Links

Information Regarding the 2020 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting (LINK)

Warren Buffett may have ditched airline stocks and spent $20 billion on stock buybacks, investor Chris Bloomstran says (LINK)

What the Coronavirus Crisis Reveals About American Medicine - by Siddhartha Mukherjee (LINK)

Medicine is a system for delivering care and support; it’s also a system of information, quality control, and lab science. All need fixing.

Nassim Taleb on warnings over systemic risks from global pandemics (video from last week) (LINK)

When Your Fund Beats the Market, Ask: Which Market? - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Brent Beshore chats with Tobias Carlisle on The Acquirers Podcast (LINK)

Macro Voices Podcast: Hot Topic #14: Crude Oil BLACK SWAN ALERT with Jim Bianco (LINK)

Today's Audible Daily Deal is worthwhile: Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

The contenders – and challenges – in the race to cure Covid - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

A Complete History of Pandemics - by Vaclav Smil (LINK) [Excerpted from his 2008 book, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years.]

Related previous post: Vaclav Smil on pandemics and growth

And for those analysts and aspiring analysts out there that may have missed the Friday afternoon post: Behind the Balance Sheet

Links

"Stocks got much cheaper in 1974 than they are now [in May 2009]. But you were also facing a different interest rate scenario. So you could say they really weren’t that much cheaper. You could buy very good companies at four times earnings or thereabouts with good prospects. But interest rates were far higher then. That was the best period I’ve ever seen for buying common equities. The country may not have been in as much trouble then as we were back in September. I don’t think it was. But stocks were somewhat cheaper then.... We don’t try to pick bottoms. We don’t have an opinion about where the stock market’s going to go tomorrow or next week or next month. So to sit around and not do something that’s sensible because you think there will be something even more attractive, that’s just not our approach to it. Anytime we get a chance to do something that makes sense, we do it. And if it makes even more sense the next day, and if we’ve got money, we may do more. And if we don’t — what can we do about it? So picking bottoms is basically not our game. Pricing is our game." --Warren Buffett (2009)

The Long View Podcast: Chris Davis: Banking on Boring, Reliable Franchises (LINK)

Easter on the Sidewalk - Jason Zweig (LINK)

Coronavirus Clarity - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Railroader - Learning from Hunter Harrison (LINK)

Walter Isaacson: This is going to be a new century of biotechnology (video) (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: How COVID-19 Impacts Startups and Venture Capital with Ali Hamed and Brent Beshore (LINK)

Our Pandemic Summer - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

A Primer on Reading Annual Reports [H/T @CrowdedTradeCap] (LINK)

Bob Iger Thought He Was Leaving on Top. Now, He’s Fighting for Disney’s Life. (LINK)

Steve Bregman on Debt Debasement (audio) (LINK)

Mohnish Pabrai: A Bull's View in a Virus Shop (LINK)

Paul Black Investor Update March 2020 (video) [H/T @mastersinvest] (LINK)

Learning from Charles Schwab (LINK)

Federal Reserve has encouraged moral hazard on a grand scale - by Jonathan Tepper ($) (LINK)

Value Hive Podcast: 20: Survival of The Permanent w/ Brent Beshore, Permanent Equity (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: Nir Eyal on His New Book, “Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life” (LINK)

The Great Influenza of 1918 (LINK)

Related book: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

Standing on the Shoulders of Giants: The Key to Innovation (LINK)

How Anthony Fauci Became America’s Doctor (LINK)

Links

"I think it’s hugely a mistake to think only about your probable misfortunes. You should also think about what’s good about your situation." --Charlie Munger (2009)

We Can’t Prevent Market Panics. We Can Control How We React. - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

The Corona Crisis is Not a Black Swan: Nassim Nicholas Taleb (video) (LINK)

Viral Prohibition, Eminent Domain, and the Path Ahead - by Brent Beshore (LINK)

COVID Impacts [on media & entertainment businesses] - by Matthew Ball (LINK)

Unmasking Twitter - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Socializing Corporate Risk-taking: Moral hazard 2.0 - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Absolute Return Letter, March 2020: The Economic Cost of Social Distancing (LINK)

The Oil Glut Is Getting Critical ($) (LINK)

Pressure Mounts on Insurance Companies to Pay Out for Coronavirus ($) (LINK)

Lawmakers and regulators are pressuring insurers to go beyond the legal language of policies to get cash to Americans amid the mounting cost of shutdowns from the coronavirus pandemic.

