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Most people think that if they just had more information, they'd make better decisions. But the problem is rarely a lack of information — it's that we don't want to believe what the information is telling us.

— Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing Illuminated (2011)
1d ago

The human race has had long experience and a fine tradition in surviving adversity. But we now face a task for which we have little experience, the task of surviving prosperity.

2d ago

The single greatest edge an investor can have is a long-term orientation that isn't merely stated but is structurally enforced — meaning your capital, your clients, and your own psychology are all aligned so that you literally cannot sell at the wrong time.

2d ago

The risk of paying too high a price for good-quality stocks is not the chief hazard for the thoughtful, enterprising investor — his chief hazard is the adoption of unsound principles or inapplicable methods under conditions of excitement and stress.

3d ago

The lesson of history is that there have always been more buyers of stability than sellers of it. When uncertainty rises, the price of certainty rises with it — and those willing to sell certainty at that moment earn returns that compound for decades.

4d ago

Most people think of risk as the probability of losing money. But the real risk is behaving in a way today that prevents you from being in the game tomorrow. Permanent impairment of capital is far less common than permanent impairment of judgment under pressure.

6d ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Bait Ball Edition

Here's the irony: the bait ball also attracts more predators due to its concentrated nature. The same behavior that makes you harder to pick off as an individual makes the collective impossible to ignore. The logic that protects the individual exposes the group.

1w ago

The stock promoter sells sizzle, but the great investor buys the business nobody is talking about yet. Most of the time the exciting story and the good investment are mutually exclusive — the more compelling the narrative, the more the price has already discounted the future.

1w ago

Risk means more things can happen than will happen. The dangerous investor is not the one who doesn't know what will happen, but the one who doesn't know what he doesn't know.

1w ago

The market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient. But what most people miss is that patience isn't passive — it requires the active courage to hold while everything around you screams sell.

1w ago

Invert, always invert: Turn a situation or problem upside down. Look at it backwards. What happens if all our plans go wrong? Where do we not want to go, and how do you get there? Instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to guarantee failure—then avoid it.

2w ago

Mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean. Unconventional behavior is the only road to superior investment results, but it isn't for everyone. Uncomfortably idiosyncratic positions can result in short-term performance that is worse than the market or peers.

2w ago
upstartsmedia.com
‘Superbabies,’ Thiel Fellows and Holy Wars, With Orchid’s Noor Siddiqui

The tolerance for failure is just so much higher. I just met so many people who just burned through tens of millions of dollars on what seemed a trash idea, and it was a trash idea! And then it was like, 'Okay, great, well now I'm going to do the other thing.' And then the next thing is also a trash idea. Great, they get to put $100 million into that other trash thing. And the third thing is amazing, and then it's a multi-billion-dollar company.

2w ago
ftav
The big quant convergence

At the very short end [of latency], opportunities have compressed; at the very long end, premia are crowded. Naturally, capital and talent migrate towards the middle.

2w ago

The best investment is in the business that compounds the fastest while requiring the least capital. Most people think about return on capital. They should think about return on capital per unit of risk taken.

2w ago

The biggest investing errors come not from companies that fail, but from companies that succeed in ways you didn't anticipate. You prepare for the future by studying how the past was different from what people expected.

3w ago

The best way to think about the future is to invent it. People are often afraid to bet on radical change, so the market systematically underestimates how much the world can improve.

3w ago
noahpinion.blog
America is heading for a debtpocalypse

Right now, the national debt continues to explode, because the government is borrowing money just to pay the interest on the money it borrowed before. This increased debt naturally results in even greater interest costs, forcing the government to borrow even more to fund those interest payments. And so on.

3w ago

The best thing you can do is compound money at high rates of return for a long time. That's the game. Most people don't understand that the biggest returns come from sitting, not trading.

4w ago
notboring.co
Cowboy Space Corporation

turning Robinhood money into sci-fi energy and compute moonshots is exactly how you should billionaire.

4w ago
honest-broker.com
The New Counterculture

As these industries become more consolidated, they become more bureaucratic, they move more slowly, they're more cautious. Yet we're more dependent on them than ever before.

