Links

"In terms of generally advancing within organizations, I think you’d be surprised at how little competition you really  have if you start thinking like you would if you were an owner of the place, and working like you would if you were an owner of the place, and pretty soon you may be running something." --Warren Buffett (2010)

Armed With Swabs, Covid Hunters Stalk Their Prey - by Michael Lewis (LINK)

Michael Lewis in Conversation with Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg (podcast) (LINK)

Bronte Capital's Q1 Letter [H/T Linc] (LINK)

[There's another great collection of Q1 letters HERE.]

What Have We Learned Here? - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

The Psychology of Masks (LINK)

The Glut Drowning the Oil Market ($) (LINK)

Here’s What to Know If You Must Sign Up for Cobra Health Insurance ($) (LINK)

Cloud Gaming: Why It Matters And The Games It Will Create - by Matthew Ball & Jacob Navok (LINK)

Tom Colicchio’s Plan to Save Restaurants (LINK)

The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast): #1470 - Elon Musk (LINK)

Recode Media Podcast: Michael Jordan’s Last Dance, with director Jason Hehir (LINK)

A Much-Hyped COVID-19 Treatment Has a Weird Connection to Black-Market Cat Drugs - by Sarah Zhang (LINK)

The Problem With Stories About Dangerous Coronavirus Mutations - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"The businesses at the top of my portfolio are not necessarily going to be the ones that perform the best over the long term but are the ones I know will perform." --Chris Bloomstran [Source] 

1986 article: How to Tame the Casino Society - by Warren E. Buffett [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Non-Ergodicity and its Implications for Businesses and Investors - by Sanjay Bakshi (LINK)

A Big Little Idea Called Ergodicity (Or The Ultimate Guide to Russian Roulette) (LINK)

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Skin in the Game (video) (LINK)

Related book: Skin in the Game

Robert G. Hagstrom on Liberal Arts Investing (video) (LINK)

Making a Killing with Bethany McLean (podcast): Tesla, and why "Elon Musk doesn't care about you" (LINK)

The Acquirers Podcast: Big Decisions: Michael Mauboussin talks luck, skill, success, risk, mean reversion and the base rate (LINK)

Robert Iger talks with Oprah Winfrey about his career at Disney (video) (LINK)

Related book: The Ride of a Lifetime: Lessons Learned from 15 Years as CEO of the Walt Disney Company

Yuval Noah Harari & Steven Pinker in conversation (video) (LINK)

The world is uniting to help this group - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Bill Gates delivers a speech at the Global Fund Replenishment conference in France.

The Many Contradictions of Thomas Edison - by Derek Thompson (LINK)

Related book: Edison - by Edmund Morris

It's only $4.99. But Costco's rotisserie chicken comes at a huge price (LINK)

A tweetstorm from Tren Griffin about wholesale transfer pricing power (LINK)

Why So Negative? - by Peter Zeihan (LINK)

What Economists (Including Me) Got Wrong About Globalization - by Paul Krugman (LINK)

Odd Lots Podcast: Why Governments Haven’t Learned The Lessons Of Japan (LINK)

The New Yorker Radio Hour (podcast): New Yorker Writers on Hong Kong, and Nixon After Tiananmen Square (LINK)

The New Yorker: Politics and More Podcast: Trump’s Abandonment of the Kurds Appeases Erdoğan and Infuriates Republicans (LINK)

Dexter Filkins joins Dorothy Wickenden to discuss how the incursion into Syria is affecting one of the most volatile regions in the world, and what it could mean for Trump’s Presidency.

