Showing posts with label Michael Mauboussin. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Michael Mauboussin. Show all posts

Sunday, April 19, 2020

Links

"He who moves not forward, goes backward." --Goethe

IT'S TIME TO BUILD - by Marc Andreessen (LINK)

Dispersion and Alpha Conversion: How Dispersion Creates the Opportunity to Express Skill - by Michael J. Mauboussin & Dan Callahan (LINK)

Masters in Business Podcast: James Montier on Fear and Investment (LINK)

Renaissance's $10 Billion Medallion Fund Gains 24% Year to Date in Tumultuous Market ($) (LINK)

Airbnb Defied the Odds of Startup Success. How Will It Survive a Pandemic? ($) (LINK)

Calpers Unwound Hedges Just Before March’s Epic Stock Selloff ($) (LINK)

Case Study of Tidewater and The Capital Cycle by John Chew (LINK)

The Forgotten Man - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

The Day of Reckoning for Private Equity - by Ted Seides (LINK)

Bloomberg Invest Talks: A Conversation with Ray Dalio (video) (LINK)

Kyle Bass: US & China Fallout & Recovery from COVID 19; Hong Kong Looming Banking Crisis (video) (LINK)

Why Walking Matters—Now More Than Ever (LINK)

Radiolab Podcast: The Cataclysm Sentence (LINK)
One day in 1961, the famous physicist Richard Feynman stepped in front of a Caltech lecture hall and posed this question to a group of undergraduate students: “If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence was passed on to the next generation of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words?” Now, Feynman had an answer to his own question - a good one. But his question got the entire team at Radiolab wondering, what did his sentence leave out? So we posed Feynman’s cataclysm question to some of our favorite writers, artists, historians, futurists - all kinds of great thinkers. We asked them, “What’s the one sentence you would want to pass on to the next generation that would contain the most information in the fewest words?” What came back was an explosive collage of what it means to be alive right here and now, and what we want to say before we go.

Monday, March 23, 2020

Links

BIN There, Done That: How to Reduce the Sources of Forecasting Error - by Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: Michael Mauboussin - Finding Value in a Crisis (LINK)

Berkshire Hathaway and the Coronavirus Crash (LINK)

Preserving Optionality: Preparing for the Unknown (LINK)

Fed Unveils Major Expansion of Market Intervention ($) (LINK)
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell’s whatever-it-takes moment arrived Monday. 
The central bank signaled it would do practically anything—extending loans to big and small businesses, backstopping funds to municipalities and purchasing hundreds of billions of dollars of government debt—to help an American economy in a race against time.
A Viral Market Meltdown IV: Preparing for a post-virus World - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Francis Collins speaks about the coronavirus, his faith, and an unusual friendship. [H/T @pcordway] (LINK)

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For Audible Members, the current sale ($6.95 each) has many titles of note:



The Evolution of Everything by Matt Ridley

The Great Mental Models by Shane Parrish

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein

The Clayton M. Christensen Reader

Platform Revolution

Sam Walton: Made in America

Basic Economics, Fifth Edition by Thomas Sowell

The Creature from Jekyll Island: A Second Look at the Federal Reserve by G. Edward Griffin

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer

Proof: The Science of Booze by Adam Rogers

The Federalist Papers

The History of the United States, 2nd Edition (The Great Courses)

The Vital Question: Energy, Evolution, and the Origins of Complex Life by Nick Lane

The Origin and Evolution of Earth: From the Big Bang to the Future of Human Existence (The Great Courses)

The Joy of Science (The Great Courses)

The Disappearing Spoon by Sam Kean

The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time by Jonathan Weiner

I Contain Multitudes by Ed Yong

Joseph Campbell and The Power of Myth: Programs 1-6

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

Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

Billions & Billions by Carl Sagan

Spillover by David Quammen

Monday, October 14, 2019

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)

Thursday, June 6, 2019

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)

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Links

"In 1928 and 1929 there occurred a wholesale and disastrous relaxation of the standards of safety previously observed by the reputable houses of issue. This was shown in the sale of many new offerings of inferior grade, aided in part by questionable methods of presenting the facts to the public. The general collapse in values affected these unsound and unseasoned issues with particular severity, so that the losses suffered by investors in many of these flotations have been little short of appalling." --Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (1934 edition of Security Analysis)

