Links

"It's one thing to have an opinion, and something very different to act as if it's right." --Howard Marks

The CFA Institute's Virtual Conference [Howard Marks, Peter Zeihan, and others] (LINK)

Platforms in an Aggregator World - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

All six parts of Matthew Ball's & Jacob Navok's primer on Epic Games (LINK)

The Rise of TikTok and Understanding Its Parent Company, ByteDance (LINK)

What Is Clubhouse, and Why Does Silicon Valley Care? (LINK)

The 'Don't Worry, Make Money' Strategy Trouncing The Stock Market By 30 Percentage Points (LINK)

Mortgage Credit Tightens, Creating Drag on Any Economic Recovery ($) (LINK)

Could the Pandemic of 2020 Redefine “Enough”? - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Can Remote Work Be Fixed? - by Cal Newport (LINK)

Chapter 1 of Matt Ridley's new book, How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom (LINK)

Ian Cassel Talks MicroCaps and 100-Baggers on the Chain Reaction Podcast (LINK)

Rob Arnott on WealthTrack (video) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Shishir Mehrotra – The Art and Science of the Bundle (LINK)

The Talk Show With John Gruber (podcast): 285: ‘Fahrenheit Truthers’, With Ben Thompson (LINK)

Recode Decode Podcast: Brian Chesky: These 9 weeks were the most stressful in Airbnb’s history (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: SpaceX (LINK)

Masters in Business Podcast: Michael Lewis on the Power of Intelligent Leadership (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): The Coach Effect (LINK)

Tail risk of contagious diseases: a conversation between Nassim Taleb and Pasquale Cirillo (video) (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): 419. 68 Ways to Be Better at Life [with Kevin Kelly] (LINK)

Links

"A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves." --Lao Tzu 

Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway sold a substantial amount of U.S. Bancorp stock this week (LINK)

A good post via the Berkshire Hathaway message board at The Motley Fool [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Full video of Stanley Druckenmiller at The Economic Club of New York (LINK)

Full video of David Tepper's CNBC call-in yesterday (LINK)

A Viral Market Update VIII: A Crisis Test - Value vs Growth, Active vs Passive, Small Cap vs Large! - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Acceptable Flaws - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): #432: Books I’ve Loved — Kevin Kelly (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): 418. What Will College Look Like in the Fall (and Beyond)? (LINK)

Matt Ridley: 23 of Your AMA Questions, Answered (LINK)

Links

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Chris Bloomstran - An Update on Public Markets (LINK)

Related previous post: Semper Augustus Investments Group: 2019 Annual Letter

Grant’s Current Yield Podcast: Class is in session [with Bruce Greenwald] (LINK)

Broyhill Portfolio Update (LINK)

Boyar Quarterly Letter (LINK)

Greenhaven Road Capital Q1 Letter (LINK)

[More Q1 letters can be found HERE and HERE.]

The Investing Edge Podcast: Value Investor’s Edge Live #18: On The Water In The Tanker Markets With Frontline’s CEO (LINK)

Matt Ridley on The Glenn Beck Show on BlazeTV (video) (LINK)

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice - by Kevin Kelly (LINK)

It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.

I Am So Lucky - by Trey Mancini [H/T Linc] (LINK)

What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Links

"GEICO to me is very much like Costco. And one of the reasons it’s succeeded is that they really feel a holy duty to have a wonderful product at a very low price. A lot of people talk that game, but very few have it just right down under the body and soul of the company. But GEICO does, and companies like that do tend to grind ahead over time.... It’s easy to talk the game, but living the game is something else. I mean, it’s against the human nature of many entrepreneurial people to try and get the price down and the service quality up all the time." --Charlie Munger (2014)

How to Hedge a Coronavirus ($) (LINK)

Universa, managed by Mark Spitznagel, a protégé of “The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable” author Nassim Nicholas Taleb, managed a little over $4 billion in assets as of the end of 2018. Claude Bovet, founder of Lionscrest Capital and a long time investor in the fund, estimates that Universa’s tail risk hedging strategy, representing part of its capital, earned more than 1,000% in a matter of days.

Market Corrosion and the Catalyst of COVID-19 - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

How Are You Different? - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Death, Taxes, and Three Other Inevitable Things - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Jeff Lawson – How to Build a Platform (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: Jerry Neumann on Technological Revolutions, Picking Winners, and VC Returns (LINK)

The Knowledge Project Podcast: #77 Mike Maples: Living in the Future (LINK)

Second Order Risk - by Kevin Kelly (LINK)

Coronavirus Is No 1918 Pandemic (LINK)

What’s the Difference Between Dark Matter and Dark Energy? (LINK)

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

"When we own stock, we are not there to try and change people. Our luck in changing them is very low, anyway. In fact, Charlie and I have been on boards of directors where we’re the largest shareholders and we’ve had very little luck in changing behavior. So, we think that if you buy stock in a company, you better not count on the fact that you’re going to change their course of action." --Warren Buffett (2009)

The Financial Lesson of 2008-09 That Most Investors Have Forgotten - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

If your memory minimizes how much you lost in the last bear market, you can easily overestimate how brave you will be in the next one

CFP Board to Tighten Oversight of Financial Advisers ($) (LINK)

Understanding Money (LINK)

The Financial Illiteracy Epidemic (LINK)

The 2019 Stratechery Year in Review – by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Jobs-to-be-Done - by Mike Dariano (Kindle ebook, PDF, Podcast)

What Does an Oil Refinery Do? (podcast) (LINK)

The Cutting Room Files, Part 6: The Future of the China - by Melissa Taylor and Peter Zeihan (LINK)