5 Tenets of a Negative Self-Help - by Mark Manson (LINK)

Magnetars are the most powerful magnets in the Universe. Here's how they're made. - by Phil Plait (LINK)

What Made Me Reconsider the Anthropocene - by Peter Brannen (LINK)

Links

"If we could guess successfully a high percentage of the time where the stock market was going to go, we would do nothing but play the S&P futures market. There wouldn’t be any reason to look at businesses and stocks. It’s just not our game. What we see when we look at the stock market is we see thousands and thousands and thousands of companies priced every day, and we ignore 99.9 percent of what we see, although we run our eyes over them. And then every now and then we see something that looks like it’s attractively priced to us, as a business. Forget about the word 'stock.' So when we buy a stock, we would be happy with that stock if they told us the market was going to close for a couple years. We look to the business." --Warren Buffett (2008)

Cliff Asness on why it's hard to say when value wins again (LINK) [“A huge part of our job is building a great investment process that will make money over the long term, but a fair amount of our job is sticking to it like grim death during the tougher times.”]

How Elon Musk Gambled Tesla to Save SolarCity - by Bethany McLean (LINK)

Streaming Video Will Soon Look Like the Bad Old Days of TV - by Matthew Ball (LINK)

China's Hong Kong Dilemma - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

The Acquirers Podcast: Ian Cassel chats with Tobias Carlisle (LINK)

The Investor’s Podcast: Small Cap Investing - w/ Eric Cinnamond (LINK)

Flux Podcast: 24: Matt Cauble—Soylent’s Co-Founder Goes After Alcohol (LINK)

Radiolab Podcast: Right to be Forgotten (LINK)

Attachment Theory - by Mark Manson (LINK)

Links

"Security analysis is a severely practical activity, and it must not linger over matters that are not likely to affect the ultimate judgment." --Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (Security Analysis: Sixth Edition)

Dr James Simons, S Donald Sussman Fellowship Award Fireside Chat (Chat 2 - March 6, 2019) (video) [H/T @collabfund] (LINK)

Can goats empower women? - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Calpers Wants to Double Down on Private Equity ($) (LINK)

Can a Facebook Post Make Your Insurance Cost More? ($) (LINK)

A detailed short thesis on Tesla (LINK)

In the wake of one university’s headline-making failure, a look at business models (LINK)

The Disruptive Voice Podcast: Revisiting Resource Allocation in the Firm (with Clayton Christensen) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Annie Duke – Wanna Bet? (LINK)

The Knowledge Project Podcast: Doing the Enough Thing (LINK)

WorkLife with Adam Grant Podcast: Networking For People Who Hate Networking (LINK)

A Doctor’s Prescription for More AI in Medicine (LINK)

Eric Topol makes the case for how artificial intelligence can improve health care, despite privacy concerns

The Rock Health Podcast: How AI Can Get Medicine Back On Track: Dr. Eric Topol (LINK)

Related book: Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again

The After On Podcast: 44: Naval Ravikant (part 1) | End Games (LINK)

The Fertility Doctor’s Secret (LINK)

Links

Dr. Elon & Mr. Musk: Life Inside Tesla's Production Hell (LINK)

Jim Chanos On His Favorite Shorts: Full CNBC Transcript [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

16 Ways to Measure Network Effects (LINK)

The Dynamics of Network Effects (LINK)

How a World Order Ends: And What Comes in Its Wake [H/T @scmallaby] (LINK)

Nobel Prize Economics in 6 Minutes: Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Romer explains how ideas translate into growth. (video) (LINK)

The Existential Dread of Gmail's Auto-Complete Feature - by Derek Thompson (LINK)

Jonathan Tepper on The MoneyWeek Podcast discussing his book The Myth of Capitalism (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Clumping and Clustering (LINK)

Pivot Podcast: Google doesn’t make iPhones, and other things Congress learned this week (LINK)

The Long Now Podcast -- Niall Ferguson: Networks and Power (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

***

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

Links

"Progress often comes from people who often came from life-circumstances that seemed impossible.... People who because of adversity, not in spite of it, have an inextinguishable flame that gets lit. This propulsive force—resilience—that against the seemingly impossible makes great achievement inevitable. And it makes the bad stuff of great adversity often lead to the good stuff of great ambition and achievement." --Josh Wolfe

Josh Wolfe's 2018 Lux Annual Dinner Talk (audio/video....and really fantastic) (LINK)

An Evolve-or-Die Moment for the World's Great Investors [H/T Linc] (LINK)

The dominance of tech stocks has forced some of the best investing minds—including Warren Buffett himself—to reexamine their thinking. Who will adapt and survive?

