position in tranches, over weeks. They used their ownership stake to earn a voice — board seats — instead of passively waiting for the market to notice. And when the structural catalyst arrived — the PDVSA contract — they were already inside, with real influence to make sure the deal benefited them first. Said plainly: this could still fail. Venezuela and PDVSA as a counterparty carry serious geopolitical risk, and nobody should copy the asset thinking history repeats itself identically. What’s replicable isn’t the Bare Block. It’s the method.

The version of this you can actually run without $100 million

If you have $5,000, $50,000 or $500,000, the sequence works the same way, at your scale. Look for undervalued assets or businesses in a sector you genuinely understand, not whatever’s trendy this week. Build the position gradually, with a written thesis before you buy — not out of FOMO after the headline. If it’s your own business, or a small company you’re a partner in, the equivalent of “earning board seats” is refusing to stay a passive partner: demand real information, participate in the decisions. And look for the specific catalyst — a contract, a partnership, a regulatory shift — that can multiply your position’s value, instead of betting that “the market will eventually notice.”

Worth saying with a cold head: today, per conversation trackers on Reddit and FinTwit, almost nobody is talking about GeoPark. That’s not a sign it’s not worth a look. It’s a sign the window to study it without herd pressure is still open — just like it was open for the Gilinskis back in March, before anyone else saw it.

Here’s the question I keep asking myself, and I’ll leave it with you: next time you spot a cheap asset in a sector you understand, will you build a thesis and a gradual position — or wait for the headline to confirm it’s already too late to get in cheap?

If you want to stay ahead of moves like this before they become news, I send the ViSFI Daily Briefing every day with a read on what’s actually moving the market.

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