Bill Gates: Grilling and chilling with Warren Buffett (video) (LINK)

Five Lessons from History - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Buy And Verify - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Why Your Mortgage is So Complicated: The History and Opportunity of the Modern Mortgage (video) (LINK)

Risks and Opportunities in the Battery Supply Chain (LINK)

The end of mobile - by Benedict Evans (LINK)

Investing in the Podcast Ecosystem in 2019 (LINK)

What Amazon Might Want With Boost Mobile (LINK)

Dyson Patent Applications Offer Hints at Its Electric Car (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends: Overcoming Biases for Effective Decision-Making (with Michael Mauboussin) (LINK)

a16z Podcast: The Economics of Expensive Medicines (LINK)

AI: Hype vs. Reality Podcast: AI That Drives (LINK)
Self-driving cars: the greatest automotive industry disruption since Henry Ford’s Model-T assembly line… just around the corner. Right? That’s the hype—but is it reality? Are we mere blocks away from our neighborhood streets and freeways being filled with autonomous cars? Find out in the premiere episode of AI: Hype vs. Reality, a new podcast and video series in which Jessica Chobot, veteran host of Nerdist News and Bizarre States, puts present-day artificial intelligence technology to the test in real-world situations. And separates the hype from reality.
Masters in Business Podcast: Scott Galloway Discusses the Algebra of Happiness (LINK)
Related book: The Algebra of Happiness
Freakonomics Radio: 379. How to Change Your Mind (LINK)

Why Hundreds of Puffins Washed Up Dead on an Alaskan Beach - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Outspoken Oncology Podcast: Physician, Scientist, and Author Siddhartha Mukherjee (LINK)
Related books: 1) The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer; 2) The Gene: An Intimate History 
Related documentary: Cancer: The Emperor of All Maladies (3-part Ken Burns documentary, and free for Amazon Prime members)
Science Friday Podcast: SciFri Extra: A Relatively Important Eclipse (LINK)
This week marks the 100th anniversary of an eclipse that forever changed physics and our understanding of the universe. 
In May 1919, scientists set out for Sobral, Brazil, and Príncipe, an island off the west coast of Africa, to photograph the momentarily starry sky during a total eclipse. Their scientific aim was to test whether the sun’s gravity would indeed bend light rays from faraway stars, as predicted by Einstein’s theory of general relativity. After analyzing the data from the brief minutes of darkness, they declared Einstein correct. 
Carlo Rovelli, physicist and author, tells Ira the story.

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Links

"It’s better to pay attention to something that is being scorned than something that’s being championed." --Warren Buffett (2005

What Warren Buffett's Teacher Would Make of Today's Market - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

A Thread on Diversification - by Sanjay Bakshi (LINK)

Amazon's Size Is Becoming a Problem---for Amazon ($) (LINK)

Degrees of Confidence - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Think Again – a Big Think Podcast: Jared Diamond (LINK)
Related book: Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis
Capital Allocators Podcast: Michael Mauboussin – Who’s on the Other Side (LINK)
Related paper: Who Is On the Other Side?
Exponent Podcast: A Perfect Meal (LINK)

Aswath Damodaran chats with Meb Faber (podcast) (LINK)

Acquired Podcast: The Uber IPO (LINK)

Mark Zuckerberg & Yuval Noah Harari in Conversation (video) (LINK)

When the first stars in the Universe exploded, they really exploded - by Phil Plait (LINK)

TED Talk: Sleep is your superpower | Matt Walker (LINK)

[I'm a bit late to these, but...] The Bruce Lee Library episodes of the Bruce Lee Podcast look especially worth checking out.... Such as the episode on the Tao Te Ching and the episode on Krishnamurti's Commentaries on Living.

"Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, add what is essentially your own." --Bruce Lee


Wednesday, April 17, 2019

Links

"The history of much of which we don’t like in modern corporate capitalism comes from an unreasonable expectation, communicated from headquarters, that [corporate] earnings have to go up with no volatility and great regularity. That kind of an expectation from headquarters is not just the kissing cousin of evil. It’s the blood brother of evil. And we just don’t need that blood brother in our headquarters." --Charlie Munger (2005)