What happens to mortgage-investment firms will shed light on what may be in store for the rest of the market ($) (LINK)

The Acquirers Podcast: Long Term: Tweedy Browne (LINK)

Capital Allocators Podcast: Ben Inker – Value Investing at GMO (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: D.A. Wallach – Investing in Healthcare (LINK)

Political Economy Podcast: Ben Thompson: Big Tech monopoly, data privacy, and the rise of China (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: Adapting Episode 2: Sequoia’s Black Swan Memo (LINK)

As research progresses, the nature of our enemy is becoming ever clearer - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Links

Keeping the Coronavirus from Infecting Health-Care Workers - by Atul Gawande (LINK)

Why the Coronavirus Has Been So Successful - by Ed Yong (LINK) [Yong also wrote a long-form article in 2018 that is worth reviewing, "The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?," in which he quotes Anthony Fauci, who is now a household name given his current role and efforts, as saying: “It’s like a chain—one weak link and the whole thing falls apart. You need no weak links.”]

How the Coronavirus Became an American Catastrophe (LINK)

This Is Your Brain on a Crashing Stock Market - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Anatomy of Fear and Greed - by Frank Martin (LINK)

Data Update 6 for 2020: Profitability, Returns and the value of Growth - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Data Update 7 for 2020: Debt Delusions and Reality - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Brent Beshore – Update on Small Business and Private Equity (LINK)

Carolina Stories with Steve Vafier (podcast): 1: Josh Glover – Brilliance in the Basics (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: Adapting Episode 1: Canlis (LINK)

Stock Market Valuations - by Meb Faber (LINK)

The Meb Faber Show: #206 - Meb’s take on Investment Plans, Building and Maintaining Wealth, How Meb Invests, and Investing in the time of Corona (LINK)

Crude Contango… - by Harris Kupperman (LINK)

Harris Kupperman on Intelligent Investing in Crisis Mode | MOI Global (audio) (LINK)

The Peter Attia Drive (podcast): #99 - Peter Hotez, M.D., Ph.D.: Continuing the conversation on COVID-19 (LINK)

A vaccine for coronavirus isn't going to ride rapidly to our rescue - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Five Good Questions Podcast: Matt Ridley - How Innovation Works (LINK)

Matt Ridley Discusses Health, Innovation, and Risk (podcast) (LINK)

Links

"One of the most notable behavioral traits among investors is their tendency to overlook negatives or understate their significance for a while, and then eventually to capitulate and overreact to them on the downside.  I attribute a lot of this to psychological failings and the rest to the inability to appreciate the true significance of events. As negatives accumulate – whether they surface for the first time or just are finally recognized as significant – eventually a time comes when they can no longer be ignored, and instead they come to be treated as being of overwhelming importance." --Howard Marks ("On the Couch," January 2016)

Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos (video) (LINK)

FRONTLINE examines Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ ascent to power and the global impact of the empire he built. The film also investigates the darker side of the company’s rapid growth, and the challenge of trying to rein in the power of the richest man in the world.

Summary version of the Credit Suisse Global Investment Returns Yearbook 2020 (LINK)

Email Addresses and Razor Blades - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Brent Beshore interviews Trish Higgins and Will Thorndike at Capital Camp 2019 (video) (LINK)

This is Not 1999 - by Eric Cinnamond (LINK)

Leithner Letter No. 245-248 (26 March – 26 June 2020) (LINK)

A Viral Market Meltdown: Fear or Fundamentals? - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Niko Canner – Become a Perfect Instrument (LINK)

Planet MicroCap Podcast: 109 - Boring is Beautiful with Brent Beshore, Founder and CEO of Permanent Equity (LINK)

Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson (podcast): Theme Parks: Where Tech Meets Thrills (LINK)

Hidden Forces Podcast: Market Nihilism: Price Discovery in a World Where Nothing Matters | Ben Hunt & Grant Williams (LINK)

Edge #566: Waiting for "The Final Plague" - A Talk with Nathan Wolfe [January 2009] (LINK)

You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus - by James Hamblin (LINK)

Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.