Why “Many-Model Thinkers” Make Better Decisions [H/T @mjmauboussin] (LINK)

Late Cycle Behavior (LINK)

The Predatory Lending Machine Crushing Small Businesses Across America [H/T @pkedrosky] (LINK)

Energy Losses Prompt Emotional Video to Options Firm’s Clients ($) (LINK)

Inside Elon Musk’s Forgotten Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo (LINK)

The Sun's long-lost sibling found in our own backyard - by Phil Plait (LINK)

The History of the Oceans Is Locked in Whale Earwax - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

Berkshire Hathaway buys a stake in India's largest digital payments company (LINK)

A Primer on Utilities (LINK)

How TripAdvisor changed travel (LINK)

10 Things You May Not Know About the Great Depression - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

Dear Investor, That Cocky Voice in Your Head Is Wrong - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Chicago’s New Idea to Fix Its Pension Deficit? Take On More Debt ($) (LINK)

How Two Musk Decisions in 2016 Put Tesla Into Trouble - by Charley Grant ($) (LINK)

Never Mind, Tesla’s Not Going Private (LINK)

(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction and Negative Churn - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Small-town Ingenuity Is Making Gigabit Broadband a Reality (LINK)

What Is Quantum Computing? The Complete WIRED Guide (LINK)

Drew Houston, co-founder and CEO of Dropbox, on The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast) (LINK)

Online Bettors Can Sniff Out Weak Psychology Studies - by Ed Yong (LINK)

***

For Audible members, Audible's latest sale has some titles of note for $5.95 [And if you're not a member, and haven't yet done a free trial, you can get a free trial and 2 free audiobook credits by signing up HERE.]. The titles that stood out to me in this sale:

The Everything Store

Sam Walton: Made in America

When Breath Becomes Air

Option B

Originals

Everything Happens for a Reason: And Other Lies I've Loved

Smarter Faster Better

So Good They Can't Ignore You

Deep Work

How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

The Four

Political Order and Political Decay

Discrimination and Disparities

Abundance

Tribe

Make Your Bed

Links

"A business with something glorious underneath, disguised by terrible numbers that cause cutoff points in other people’s minds, is ideal for us, if we can figure it out." --Charlie Munger

Elon Musk Details ‘Excruciating’ Personal Toll of Tesla Turmoil (LINK)

The Art of Self-Control - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

Raoul Pal on Turkey (podcast) (LINK)

Two billion years ago, Andromeda ate the Milky Way’s sibling - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Links

The Dangers of Persistence - by Vishal Khandelwal (LINK)

The above reminded me of a Kahneman quote worth frequently thinking about:

"When I work I have no sunk costs. I like changing my mind. Some people really don’t like it but for me changing my mind is a thrill. It’s an indication that I’m learning something. So I have no sunk costs in the sense that I can walk away from an idea that I’ve worked on for a year if I can see a better idea. It’s a good attitude for a researcher. The main track that young researchers fall into is sunk costs. They get to work on a project that doesn’t work and that is not promising but they keep at it. I think too much persistence can be bad for you in the intellectual world." --Daniel Kahneman (Source)

Natural Maniacs - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Musk’s Money Mystery Intrigues SEC (LINK)

American Innovations Podcast: The Future Of | Health | 2 (LINK)

Scientists Take a Harder Look at Genetic Engineering of Human Embryos (LINK)

An Ancient Genetic Quirk Could Doom Whales Today - Ed Yong (LINK)

The Wonder Plant That Could Slash Fertilizer Use - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"Raising prices is a great way to flesh out whether you actually do have a moat. If you do have a moat, the customers will still buy, because they have to. The definition of a moat is the ability to charge more." --Marc Andreessen

Where to Go After Product-Market Fit: An Interview with Marc Andreessen (LINK)

Lessons from Jim O’Shaughnessy - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Free Trips Under Fire: SEC Wants Your Broker To Work For You - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

If the Securities and Exchange Commission has its way, brokers will have to make big changes to how they sell investments. 