 "Businesses do not meet expectations quarter after quarter and year after year. It just isn’t in the nature of running businesses. And, in our view, people that predict precisely what the future will be are either kidding investors, or they’re kidding themselves, or they’re kidding both. Charlie and I have been around the culture, sometimes on the board, where the ego of the CEO became very involved in meeting predictions which were impossible, really, over time. And everybody in the organization knew, because they were very public about it, what these predictions were and they knew that their CEO was going to look bad if they weren’t met. And that can lead to a lot of bad things." --Warren Buffett (2005)

Michael Mauboussin: Looking for Easy Games in Bonds (LINK)

A compilation of Q1 investor letters [H/T @MineSafety] (LINK)

CNBC’s interview with ValueAct’s Jeff Ubben (video) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Katherine Collins – Impact and ESG Investing (LINK)

Against the Rules with Michael Lewis (podcast): The Alex Kogan Experience (LINK)

WorkLife with Adam Grant (podcast): Bouncing Back from Rejection (LINK)

The Knowledge Project with Shane Parrish (podcast): Catalyzing Success (LINK)

Business Wars Podcast: Ferrari vs. Lamborghini (Part 1, Part 2)

Edge #535: Machines Like Me - A Talk By Ian McEwan (LINK)

The world’s deadliest shapeshifter - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Exploding Aphids Plaster Holes in Their Home With Bodily Fluids - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

Links

"It’s absolutely imperative in our view, and I think we’re almost the only insurance company like this — certainly public — in the world that sends the absolutely unequivocal message to the people that are associated with us, that they will never be laid off because of lack of volume, and therefore, we don’t want them to write one bit of bad business.... I mean, you can’t run an auto company without having layoffs. You know, you can’t run a steel company that’s this way. But this is the right way to run an insurance company. And that’s why these cookie-cutter approaches to employment practices, or bonuses, and all that are nonsense. You have to think through the situation that faces you in a given industry with its given competitive conditions, and its own economic characteristics." --Warren Buffett (2004)

Apple’s Services Event – by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Spotting Investment Opportunities In Out Of Favor Industries - by Jonathan Boyar (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Michael Mauboussin – The Four Sources of Alpha (LINK)
Related papers: 1) "Who Is On the Other Side?"; 2) "The Base Rate Book"; 3) "What Does an EV/EBITDA Multiple Mean?"; Syllabus: Security Analysis - Spring 2019
WorkLife with Adam Grant (podcast): The Perils of Following Your Career Passion (LINK)

Joe Rogan’s Galaxy Brain [H/T @karaswisher] (LINK)

My Friend’s Cancer Taught Me About a Hole in Our Health System - by Aaron E. Carroll [H/T @WallStCynic] (LINK)

Biggest T. rex Ever Discovered Was Covered in Battle Scars (LINK)

We should discuss soil as much as we talk about coal - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Book of the day (related to the above, and recommended by Jeremy Grantham over the years): Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations

Wednesday, February 13, 2019

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)

Friday, February 1, 2019

Links

"Inflation is always a latent danger to an economy. I mean I always think of inflation as being in remission at all times, because it’s something that has a cause that will recur, in terms of human behavior, from time to time, I think, in terms of how legislatures behave and governments behave. So, I think that the probability of high inflation at some point during the next, say, 20 or 30 years is — it’s not a low probability." --Warren Buffett (2003)

The syllabi of Michael Mauboussin's class at Columbia (HERE) and Jerry Neumann’s class at Columbia (HERE) have some great reading recommendations.

Oaktree Capital's Howard Marks speak from the Context Summit – Jan. 30, 2019 (video) (LINK)

Howard Marks on CNBC (LINK)

Origins of Greed and Fear - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

New Details on Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, JPMorgan Health Venture Emerge in Court Battle ($) (LINK)

Making sense of insider buys/sells - by Chris Mayer (LINK)

MMT: The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - by Cullen Roche (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter - February 2019: Another Zimbabwe In the Offing? (LINK)

Fire in Venezuela, Part III of, um, II - by Peter Zeihan (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: 161 — Vigilante Justice (LINK)

American Innovations Podcast: Rubber | Things Heat Up | 2 (LINK)

TED Talk: An astronaut's story of curiosity, perspective and change | Leland Melvin (LINK) [Melvin was also one of the astronauts featured in the excellent National Geographic series "One Strange Rock."]