Book of the day: Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic - by David Quammen

"Those who have knowledge don't predict. Those who predict don't have knowledge." --Lao Tzu

Links

"People underrate the importance of a few simple big ideas. And I think that to the extent Berkshire Hathaway is a didactic enterprise teaching the right systems of thought, I think that the chief lessons are that a few big ideas really work, as I think these filters of ours have worked pretty well. Because they’re so simple." --Charlie Munger (1997)

"We have a bunch of filters we’ve developed in our minds over time. We don’t say they’re perfect filters. We don’t say that those filters don’t occasionally leave things out that should get through. But they’re efficient.... I think most of the people in this room, if they just focused on what made a good business or didn’t make a good business and thought about it a little while, they could develop a set of filters that would let them, in five minutes, figure out pretty well what made sense or didn’t make sense." --Warren Buffett (1997)

Warren Buffett Is Giving Up on Newspapers ($) (LINK)

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. is selling its newspapers to publisher Lee Enterprises Inc. for $140 million, a rare admission by the billionaire investor that he views his newspaper business as unsustainable. 

Mr. Buffett, a lifelong newspaper lover, has said for years that Berkshire’s newspaper business declined faster than he expected. In mid-2018, Berkshire hired Lee to manage all of its newspapers except the Buffalo News. 

The sale announced Wednesday includes the Buffalo News along with the dozens of newspapers that Lee already manages for Berkshire, Lee said.

Martin Capital Management 2019 Annual Report (LINK)

High-Yield Was Oxy. Private Credit Is Fentanyl. (LINK)

The Tragic iPad - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Different Kinds of Easy - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: What Silicon Valley Doesn’t Get About Private Equity with Brent Beshore (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Chetan Puttagunta – Go Slow to Go Fast: Software Building and Investing (LINK)

a16z Podcast: The Truth about 1000 True Fans + the Price of Our Attention (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: WhatsApp (LINK)

Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson (podcast): Meat: Breaking a 2.5 Million Year Old Habit (LINK)

WEF2020: A Conversation with Lee Hsien Loong, Prime Minister of Singapore (LINK)

The Deceptively Simple Number Sparking Coronavirus Fears - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"I can’t give you a formulaic approach [to determining intrinsic value] because I don’t use one. I just mix all the factors and if the gap between value and price is not attractive, I go on to something else. And sometimes it’s just quantitative. For instance, when Costco was selling at about 12 or 13 times earnings, I thought that was a ridiculously low value, just because the competitive strength of the business was so great and it was so likely to keep doing better and better. Well, I can’t reduce that to a formula for you. I liked the cheap real estate. I liked the competitive position. I liked the way the personnel system worked. I liked everything about it. And I thought, even though it’s three times book, or whatever it was then, that it’s worth more. If you want a formula, you should go back to graduate school. They’ll give you lots of formulas that won’t work." --Charlie Munger (2018)

Morgan Housel Interviews Brent Beshore at MicroCap Leadership Summit 2019 (LINK)

The next U.S. president will have little effect on the stock market. Here’s why. - by Roger Lowenstein [H/T @pcordway] (LINK)

Forecasts or Nowcasts? What’s on the Horizon for the 2020s? - by Rob Arnott & Jonathan Treussard (LINK)

Inside-Out vs. Outside-In: The Adoption of New Technologies (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: 179 — The Water We Swim In (LINK)

North Star Podcast: Robert Cottrell: The Secrets of Reading (LINK)

**********

For Audible Members, the current sale ($5.95 each) has some titles worth noting:

Billion Dollar Whale

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage

Never Split the Difference

Ten Drugs: How Plants, Powders, and Pills Have Shaped the History of Medicine

The Fall of Carthage

Stuff Matters: Exploring the Marvelous Materials That Shape Our Man-Made World

Liquid Rules: The Delightful and Dangerous Substances That Flow Through Our Lives