For the first time, brokers would be explicitly required to act in the best interests of their customers, not their own paychecks, when they make investment recommendations. 

Furthermore, as SEC Chairman Jay Clayton made clear in an interview, some sales contests — those competitions in which brokers earn rewards for selling specific investments — are in danger of extinction.

Tesla Asks Suppliers for Cash Back to Help Turn a Profit ($) (LINK)

Tesla Inc. has asked some suppliers to refund a portion of what the electric-car company has spent previously, an appeal that reflects the auto maker’s urgency to sustain operations during a critical production period. 

The Silicon Valley electric-car company said it is asking its suppliers for cash back to help it become profitable, according to a memo reviewed by The Wall Street Journal that was sent to a supplier last week. Tesla requested the supplier return what it calls a meaningful amount of money of its payments since 2016, according to the memo.

Private Pension Product, Sold by Felon, Wipes Investors Out ($) (LINK)

Scott Kohn, a 64-year-old felon, ran a company from a Nevada strip-mall mailbox that investors claim took them for more than $100 million in losses. 

Mr. Kohn’s company, Future Income Payments, appears shut, according to court filings. His investors are likely to be wiped out, according to lawyers representing them, who plan to sue scores of firms that sold Future Income products as soon as this week. At least 25 states have taken enforcement actions or are investigating the company, it said in April. 

The blow-up shines a light on the boom in opaque private markets, to which investors have flocked in the hope of doing better than they can in traditional stock and bond markets.

Can outsiders redefine the insurance industry? (LINK)

Masters in Business Podcast: John Carreyrou on Theranos & Bad Blood (LINK)

Related book: Bad Blood

Skift Podcast: The Amazon Factor in Travel (LINK)

How to Say “No” Gracefully and Uncommit (podcast -- book excerpt) (LINK)

Related book: Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

The G.O.P. Stands By as Trump Upends American Security - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

An Enormous Study of the Genes Related to Staying in School - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Michael Lewis' first Audible Original, The Coming Storm, will be released next week and is available for pre-order (free for Audible members).

Links

"The game in our kind of life is being able to recognize a good idea when...it rarely is presented to you. And I think that’s something you have to prepare for over a long period. What is the old saying? That opportunity comes to the prepared mind? And I don’t think you can teach people in two minutes how to have a prepared mind. But that’s the game." --Charlie Munger

How 20-Year-Old Kylie Jenner Built A $900 Million Fortune In Less Than 3 Years (LINK) [I think the mental model for understanding the business success revolves around understanding the way the internet has changed the competitive advantages around supply and demand relationships. As Ben Thompson has written: "The most successful companies no longer control supply but rather demand; moreover, that shift is not due to the actions of any one company but rather to the fundamentally changed structure of the market.... This is the critical insight: it has always been obvious that owning all customers is preferable to owning all suppliers; before the Internet, though, that was impossible. There was too much friction. In other words, the implication of the Internet is the enablement of new models that actually make much more sense, yet were previously unviable because of said friction."]

Ruane, Cunniff & Goldfarb Investor Day Transcript (May 2018) [H/T Eli] (LINK)

Journalist Elon Musk questioned over Tesla reporting speaks (video) (LINK)

Scott Wapner is joined by Linette Lopez, the Business Insider senior finance reporter whom Elon Musk criticized over Twitter on her Tesla reporting. With Yale's Jeffrey Sonnenfeld and Bethany McLean, Vanity Fair.