Astronomers accidentally discover a nearby galaxy in a Hubble image! - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Ancient-human species mingled in Siberia’s hottest property for 300,000 years (LINK)

The Special Sleep That Kicks In During a Sickness - by Ed Yong (LINK)

The Wild Experiment That Showed Evolution in Real Time - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Thursday, November 8, 2018

Links

I Can’t See Berkshire’s Bottom Line - by Donald E. Graham ($) (LINK)
A new accounting rule makes it difficult for investors to make sense of annual reports.
Buffett’s Underrated Investment Attribute - by John Huber (LINK)

Making Sense Of Multiples: Mauboussin On EV/EBITDA (LINK)

Once an Optimist on U.S.-China Relations, Henry Paulson Delivers a Sobering Message ($) (LINK)
The former Treasury secretary warns that Chinese behavior and U.S. miscalculation could bring down an ‘economic Iron Curtain’ between the two global superpowers
On Physician Burnout and the Plight of the Modern Knowledge Worker - by Cal Newport (LINK)

Eric Schmidt chats with Tyler Cowen (podcast) (LINK)

Hard Words: Why aren't kids being taught to read? (LINK)
Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail.
Book of the day (was released this week): Merger Masters: Tales of Arbitrage - by Kate Welling and Mario Gabelli

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

Links

I'm back in Charlotte after a great couple of weeks traveling. As often happens, I brought way more to read with me than I actually had time to read, but I did catch up on some podcasts, started a couple of new things, and was able to get through Bethany McLean's latest book, Saudi America, which I thought was especially good, well-balanced, and timely. It pairs well with Jeremy Grantham's "The Race of Our Lives Revisited," as well as the shale section in the first part of Peter Zeihan's book The Absent Superpower.

One of the Grant's podcasts also mentioned two books on cycles—one by Jim Grant himself, The Trouble With Prosperity, as well as Economics and the Public Welfare by Benjamin Anderson, which Amazon tells me I bought in 2012 and yet wasn't kind enough to also let me know where I seem to have placed it. And those books both reminded me that we are only a couple of weeks away from the book many of us have been eagerly awaiting: Mastering the Market Cycle by Howard Marks.

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"Machines are there to help people, not replace them. Humans should never wait for machines. Machines wait for people. And so in this way, I find myself so far outside of the world of technology. I see so much 'technology over everything' kind of thinking where those people are like, it’s all there....I don’t even think there’s such a thing as, truly, the technology industry, right? It’s a weird construct. It’s like, technology is a...it’s not an industry. It’s not even a strategy. It’s sort of a tactic. It’s like a tool that you use to give people more skills." --Tobi Lütke

Tobi Lütke, founder and CEO of Shopify, talks with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project Podcast (LINK) [In addition to the quote above, this conversation also has some great insights on culture and on creating the right environment at a company.]

Predicting the Future with Bayes’s Theorem (LINK)

You Can Time The Market, Just Not All The Time - by Jason Zweig (LINK)
Howard Marks has made a few market calls in his day, but warns that it’s harder than it looks
How Jim Chanos Uses Cynicism, Chutzpah — and a Secret Twitter Account — to Take on Markets (and Elon Musk) (LINK)

Grant’s Interest Rate Observer's piece on municipal bonds, featuring Chris Pavese of Broyhill Asset Management (LINK)

Amazon Data Leaks and Bribes Have Consequences (LINK)

How to keep up progress on global health - by Bill Gates (LINK)

For Real Vision subscribers, Michael Mauboussin had a video released discussing "The Five Behavioral Mistakes Investors Make" (LINK), and the final episode of The Jim Grant Series also aired, which was an interview with Dan Rasmussen (LINK) [If you're not a subscriber and would to join or take a free trial, you can sign up HERE.]

Ben Thompson's article from last week, as well as his latest:

The iPhone Franchise (LINK)

The European Union Versus the Internet (LINK)

And Ed Yong has continued his productive ways, writing about the latest and/or more interesting science stories of the day...