I Contain Multitudes

The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs

Origin Story: A Big History of Everything

Links

"If you need to use a computer or a calculator to make the calculation, you shouldn’t buy it. It should be so obvious that you don’t have to carry it out to tenths of a percent or hundredths of a percent. It should scream at you. So if you really need a calculator to figure out that the discount rate is 9.6 percent instead of 9.8 percent — forget about the whole exercise. Just go onto something that shouts at you. And essentially, we look at every business that way. But you’re right, we do not sit down with spreadsheets and do all that sort of thing. We just see something that obviously is better than anything else around, that we understand. And then we act." --Warren Buffett (2009)

"I’d say some of the worst business decisions I’ve ever seen are those that are done with a lot of formal projections and discounts back. Shell Oil Company did that when they bought the Belridge Oil Company. And they had all these engineers make all these elaborate figures. And the trouble is you get to believe the figures. And it seems that the higher mathematics, with more false precision, should help you. But it doesn’t. The effects, averaged out, are negative when you try and formalize it to the degree you’re talking about. They do that in business schools because, well, they got to do something." --Charlie Munger (2009)

"It’s a terrible mistake to think that mathematics will take you a long place in investing. You have to understand certain aspects of mathematics. But you don’t have to understand higher mathematics. And higher mathematics may actually be dangerous and it will lead you down pathways that are better left untrod." --Warren Buffett (2009)

***

Brent Beshore's‬⁩ 2019 Annual Letter (LINK)

The Money Men Who Enabled Adam Neumann and the WeWork Debacle ($) (LINK)

Notes on a Reading Framework - by Venkatesh Jayaraman (LINK)

Hidden Forces Podcast: The Greatest Story Ever Sold: The Rise of Passive Investing & the Fall of the Free Market | Mike Green (LINK)

Starting Greatness Podcast: Marc Andreessen: “Was Netscape an Overnight Success?” (LINK)

The Acquirers Podcast: Endowment Value: Mark Yusko on the endowment model, value investing and bitcoin, crypto and digital assets (LINK)

The Investor’s Podcast Network: TIP273: Billionaire Jim Simons’ Quant Revolution w/ Gregory Zuckerman (LINK)

Related book: The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution

Odd Lots Podcast: How Online Dating Is Reshaping the Entire Economy (LINK)

Related paper: The Dating Market: Thesis Overview

There’s No Such Thing as ‘Quality’ Time - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Jupiter is still really weird: A new monster storm has formed around its south pole - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Links

Note to readers: I'm traveling with limited internet access over the next week or two, so posting will probably be less frequent than normal.

***

"We think that when we make a decision, there ought to be such a margin of safety that it ought to be so attractive that you don’t have to carry it out to three decimal places." --Warren Buffett (1995)

Beachheads and Obstacles - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Bubble Yet? (The Brooklyn Investor blog) (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter - October 2019: How to invest in a low growth world (Part 1 of 2) (LINK)

Michael Bloomberg’s Answer to the U.N. General Assembly - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

Some takeaways from The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (LINK)

Kyle Bass: Hong Kong Protests are Chinese Regime’s “Worst Nightmare” in US China Trade War (video) (LINK)

Odd Lots Podcast: How Financial Repression in China Helped Cause the Trade War (LINK)

Hidden Forces Podcast: Financial Fault Lines, Central Banks, and the Law of Unintended Consequences | William White (LINK)

Masters in Business Podcast: Brian Grazer Discusses Imagine Entertainment (LINK)

The James Altucher Show (podcast): 493 -- Frank Abagnale (LINK)

What Got You There Podcast: #158 Brent Beshore (LINK)

The Knowledge Project Podcast -- Jim Collins: Keeping the Flywheel in Motion (LINK)

Externalities: Why We Can Never Do “One Thing” (LINK)

The Messy World of Crime-Solving Genealogists - by Sarah Zhang (LINK)

Links

"What we really like at Berkshire is buying good-sized to very large first-class businesses with first-class management and just sitting there. Because the nice thing about that is you don’t have go from flower to flower. You can just sit there and watch them produce more and more every year and give you capital and you can buy more businesses." --Warren Buffett (2008)

Good Reading — 10th Anniversary Edition - by Phil Ordway (LINK)

Investors and Operators: Lessons I've Learned From Both Worlds - by Brent Beshore (LINK)

A reexamination of ownership in the age of the public corporation - by Roger Lowenstein (LINK)

The Horse Story - by Chris Mayer (LINK)

How U.S. Banks Took Over the World ($) (LINK)

A decade ago, they almost brought down the global financial system. Now they rule it.