The Knowledge Project Podcast: The Science of Doing Good, with William MacAskill (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: Strong Verbs, Short Sentences (LINK)

American Innovations Podcast: Nuclear Energy | Backlash | 5 (LINK)

An interview with George Church: Reversed Aging, Pig Organs, and the Future of Humankind (LINK)

A Hallmark of Alzheimer's May Actually Begin as a Defense Against Viruses - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

How I Evaluate an Investment - by Brent Beshore (LINK)

Lessons from Cliff Asness - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Sustaining Wealth is Harder Than Getting Rich - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

On Passion and Its Discontents - by Cal Newport (LINK)

Peter H. Diamandis interviews Joshua Dahn, the principal and co-founder (with Elon Musk) of the Ad Astra School [H/T @maxolson] (video) (LINK)

J.P. Morgan Reading List Collection 2018 (LINK)

For Audible members, the new $5.95 sale that runs until July 8th has a few titles that stood out to me:

Den of Thieves - by James B. Stewart

Stuff Matters - by Mark Miodownik

Debt: The First 5,000 Years - by David Graeber

The Goal - by Eliyahu M. Goldratt, Jeff Cox

Red Notice - by Bill Browder

Links

What the Hell Happened at GE? - by Geoff Colvin (LINK)

How Elon Musk became an inequality machine - by Roger Lowenstein (LINK)

Banks Won Big in Washington. What It Means for Investors - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Business Lessons from Oprah Winfrey - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

[I like Bruce Greenwald, but this is your latest reminder that smart people can often be very wrong...] Bruce Greenwald on Amazon in 2012 (video) [H/T @maxolson] (LINK)

Related previous posts: 1) Amazon is going to do to enterprise cloud companies exactly what it did to book stores (April 2013); 2) Bruce Greenwald and Judd Kahn on competitive advantage and Apple (circa 2005)

[I'm late to these, but there were interesting segments on Google and Theranos on "60 Minutes" this past Sunday.]

How To Democratize Healthcare: AI Gives Everyone The Very Best Doctor (LINK)

13D Research: “Liquidity is the new leverage” (LINK)

Dan Ariely talks to Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project Podcast (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Black Holes (LINK)

Ben and James continue their discussion on why aggregators and platforms are different and why it matters for big companies, competitors, and regulators.

Marc Cohodes on The Jolly Swagmen Podcast (LINK)

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity Explained in One of the Earliest Science Films Ever Made (1923) (LINK)

Book of the day: Tube: The Invention of Television

Links

"Hang on to your hat. Hang on to your hope. And wind the clock, for tomorrow is another day." --E. B. White [Source]

The End of Windows - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

How do wars affect stock prices? (LINK)

Mutual Fund Observer, April 2018 (LINK)

Charley Grant, columnist for the Wall Street Journal, on the Hidden Forces podcast discussing Tesla (LINK)

How to Serve a Deranged Tyrant, Stoically - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Books of the day:

Letters of Note: Volume 1

Letters of Note: Volume 2

Links

Elon Musk's interview at SXSW 2018 (video) (LINK)

Qualcomm, National Security, and Patents - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Bill Gates chats with Jorge Aguilar, the superintendent of the Sacramento City United School District (LINK)

The Knowledge Project Podcast -- Company Culture, Collaboration and Competition: A Discussion With Margaret Heffernan (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: World After Capital, with Albert Wenger (LINK)

How Psychopaths See the World - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"Forget everything else. Keep hold of this alone and remember it: Each one of us lives only now, this brief instant. The rest has been lived already, or is impossible to see." -Marcus Aurelius

Graham & Doddsville: Fall 2017 (LINK)

Opinions on Everything (LINK)

Goodbye Gatekeepers - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Your Next Home Could Run on Batteries [H/T @morganhousel] (LINK)

Loss Leader or Value Creator? Deconstructing Amazon Prime - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Can We have an ETF Meltdown? - by Rick Bookstaber (LINK)

Nassim Taleb on Black Monday, Fed, Market Lessons (video) (LINK)

Jim Chanos Shares 'Bizarre' Black Monday Experience (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

"60 Minutes" on the opioid crisis (video) (LINK)