Bacteria in a Dinosaur Bone Reignite a Heated Debate (LINK)

The Genes That Never Go Out of Style (LINK)

The Three Major Cartels Behind the Downfall of Africa’s Elephants (LINK)

Wiping Out the Brain’s Retired Cells Prevents a Hallmark of Alzheimer's (LINK)

Thursday, July 5, 2018

Links

 "I don’t look at the primary message...of [Ben] Graham, really, as being...anything to do with formulas. In other words, there’s three important aspects to it.... One is your attitude toward the stock market. That’s covered in chapter eight of The Intelligent Investor. If you’ve got that attitude toward the market, you start ahead of 99 percent of all people who are operating in the market. So, you have an enormous advantage. Second principle is the margin of safety, which again, gives you an enormous edge, and actually has applicability far beyond just the investment world. And then the third is just looking at stocks as businesses, which gives you an entirely different view than most people that are in the market. And with those three sort of philosophical benchmarks, the exact — the evaluation technique you use is not really that important. Because you’re not going to go way off the track, whether you use Walter’s approach — Walter Schloss’s — or mine, or whatever." --Warren Buffett

1991 Barron's interview with Seth Klarman [H/T @NeckarValue] (LINK)

If You Say Something Is “Likely,” How Likely Do People Think It Is? - by Andrew Mauboussin and Michael J. Mauboussin (LINK)

Investing and the Art of Catching Falling Knives - by Vishal Khandelwal (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter, July 2018: The Italian Job (LINK)

29 Life-Changing Lessons That Will Make You Successful And More Strategic - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Your company’s culture is not unique, psychologist Adam Grant says (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: The Future of Media, with Niel Roberson (LINK)

Grant's Podcast: Nobody knows notin' (LINK)

American Innovations Podcast: Nuclear Energy | Meltdown | 4 (LINK)

Revisionist History Podcast: The Imaginary Crimes of Margit Hamosh (LINK)

TED Talk: How we're saving one of Earth's last wild places | Steve Boyes (LINK)

A Game-Changing AI Tool for Tracking Animal Movements - by Ed Yong (LINK)

How to Grow Old: Bertrand Russell on What Makes a Fulfilling Life (LINK)

"The best Armour of Old Age is a well spent life preceding it; a Life employed in the Pursuit of useful Knowledge, in honourable Actions and the Practice of Virtue; in which he who labours to improve himself from his Youth, will in Age reap the happiest Fruits of them; not only because these never leave a Man, not even in the extremest Old Age; but because a Conscience bearing Witness that our Life was well-spent, together with the Remembrance of past good Actions, yields an unspeakable Comfort to the Soul." --Cicero (via "Praising Old Age" in Poor Charlie's Almanack)

Monday, May 7, 2018

Links

FULL TRANSCRIPT: BILLIONAIRE INVESTOR WARREN BUFFETT SPEAKS WITH CNBC’S BECKY QUICK ON "SQUAWK BOX" (LINK)

Charlie Munger's Yahoo Finance interview (LINK)

10 Insights from the 2018 Berkshire Hathaway Weekend [H/T @jasonzweigwsj] (LINK)

Warren Buffett’s Lieutenants Are Increasingly Running Berkshire (LINK)

Graham & Doddsville: Spring 2018 (LINK)

Stan Druckenmiller's comments at the 2018 Alexander Hamilton Award Dinner [H/T @MulletCap] (LINK)

Confronting Tech's Titans: Schooling Wall Street on Silicon Valley | Scott Galloway Interview (Real Vision video) (LINK)

The Very First Animal Appeared Amid an Explosion of DNA (LINK)

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Audible's latest sale, which ends May 10th, has some good titles on sale. Some of note are below:

The House of Morgan: An American Banking Dynasty and the Rise of Modern Finance - by Ron Chernow

The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves - by Matt Ridley

Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life - by Anne Lamott

Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea - by Barbara Demick

Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy - by Sheryl Sandberg and Adam Grant 

No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II - by Doris Kearns Goodwin

Into Thin Air - by Jon Krakauer

Friday, February 9, 2018

Links

Michael Mauboussin on the Future of Active Management (LINK)

Polleit & Riechert Investment Management's H2 2017 Letter (LINK)

Why Competitive Advantages Die - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Has Anyone Seen the President? - by Michael Lewis (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Hot Hand Fallacy (LINK)