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): 388. The Economics of Sports Gambling (LINK)

a16z Podcast: From the Internet’s Past to the Future of Crypto (LINK)

What can we learn from the history of the internet for the future of crypto? In this episode of the a16z Podcast, general partner Katie Haun interviews a16z co-founder Marc Andreessen.

Recode Media Podcast: The epic battle for Uber, with Mike Isaac from the New York Times (LINK)

Related book: Super Pumped: The Battle for Uber

A Radical Guide to Spending Less Time on Your Phone - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

One of Nature’s Greatest Spectacles Is Coming Undone - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Corals release their eggs and sperms with perfect synchronization. But a new study suggests their incredible timing is starting to slip.

Links

"We don’t play big trends. We don’t think about demographic trends or anything of the sort.... Big trends, they just don’t mean that much. There’s too much money to be made from year to year to think about things that take decades to manifest themselves." --Warren Buffett (2006) 

Brilliant stock picker John Neff, who ran Vanguard's Windsor Fund and built Penn’s endowment, dies at 87 (LINK)

Terry Smith presents the full Fundsmith FEET 2019 Annual Shareholders' Meeting (video) (LINK)

A 2017 paper from Ernst & Young: "Getting ROIC right" [H/T @_inpractise] (LINK)

Related paper: "Calculating Return on Invested Capital" (Mauboussin, Callahan); Related book (2006): Cash Return on Capital Invested: Ten Years of Investment Analysis with the CROCI Economic Profit Model

The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast): #1309 - Naval Ravikant (LINK)

Related podcast: Naval: How to Get Rich: Every Episode

The Ezra Klein Show (podcast): Michael Lewis reads my mind (LINK)

Conversations with Tyler (podcast): Russ Roberts on Life as an Economics Educator (LINK)

Standard Deviations Podcast: Brent Beshore - Building a “Baby Berkshire” (LINK)

Crazy/Genius Podcast: Influencers: Frauds or the Future of Online Commerce? (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: A Deep Dive On InsureTech with Karn Saroya and Sheel Mohnot (LINK)

Solvable Podcast: Homelessness is Solvable (LINK)

Malcolm Gladwell talks to Rosanne Haggerty about ending homelessness for everyone. Forever.

Kevin Kelly on Still Untitled: The Adam Savage Project Podcast (LINK)

AI: Hype vs. Reality Podcast: AI On The Job (LINK)

Humane: A New Agenda for Tech (video) [H/T @harari_yuval] (LINK)

The Deep Sea Is Full of Plastic, Too (LINK)

Links

"To the extent that the method of estimating future cash flow requires projections, I would say that projections, while they’re logically required by the circumstances, on average, do more harm than good in America. Most of them are put together by people who have an interest in a particular outcome. And the subconscious bias that goes into the process, and its apparent precision makes it...fatuous, or dishonorable, or foolish, or what have you. Mark Twain used to say a mine is a hole in the ground owned by a liar. And a projection prepared in America by anybody with a commission, or an executive trying to justify a particular course of action, will frequently be a lie. It’s not a deliberate lie, in most cases. The man has gotten to believe it himself. And that’s the worst kind.... Projections are to be handled with great care, particular when somebody has an interest in misleading you." --Charlie Munger (1995)

"Charlie and I, I think it’s fair to say, we’ve never looked at a projection in connection with either a security we’ve bought or a business we’ve bought. We’ve had them offered to us in great quantities.... We voluntarily turn them away when people try to thrust them upon us.... It’s a ritual that managers go through to justify doing what they wanted to do in the first place, in about nine cases out of ten." --Warren Buffett (1995)