4w ago
whyisthisinteresting
The Monday Media Diet with Marc from Fabricateurialist

I love sharing it with people to illustrate just how fragile the global economy is — because we have eliminated every redundancy in favor of efficiency, and the consequences are hiding in plain sight.

1mo ago
longreads.com
ISpyForGood

When I started paying my own rent and utilities, I frequently lied to the landlord and the gas company, saying the check was on its way when it wasn't. I didn't believe that scamming, or any illicit activity, even if done correctly, could ever be fruitful enough to get me or anyone else out of poverty—though it could easily attract the police or people of ill intent, who would make life worse.

1mo ago

The difference between a wise decision and a foolish one is often not apparent until years later. What matters is the quality of your thinking at the time, not whether you got lucky.

1mo ago
themarginalian.org
The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet

We place life's bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ourselves are children of improbability, that everything we treasure exists not because it had to, not because it was likely or necessary, but because the universe took a gamble against the staggering odds otherwise.

1mo ago

The best investment is in yourself. But the second-best is almost always in a business that does something you understand, run by people you trust, at a price that makes sense.

1mo ago
dwarkesh.com
Blog prize for the big questions about AI

Compelling answers about the big questions about AI can inform the most important economic and foreign policy decisions that will ever be made, the deployment of (at least) hundreds of billions of philanthropic dollars, and the training and governance of superintelligences.

1mo ago

We accept the verdict of the past until the need for change cries out loudly enough to force upon us a choice between the comforts of inertia and the terrors of a too-little-explored future.

2mo ago

The best business decision is often the one you don't make. Most of life's errors come from doing the wrong thing, not from doing nothing.

2mo ago

The best thing a company can do is compound capital efficiently over decades. But the second-best thing is to be so boring that people forget to worry about you.

2mo ago
ftav
It's quiet. Too quiet

But it is hard to find much sign that it is doing so. And Gillian Tett: [I]nvestors need to get better at imagining — and pricing — once-unimaginable disasters. This is hard. No business school teaches students how to model something like a presidential threat to wipe out a civilisation.

2mo ago

The big money is not in the buying and selling, but in the waiting. If you have the capital and the patience, you can ride out the volatility and let compounding do the work.

2mo ago

The best decisions in business often come from understanding what you don't know rather than from expertise in what you do. Most people are taught to eliminate ignorance, but the real skill is in recognizing which ignorance matters.

2mo ago
3quarksdaily.com
War on Iran

The world has never seen an interruption on this scale to the supply of stuff. It easily surpasses the 1979 oil crisis, sparked by the Iranian revolution, in which crude oil production declined by 4 percent. Forty-seven years later, Hormuz is the passageway for one fifth of the world's crude oil and one fifth of its liquefied natural gas. It's also the transit point for a third of exported urea—a feedstock used for making fertilizer which grows the food for an estimated half of the world's population.

2mo ago
wired.com
Your Vape Wants to Know How Old You Are

Companies hope that biometric age-verification tech in cartridges could put flavored vapes back in business. But it's unlikely to solve the real problems.

2mo ago

One cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for something. It is enough that we prepare for the one or the other.

2mo ago

The best way to think about capital allocation is not how much money you make, but how much you keep after you've paid taxes, inflation, and the cost of maintaining your standard of living.

2mo ago
stratechery.com
An Interview with Arm CEO Rene Haas About Selling Chips

Robin Saxby put out a goal to make the ARM ISA the global standard for CPUs. And if you go back to early 1990s, there were a lot of CPUs out there and also there was not an IP business, there really wasn't a very good fabless semiconductor model, and there was not a very good set of tools to develop SoCs. So in some ways, and this is what I love about the company, it was a bit of a crazy idea because you didn't really have all the things in place necessary to go off and do that.

2mo ago

The best way to think about capital allocation is not how much money you make, but how much you keep after accounting for the permanent loss of capital. Most investors focus on returns; the best ones obsess over never losing what they've built.

3mo ago

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