Jimmy Buffett Does Not Live the Jimmy Buffett Lifestyle (LINK)
He’s so rich that he’s done a 23andMe DNA test with Warren Buffett because in addition to sharing a last name, the mutual ability to sustain such mind-boggling wealth is so otherworldly that it could surely only be the result of the same extremely rare and fortunate genetic mutation. The test showed no biological relationship, but they stayed friends. Jimmy calls Warren “Uncle Warren” and Warren, who has been a business mentor to Jimmy, calls him “Cousin Jimmy.” 
Uncle Warren gave Cousin Jimmy some advice while he was growing the Margaritaville empire: “Management in place,” he said. Find a good business that makes sense, and make sure there are good people running it. Jimmy Buffett didn’t just want to license his name around. He wanted to work only with people who would give the customer a great experience: “If you like what I do in goods and services, if we make you feel better after a hard day of work and you want to come blow off some steam and you pay for that, I’m going to give you your money’s worth and have a good time doing it.”
Amazon to Launch Delivery Service That Would Vie With FedEx, UPS ($) (LINK)
Amazon.com Inc. is preparing to launch a delivery service for businesses, positioning it to directly compete with United Parcel Service Inc. and FedEx Corp. 
Dubbed “Shipping with Amazon,” or SWA, the new service will entail the tech giant picking up packages from businesses and shipping them to consumers, according to people familiar with the matter.
Facebook’s Desperate Smoke Screen (LINK)

The Rise of China and the Fall of the ‘Free Trade’ Myth [H/T @ProfSteveKeen] (LINK)

Natural gas: the longest bear markets with the greatest over-supply always lead to long bull markets with shortages. (LINK)

Macro Voices Podcast: The week short vol imploded (LINK) [Chris Cole, whose interviews and papers I've linked to the last couple of days, also joins the show for an update, at the 50:38 mark.]

Exponent Podcast: Episode 140 — The Products They Built Along the Way (LINK)

Talks at GS – Jonathan Haidt: The Psychology of Partisanship & Ethical Leadership (video) [H/T Tamas] (LINK)

What Scientists Learned From Putting 3-D Glasses on Praying Mantises - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Tuesday, January 23, 2018

Links

The Playing Field - by Graham Duncan [H/T @AlexRubalcava] (LINK)
Over the last decade, I’ve interviewed and assessed more than 5,000 investment managers. One of the most important things I’ve learned in that process is what separates the great investors from the rest. The great ones view investing as a game, and they know exactly what game they’re playing. It brings to mind an observation from the philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah: “In life the challenge is not so much to figure out how best to play the game; the challenge is to figure out what game you’re playing.”
Amazon Go and the Future - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Michael Mauboussin returns for another chat with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project Podcast (LINK)

Ray Dalio on CNBC (LINK)

Robert Shiller on CNBC (Video 1, Video 2)

Elliott Is Doing Pretty Nicely in the Power Business [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Burger King Owner Appoints Tech Czar in Bid to Modernize Chain [H/T Linc] (LINK)

The Meb Faber Show (podcast): Dan Rasmussen - “The Crown Jewel of the Alternative Universe is Private Equity" [H/T Steve] (LINK) [This podcast has given me some stock-screening ideas, especially as it relates to the small and micro-cap world of investing.]
He tells us that PE has been considered the crown jewel of the alternative world, then provides a wonderful recap of its evolution – how this market outperformed for many years (think Mitt Romney in the 80s, when he was buying businesses for 4-6 times EBIT), yet its outsized returns led to endowments flooding the market with capital ($200 - $300 billion per year, which was close to triple the pre-Global Financial Crisis average), driving up valuations. Today, deals are getting done at valuations that are nowhere near as low as in the early days. And so, the outsized returns simply haven’t existed. Yet that hasn’t stopped institutional investors from believing they will.
Invest Like the Best podcast: Dr. Ben Hunt - The Three-Body Portfolio (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Beyond CES: Connected Home Devices, Voice, and More (LINK)

Heraclitus, the weeping philosopher (LINK)

Tuesday, January 9, 2018

Links

'Moneyball' Author Michael Lewis: How I Knew When to Quit a Fancy Wall Street Job to Follow My Dream [H/T Linc] (LINK)
Related book: When to Jump: If the Job You Have Isn't the Life You Want (the audiobook looks like it is read by those who contributed stories to the book)
Ray Dalio’s Secret Sauce – The Truth Machine and The Good Life (LINK)
Related book: Principles
Invest Like the Best Podcast: Creative Investing, with CoVenture’s Ali Hamed (LINK)

Capital Allocators Podcast: Michael Mauboussin – Active Challenges, Rational Decisions and Team Dynamics (LINK)

How do alligators survive the winter weather in a frozen pond? (LINK)

Great Barrier Reef: rising temperatures turning green sea turtles female [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Super-Black Is the New Black - by Ed Yong (LINK)
Feathers on birds of paradise contain light-trapping nanotechnology that makes some of the deepest blacks in the world.