"We don’t give a hoot about anybody’s projections. We don’t even want to hear about them, in terms of what they’re going to do in the future. We’ve never found any value in anything like that." --Warren Buffett (2003)

"Usually, I don’t use formal projections. I don’t let people do them for me because I don’t like throwing up on the desk (laughter), but I see them made in a very foolish way all the time, and many people believe in them, no matter how foolish they are. It’s an effective sales technique in America to put a foolish projection on a desk." --Charlie Munger (“Academic Economics: Strengths and Faults After Considering Interdisciplinary Needs”)

***

When Charlie Munger Calls, Listen and Learn ($) (LINK)

An unexpected phone call from Charlie Munger says at least as much about him as it does about you. 

Jacob Taylor, chief executive of Farnam Street Investments, a tiny asset-management firm in Folsom, Calif., was stunned when Mr. Munger—Warren Buffett’s business partner at Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and one of Mr. Taylor’s heroes—called him late last month. 

All investors should strive to match Mr. Munger’s focus, intensity and insatiable appetite for reading. He turned 95 on Jan. 1. 

Mr. Munger was calling to say that he had read the novel Mr. Taylor was about to self-publish, “The Rebel Allocator.” He was “surprisingly engaged,” recalls Mr. Taylor, 37, who had sent the book to Mr. Munger without much hope the great investor would read it. Mr. Munger proceeded to reel off roughly 20 minutes of unsolicited, detailed advice, mostly about plot and character.

GMO Quarterly Letter (LINK)

2018 was a lousy year for almost all assets, with no major asset class around the world able to keep pace with U.S. Treasury Bills. The poor returns have a silver lining, however, in that today a number of asset classes are priced at levels that embody much more achievable expectations and decent long-term returns. In general, it looks to be the best opportunity set we have seen since 2009. This means it is reasonably straightforward to put together a diversified portfolio priced to achieve something close to +5% real return. But as U.S. equities and nominal government bonds are not among the appealing assets, we believe the portfolio you should own today looks more or less nothing like a traditional 60% stock/40% bond portfolio. In particular, liquid alternatives now look poised to deliver attractive real returns and outperform developed equity markets in the coming years.

Jack Bogle: Crusader for Investment Professionalism (LINK)

Advertising is in crisis, but it's not because it doesn't work - by Rory Sutherland (LINK)

How To Be Successful - by Sam Altman (LINK)

Howard Schultz: Leading a Values-Based Business | MasterClass | Official Trailer [H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi] (LINK) [More info on the class HERE. Bob Woodward's class on investigative journalism would also probably be a useful class for the fundamental, value investor.]

Five Good Questions Podcast: Brent Beshore - The Messy Marketplace (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Zeros All the Way Down (LINK)

TED Talk: A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity | Tim Harford (LINK)

One of Earth’s oldest rocks may have been found… on the Moon - by Phil Plait (LINK)

When Modern Men Throw Ancient Weapons - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"While investors will obviously achieve the best results by remaining rational thinkers at all times, this is easier said than done. In the financial markets, emotion often takes over, and greed and fear come to dominate investor behavior. Even those who are aware of this, who expect always to invest rationally and to be able to resist their own greedy temptations and panicky reactions, cannot always carry through on their plans." --Seth Klarman (January 2008)

The Investor Seth Klarman, in a Rare Interview, Offers a Warning. Davos Should Listen (LINK)

List of Q4 2018 Investor Letters (to be updated as more become available) [H/T @MineSafety10k] (LINK)

CNBC's Davos interviews with Bill Gates, Jamie Dimon, Dara Khosrowshahi, and Carlos Brito.

Davos panel videos: Financial Innovation for Global Health (Bill Gates, et al.), Business Leadership in the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Safeguarding Our Planet, and more available HERE.