Whistleblower Joe Rannazzisi says drug distributors pumped opioids into U.S. communities -- knowing that people were dying -- and says industry lobbyists and Congress derailed the DEA's efforts to stop it

The Family Making Billions From The Opioids Crisis [H/T The Browser] (LINK)

"60 Minutes" talks with Danny Meyer [from last week] (video) (LINK)

Related books: 1) Setting the Table; 2) Shake Shack: Recipes & Stories

Tim Urban talks with Patrick O'Shaughnessy (podcast) (LINK)

What Facebook Did to American Democracy [H/T The Browser] (LINK)

Containers: An 8-part audio documentary (and podcast) about how global trade has transformed the economy and ourselves (LINK)

TED Talk -- Kristin Poinar: What's hidden under the Greenland ice sheet? (LINK)

How Domestication Ruined Dogs' Pack Instincts - by Ed Yong (LINK)

The Microbes That Supercharge Termite Guts - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Walter Isaacson talks to Charlie Rose about his latest biography, Leonardo da Vinci, which was released today (video) (LINK)

Ebook of the day (You can also read the posts that make up the ebook for free online, HERE.): The Elon Musk Blog Series: Wait But Why

Links

“It is just as important to have studied men, as to have studied books.” — Baltasar Gracian (Source)

How Filter Bubbles Distort Reality: Everything You Need to Know (LINK)

Meet the woman who gives bridge tips to Warren Buffett and Bill Gates [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Tesla’s Big Reveal Shows a Rough Road Ahead - by Charley Grant (LINK)

A Dozen Lessons about Business and Investing from Poker - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Coping With the “Foie Gras” Stock Market ($) [James Montier] (LINK)

Barron’s: Bonds are expensive, stocks are expensive. What’s an asset allocator to do? 

Montier: Things just don’t add up. One group has thrown in the towel and says, “If you can’t beat them, join them. I’m just going passive and be damned.” [Passive investing] is a very strange thing to do at this particular point in time. 

The U.S. market is at its second or third most expensive point in history. So people are saying, “I either don’t understand the world anymore, or I don’t think that valuation matters anymore,” which is a really weird thing to say. You’re giving up the one piece of information that you know helps determine your long-term returns. You cannot describe yourself as an investor if you are going passive. You are welcome to call yourself a speculator, but you honestly can’t say you care about expected returns if you are going passive at this time. 

For those standing against the tide, there are a couple of challenges. One, how much pain can you take? The U.S. has been an incredibly strong market for a number of years, so going passive is classic returns-chasing behavior. How do you manage the pain? Nothing in the precepts of being a value investor tells you about the path or the timing. It just tells you about the final destination. The light at the end of tunnel is that the more that people buy on the basis of market cap, the greater the opportunity for active managers. 

You have also taken Warren Buffett to task. 

All these years I have looked to Warren Buffett as a beacon of hope. Two months ago, he said that equities look cheap, relative to interest rates. It seemed like a dreadful thing to say. It might be true only if you believed there was absolutely no mean reversion—in that case you’d be looking at a 3% real return from equities, zero from bonds, and, say, minus 1% or 2% from cash. But here was a man who, using his favorite valuation indicator of market cap to gross domestic product, pointed to the tech bubble of 2000 and said it was insane. Using the same indicator, he pointed out when to buy equities in late 2008, early ’09. Here we are within a hair’s breadth of the levels in 2000, and he is saying equities are cheap. This is an unvaluelike statement, and I don’t think it’s true. There are plenty of reasons why interest rates are not related to performance—very low rates haven’t stopped a 50% decline in Japan. So I’m sticking to dead heroes now—Ben Graham and John Maynard Keynes. 

Valuing Tech's Titans (video) (LINK)

Are we basing companies' valuations on the right criteria? In this long-form conversation, Scott [Galloway] and NYU Stern colleague Aswath Damodaran discuss what the top digital companies are really worth.