Related book: Disunited Nations: The Scramble for Power in an Ungoverned World

How to Fix Our Prisons? Let the Public Inside [H/T @RogerLowenstein] (LINK)

Across the Universe, it's the normal galaxies doing all the star-making work - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Extraordinary Routines [H/T @ChrisPavese] (LINK)

A couple of books mentioned by Marc Andreessen in his recent chat with Kevin Kelly: 1) VC: An American History; 2) More from Less: The Surprising Story of How We Learned to Prosper Using Fewer Resources―and What Happens Next

"There is so much that’s false and nutty in modern investment practice, and in modern investment banking, and in modern academia in the business schools, even in the Economics departments, that if you just reduce the nonsense, that’s all I think you should reasonably hope for." --Charlie Munger (2009)

Links

"I would argue that differing people learn in differing ways. With me, I was put together by nature to learn from reading. If some guy’s talking to me, he’s telling me something I don’t know, I don’t want to know, I already know, or he’s doing it too slow or too fast. In reading, I can learn what I want at the speed that works. So, to me, reading is what works for my nature. And to all of you who are at all like me, I say welcome. It’s a nice fraternity.... My father was the type that always did more than his share of the work and took more of his share of the risk. All that kind of example was, of course, very helpful, and you learn it better from a person close to you. But in terms of the conceptual stuff, I’d say I learned it from books. Now, those are fathers in a difference sense." --Charlie Munger (2008)

Marc Andreessen and Kevin Kelly: Why You Should Be Optimistic About the Future (video) (LINK)

How You Can Get Big Gains That Wall Street Can’t - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Acquisition Vehicle EverArc Raises $340 Million ($) (LINK)

EverArc Holdings Ltd., a British Virgin Islands-based acquisition vehicle, said it raised $340 million in an initial offering in London. 

The company said in a filing that it expects to use the proceeds to “acquire a business with a significant proportion of its activities in North America.” It didn’t offer further details. The firm said it expects its shares to begin trading on the London Stock Exchange on Dec. 17. 

EverArc’s board includes Tracy Britt Cool, one of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. Chief Executive Warren Buffett’s key lieutenants in recent years. She announced in September that she plans to leave Berkshire next year to create her own investment firm.

David Perell's Coolest Things Learned in 2019 (LINK)

David Rosenberg on the WealthTrack Podcast (Part 1, Part 2)

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): #401: Gary Keller — How to Focus on the One Important Thing (LINK) ["My life is better when I'm spontaneous after I've done my most important thing. Being spontaneous before that, that's where it becomes a distraction and does me harm." --Gary Keller]

Related book: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results

So, about that 'too massive' black hole… yeah, not so much. - by Phil Plait (LINK)

The Startling Secret of an Invincible Virus - by Ed Yong (LINK)

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

"I will bet you that a lot of years in the future we, or you, will be able to find equities that you understand, or we understand, and that have the probability of returns at 10 percent or greater. Now, once you find a group of equities in that range, and leaving aside the problem of huge sums of money, which we have, then we just buy the most attractive. That usually means the ones we feel the surest about, I mean, as a practical matter. There’s just some businesses that possess economic characteristics that make their future prospects, far out, far more predictable than others. There’s all kinds of businesses that you just can’t remotely predict what they’ll earn, and you just have to forget about them. So, we have, over time, gotten very partial to the businesses where we think the predictability is high. But we still want a threshold return of 10 percent, which is not that great after-tax, anyway." --Warren Buffett (2003)

"Everything we do comes back to opportunity cost. But it, to some extent — in fact, to some considerable extent — we are guessing at our future opportunity cost. Warren is basically saying that he’s guessing that he’ll have opportunities in due course to put out money at pretty attractive rates of return, and therefore, he’s not going to waste a lot of firepower now at lower returns. But that’s an opportunity cost calculation. And if interest rates were to more or less permanently settle at 1 percent or something like that, and Warren were to reappraise his notions of future opportunity cost, he would change the numbers. It’s like [economist John Maynard] Keynes said, 'What do you do when you change your view of the facts? Well, you change your conduct.' But so far at least, we have hurdles in our mind which...involve, implicitly, future opportunity cost." --Charlie Munger (2003)

Who Is On the Other Side? - by Michael Mauboussin (LINK)

Safal Niveshak's Wall of Ideas (LINK)

Part 2 and Part 3 of the Money Control interview with Sanjay Bakshi [H/T Linc]

Skin in the Game: the Tradition of the Captain and His Ship - by Frank Martin (LINK)

The Cost of Apple News  - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

AR Will Spark the Next Big Tech Platform—Call It Mirrorworld - by Kevin Kelly (LINK)

Susan Crawford on the Community Broadband Bits Podcast (LINK)

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

Scott Adams and Naval Ravikant have another chat (video) (LINK)

Conversations with Tyler (podcast): Jordan Peterson on Mythology, Fame, and Reading People (LINK)

Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson Podcast -- Home Cooking: Technology Worth Savoring (LINK)

A review of A Zen Way of Baseball by Sadaharu Oh and David Falkner (LINK)

Small Teams of Scientists Have Fresher Ideas - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Humans, Gods and Technology - VPRO documentary - 2017

Nobody knows how our world will look like in 25 years. Perhaps our work is taken over by autonomous robots and we become the slaves of the technology we have created ourselves. The big questions about the future of man and his relation to technology are presented to two important thinkers of the moment: Kevin Kelly and Yuval Noah Harari.

Link to video

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Related books:

Homo Deus - by Yuval Noah Harari

The Inevitable - by Kevin Kelly