Silicon Valley’s Unbridled Optimism Gets Fresh Reality Check (LINK)

The Investing City Podcast -- Brent Beshore: Business as a Service (LINK)

Related book: The Messy Marketplace

The Bill Simmons Podcast: Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey (LINK)

Book of the day: Ackoff's Best: His Classic Writings on Management

Links

Case Studies of Companies That Do Capital Allocation Right - by Phil Ordway (LINK)

Cummins: Diesel Engine Maker with Shareholder-Friendly Management - by Chris Bloomstran (LINK)

What Does An Intelligent Fanatic Look Like? - Ian Cassel (video) (LINK)

Brent Beshore's 2018 Year In Review: Serving the Six-Sided Teeter Totter (LINK)

O’Shaughnessy Quarterly Investor Letter Q4 2018 (LINK)

Lawrence Cunningham NACD 2018 Lifetime Achievement Award (video) (LINK)

WeWork’s CEO Makes Millions as Landlord to WeWork (LINK)

How a Behavioral Scientist Optimizes His Monthly Cashflow (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Dark Data in Healthcare (LINK)

Glossier CEO Emily Weiss on the “art and science” of the beauty business (LINK)

Peter Diamandis: "Exploring Exponential Technologies" | Talks at Google (LINK)

Tidying Up: Marie Kondo on her Netflix show, the KonMari method, and why folding "sparks joy." (video) (LINK)

Links

Jake Taylor's book, The Rebel Allocator, has just been released, and I'm really looking forward to reading it. Jake is the man behind the Five Good Questions interviews, and Jake's book is his mission to distill some key lessons on capital allocation that he's learned from Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, and the other greats that many of us follow into a fictional, story format that will be interesting to a wider audience, as well as to those of us in the investing world. As Jake described it in an interview: 

I was working hard on a non-fiction guide to proper capital allocation. It felt like different books, podcasts, and conversations at that time were telling me I needed to write a fictional story if there was any chance of my book still mattering in ten years. The emotion of a story is all that persists. Around that same time I lost a close friend my age to a tragic hiking accident. It was a wake up call. If I were to disappear tomorrow, what kind of book would I want to leave as a literary legacy for my two young boys? It certainly wasn’t a dry, non-fiction, vanity project that no one would care about in six months. I had to try something radically different and tell a story. This lead to researching hero’s journeys and even screenplay writing to learn about character arcs and dynamic pacing to engage the reader. I hope the book reads a little like watching a movie.

***

John Hempton reviews the book The Myth of Capitalism (LINK)

What Amazon’s Rise to No. 1 Says About the Stock Market - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

AWS, MongoDB, and the Economic Realities of Open Source - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

How Aging Japan Defied Demographics and Revived Its Economy - by Greg Ip (LINK)

Back to Class: A Teaching Manifesto! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast: 63 - Supernova in the East II (LINK)

Brent Beshore on The Learning Leader Show (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: The Messy Marketplace

60 Minutes video: Facial and emotional recognition; how one man is advancing artificial intelligence (LINK)

a16z Podcast: All About Synthetic Biology (LINK)

a16z Podcast: The Science and Business of Innovative Medicines (LINK)

Cal Newport on The Ezra Klein Show (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Digital Minimalism

A review of “The Big One,” a new podcast from the Southern California NPR station KPCC about the potential devastation an earthquake could cause in Los Angeles (LINK)

What Happens When the President Doesn’t Have a Science Adviser - by Ed Yong (LINK)

A cool video of New York City in 1911 [H/T @Jesse_Livermore] (LINK)

Links

"It makes more sense...to buy a wonderful business at a fair price, than a fair business at a wonderful price.... I’ve changed my focus...over the years in that direction.... It’s not hard when you watch businesses for 50 years...to learn a few things about them, as to where the big money can be made. Now, you say when did it happen? It’s very interesting on that. Because what happens, even when you’re getting a new, important idea, is that the old ideas are still there. So there’s this flickering in and out of things. I mean, there was not a strong, bright red line of demarcation where we went from cigar butts to wonderful companies.... But we moved in that direction, occasionally moved back, because there is money made in cigar butts. But overall, we’ve kept moving in the direction of better and better companies." --Warren Buffett (2003)

Rob Vinall's 2018 investor letter [registration required] (LINK)

Brent Beshore on the Tropical MBA Podcast (LINK)

Related book: The Messy Marketplace

David Marcus: Great Owner-Operators in Europe (audio) (LINK)