How I Built This podcast -- Kickstarter: Perry Chen (LINK)

Grant’s Podcast: Summer breeze (LINK)

Masters in Business podcast: Rich Barton on Making Information Available to All (LINK)

a16z Video: A Brief History of Credit Cards (or, What Actually Happens When You Swipe) (LINK)

FT Alphachat podcast: Michael Pettis on the Chinese economy (LINK)

In the second of a two-part series, economist Michael Pettis joins the FT's Cardiff Garcia and Matt Klein to discuss the state of the Chinese economy.

Claude Shannon's lecture, "Creative Thinking" (March 1952) [H/T @mjmauboussin] (LINK)

Stoic reminders for everyday practice (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T @CGrantWSJ]: A Walk With Purpose: Memoir of a Bioentrepreneur

Links

Tom Russo talks with Ted Seides on the Capital Allocators podcast (LINK)

Walt Mossberg talks with Charlie Rose (video) (LINK)

Related article (Mossberg's last weekly column): The Disappearing Computer

It’s the Little Things That Can Color an Investor’s Outlook - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

The Widening of Amazon’s Moat - by John Huber [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Tesla Sales Fall to Zero in Hong Kong After Tax Break Is Slashed ($) (LINK)

Tesla Inc.’s sales in Hong Kong came to a standstill after authorities slashed a tax break for electric vehicles on April 1, demonstrating how sensitive the company’s performance can be to government incentive programs. 

Not a single newly purchased Tesla model was registered in Hong Kong in April, according to official data from the city’s Transportation Department analyzed by The Wall Street Journal. 

In March, shortly after the tax change was announced and ahead of the April 1 deadline, 2,939 Tesla vehicles were registered there—almost twice as many as in the last six months of 2016. 

...As a result of the new policy, the cost of a basic Tesla Model S four-door car in Hong Kong​has effectively risen to around $130,000 from less than $75,000.

Tesla’s Skid Is Coming at the Worst Time ($) (LINK)

When the story of Tesla is finally written, this week will be seen as a crucial juncture. On Friday, the electric car company started production on its highly anticipated Model 3, one day after its stock briefly fell into a bear market. 

The week’s 13% share-price decline as of Friday morning brings the company’s financial position into fresh focus given its historic reliance on the equity market. At first glance, the company has plenty of cash on hand—more than $4 billion as of March 31. But that is likely to go quickly. 

Tesla’s free cash outflow was $622 million in the first quarter. Since Tesla delivered fewer cars in the second quarter than in the first, there is a decent chance that number will worsen. Tesla said Friday that about 3,500 cars were in transit to customers at the end of June, the lowest tally in five quarters.

How to Live Without Limits – Kyle Maynard (The Tim Ferriss Show) (LINK)

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On sale for $0.99 today (Kindle): Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job

Books of the day [H/T Rick Bookstaber]:

The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report (free PDF HERE)

Wall Street and the Financial Crisis (free in Kindle format, and free PDF HERE)

Links

"In a world in which most investors appear interested in figuring out how to make money every second and chase the idea du jour, there's also something validating about the message that it's okay to do nothing and wait for opportunities to present themselves or to pay off. That's lonely and contrary a lot of the time, but reminding yourself that that's what it takes is quite helpful." -Seth Klarman

Seminars About Long-term Thinking -- Geoffrey B. West: The Universal Laws of Growth and Pace (audio) (LINK)

Related book: Scale: The Universal Laws of Growth, Innovation, Sustainability, and the Pace of Life in Organisms, Cities, Economies, and Companies 

How to Generate Stock Ideas: An Unusual Lesson from a 1939 Book (LINK)

Peer-to-Peer Live: David Rubenstein and Paul Singer (video) (LINK)

Elon Musk: The Man, the Myth, the Risk [WSJ $] (LINK)

Mike Rowe on Efficiency versus Effectiveness - by Cal Newport (LINK)

Tiny Jumping Spiders Can See the Moon - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Microbiologist and NASA astronaut Kate Rubins at the ASM Microbe 2017 keynote session. Moderated by Ed Yong. (video) (LINK)