Friday, December 29, 2017

Links

The latest from Michael Mauboussin [in his new role]: How Well Do You Compare? (LINK)

A Fireside Chat with Jim Chanos & Dan Gilbert (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Argentina Wants Cheap Flights—But Not Too Cheap [H/T Phil] (LINK)

How I Built This Podcast -- The Home Depot: Arthur Blank (LINK)
Related book: Built from Scratch: How a Couple of Regular Guys Grew The Home Depot from Nothing to $30 Billion
How the Animal Kingdom Sleeps - by Ed Yong (video) (LINK)

Wednesday, June 7, 2017

Links

Testing Mattresses with Warren Buffett - By Bill Gates (LINK)

Habits vs Goals: A Look at the Benefits of a Systematic Approach to Life (LINK)

Murray Stahl’s Presentation on Value Creation from Value Destruction (video) (LINK)

Greatest Hits From Michael Mauboussin & Meir Statman - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

The Unsung Heroes of Investing - by Phil Huber [H/T @jasonzweigwsj] (LINK)

An In Depth Look At The Greatest Minds Of Investing (podcast) (LINK)
Related book: The Great Minds of Investing - by William Green
Legendary short seller Jim Chanos tells us what he sees for the markets this year (video) [H/T Barry Ritholtz] (LINK)

Bill Gross talks about investing (video) (LINK)

Eric Schmidt chats with Reid Hoffman (podcast) (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Modernizing Government Services, from Food Stamps to Foster Care (LINK)

Cialdini Asks: Dan Ariely (video) (LINK)

Mark Sisson's Definitive Guide to the Ketogenic Diet (LINK)
Related book (to be released in October): The Keto Reset Diet
Scientists Have Found the Oldest Known Human Fossils - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Lawrence M. Krauss: "The Greatest Story Ever Told...So Far" | Talks at Google (LINK)
Related book: The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far: Why Are We Here?

Tuesday, May 16, 2017

Links

A good 14-part Twitter thread from Bill Gates, with advice to college graduates (LINK)
Related book: The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
Michael Mauboussin on the Invest Like the Best podcast (LINK)

From Jobs to Flying Cars: An Interview with Marc Andreessen (audio) (LINK)

Morgan Creek Capital Management's Q1 Letter (LINK)

Amazon’s 49,000% Gain: The Most ‘Super’ of ‘Superstocks’ Since 1926 - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

20 Years On, Amazon and Jeff Bezos Prove Naysayers Wrong - by Andrew Ross Sorkin (LINK)
Twenty years ago this week, Amazon.com went public. 
Skeptics of Jeff Bezos, the company’s founder, have spent the better part of the past two decades second-guessing and vilifying him: He has been described as “a monopolist,” “literary enemy No. 1,” “a notorious international tax dodger,” impossible, a ruthless boss and — more than once — “Lex Luthor.” His company used to routinely be described as Amazon.con. 
But you know what? 
Here we are, 20 years later, and Mr. Bezos has an authentic, legitimate claim on having changed the way we live.
The Innovator’s Dilemma Hits Higher Ed [H/T Matt] (LINK)
Last month’s announcement that Indiana’s Purdue University would acquire the for-profit Kaplan University shocked the world of higher education. The Purdue faculty are up in arms. The merger faces a series of regulatory obstacles. And it’s unclear whether the “New U,” as the entity is temporarily named, can be operationally viable or financially successful. 
But Purdue’s president, Mitch Daniels, is willing to give it a shot. 
The venture is unexpected, unconventional and smart. The nature of the partnership—in which Kaplan will transfer its assets to Purdue, a public university—is unprecedented. It’s also a rare instance of attempted self-disruption.
The Manual of Ideas' interview with Alex Rubalcava of Stage Venture Partners (LINK)

How to Invent the Future with Alan Kay (videos) (Part 1, Part 2)

Grant's Interest Rate Observer has put some free material online HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Everyone's Got a Bill Belichick Story [H/T @PeterAttiaMD] (LINK)

TED Talk - Lucy Kalanithi: What makes life worth living in the face of death (LINK)
Related book: When Breath Becomes Air
A Remote Paradise Island Is Now a Plastic Junkyard (LINK)