Notes From Sohn London Investment Conference (LINK)

Why Some Platforms Thrive and Others Don’t [H/T @FourFilters] (LINK)

Blockchain Can Wrest the Internet From Corporations' Grasp - by Chris Dixon (LINK)

Misunderstanding Liquidity, Misunderstanding QT [H/T @modestproposal1] (LINK)

You Can’t Debunk MMT - by Cullen Roche (LINK)

Bob Rodriguez: Recent Market Turmoil a 'Preamble' to Bigger Crisis [H/T @jessefelder] (LINK)

RA Conversations: The Flattening Yield Curve (LINK)

Chris Cole on the Macro Voices Podcast (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 158 — A Significant Shift (LINK)

What’s Next for Education Startups (LINK)

Recode Media with Peter Kafka: Harvard’s Susan Crawford on the importance of fiber internet (podcast) (LINK)

Related book: Fiber: The Coming Tech Revolution―and Why America Might Miss It

High-performance medicine: the convergence of human and artificial intelligence - by Eric J. Topol (LINK)

Edge #525: Judith Rich Harris: 1938 - 2018 (LINK)

Plants Can Hear Animals Using Their Flowers - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

I'm back after attending the Project Punch Card Conference last week. Congratulations to the organizers for putting together a great inaugural event in pursuit of a great cause. And for those that want to receive future updates about the project, you can join its email list HERE.

Boyar Research was one of the sponsors of the conference, and it's that time of year when they are getting ready to publish The Forgotten Forty, which features one-page reports on the forty companies that they believe have the greatest potential to outperform the leading indices in the year ahead due to a catalyst that they see on the horizon. The report has a successful track record and, once again, they're providing a link to receive three complimentary Forgotten Forty reports from last year’s report for readers of this blog.... Link to: Complimentary 3-report sample of The Forgotten Forty

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David Abrams, who rarely makes public appearances, lays out his investing strategy — and cautions against being too patient (LINK)

"We make a lot of money from mucking around in the garbage, and we also buy nice shiny things, and we care what we pay for both," he said. 

The firm puts a three- to five-year time horizon on stocks, looking for a minimum return of 15% on its first purchase, he said. 

"There has to be a point sooner than 10 year where you're determining whether you are being successful or not successful," he said.

What You Can Learn From How Warren Buffett's Investment Process Evolved (LINK)

The Housing Boom Is Already Gigantic. How Long Can It Last? - by Robert J. Shiller (LINK)

How Subscriptions Are Remaking Corporate America (LINK)

James Dyson: ‘The Public Wants to Buy Strange Things’ [H/T Collaborative Fund] (LINK)

Elon Musk on 60 Minutes (video) (LINK)

Is there a signal in the noise? Yield Curves, Economic Growth and Stock Prices! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Lampert's Hedge Fund Makes Bid for Sears Stores and Assets (LINK)

Millennials Didn’t Kill the Economy. The Economy Killed Millennials. - by Derek Thompson (LINK)

Outgrowing Advertising: Multimodal Business Models as a Product Strategy (LINK)

What’s Next in Consumer Startups? (video) (LINK)

Why Small Habits Make a Big Difference (LINK)

Jeremy Grantham on the Masters in Business podcast (LINK)

Brent Beshore on the Capital Allocators Podcast (LINK)

Related book: The Messy Marketplace

How I Built This podcast: Airbnb's Joe Gebbia (LINK)

NPR Planet Money podcast: Why Car Safety Is A Trade Barrier (LINK)

Siddhartha Mukherjee talks with Peter Attia (podcast) (LINK)

Origin Stories: Carl Sagan (podcast) (LINK)

The Leakey Foundation's award-winning Origin Stories podcast has returned for its third season. The latest episode is a never-before-released lecture given by Carl Sagan in 1977. In this talk from The Leakey Foundation's archive, Sagan explores the origins and evolution of human intelligence.

Ebola detectives race to identify hidden sources of infection as outbreak spreads (LINK)

When a Killer Climate Catastrophe Struck the World's Oceans (LINK)

Book of the day: How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone