Friday, April 20, 2018

Links

Casualties of Your Own Success - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Kicked in the Ass with a Golden Horseshoe - by Ian Cassel (LINK)
Home Depot was co-founded by Bernie Marcus (visionary), Arthur Blank (operations/finance), and Pat Farrah (energy), and financed by Ken Langone. Home Depot is yet another example of how great ideas are born out of frustration not greed.
Horizon Kinetics Q1 2018 Portfolio Update slides [H/T @chriswmayer] (LINK)

Alphabet Soup: Google is Alpha, but where are the Bets? - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Silicon Valley has oversold the near-term potential of the technologies of the future (LINK)

"Adam Smith's View of Man" - by Ronald Coase (1976) (LINK)

In a Few Centuries, Cows Could Be the Largest Land Animals Left - by Ed Yong (LINK)

How Asia's Super Divers Evolved for a Life At Sea - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Freeman Dyson reviews Geoffrey West's book Scale (LINK)

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"The notion that the desirability of a common stock was entirely independent of its price seems incredibly absurd. Yet the new-era theory [of 1927-1929] led directly to this thesis. If a public-utility stock was selling at 35 times its maximum recorded earnings, instead of 10 times its average earnings, which was the preboom standard, the conclusion to be drawn was not that the stock was now too high but merely that the standard of value had been raised. Instead of judging the market price by established standards of value, the new era based its standards of value upon the market price. Hence all upper limits disappeared, not only upon the price at which a stock could sell but even upon the price at which it would deserve to sell. This fantastic reasoning actually led to the purchase at $100 per share of common stocks earning $2.50 per share. The identical reasoning would support the purchase of these same shares at $200, at $1,000, or at any conceivable price.

An alluring corollary of this principle was that making money in the stock market was now the easiest thing in the world. It was only necessary to buy “good” stocks, regardless of price, and then to let nature take her upward course. The results of such a doctrine could not fail to be tragic."

--Benjamin Graham & David Dodd, Security Analysis