Links

"Our model is a seamless web of trust that’s deserved on both sides. That’s what we’re aiming for. The Hollywood model, where everyone has a contract, and no trust is deserved on either side, is not what we want at all." --Charlie Munger (2009)

Howard Marks on Bloomberg TV discussing his latest memo (video) (LINK)

Sam Zell on CNBC (video) (LINK)

The End of Pay-TV - by Matthew Ball (LINK)

How To Manage Change (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: David Samra - Leveraging Fundamentals to Remain Relevant (LINK)

One Doctor’s Life on the Coronavirus Front Lines. ‘If We Fail, What Happens to You All?’ ($) (LINK)

Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020 - Sequoia Capital Publication (LINK)

Scott Adams and Naval Ravikant talk about Coronavirus (video) (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show (podcast): #413: Tyler Cowen on Rationality, COVID-19, Talismans, and Life on the Margins (LINK)

Freeman Dyson’s Letters Offer Another Glimpse of Genius (LINK)

Links

The Bus Ticket Theory of Genius - by Paul Graham (LINK)

It’s Slow Going, but Stuff Like Wheat and Oil Can Spice Up Your Returns - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

The best time to get interested in an investing strategy is when its performance is at its worst. By that standard, commodities are starting to look intriguing.

Everyone Gets Paid in CBS-Viacom Except Shareholders [H/T @JohnHuber72] (LINK)

Health Care Without (much) Government - by Russ Roberts (LINK)

How to Reverse Engineer Biology (LINK)

Full Disclosure Podcast: The Overachieving Underwriter [H/T @rationalwalk] (LINK)

Markel Corp vice chairman Steve Markel on the insurer and investment shop as it approaches its 90th year in business. Worth $15 million when its shares debuted on Wall Street in 1986, Markel Corp is now a Fortune 500 member in 18 countries that is valued at more than $16 billion.

Grant’s Current Yield Podcast: It’s a gusher (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: 178 — More Ergonomic (LINK)

The Knowledge Project Podcast -- Scott Adams: Avoiding Loserthink (LINK)

One Man's Wild Quest to Reach the Bottom of Every Ocean [H/T @MebFaber] (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)

Links

"Charlie and I don’t think about the market. And Ben [Graham] didn’t very much. I think he made a mistake to occasionally try and place a value on it. We look at individual businesses. And we don’t think of stocks as little items that wiggle around on the paper and that have charts attached to them. We think of them as parts of businesses.... I know of no one that has been successful at...[making] a lot of money predicting the actions of the market itself. I know a lot of people who have done well picking businesses and buying them at sensible prices. And that’s what we’re hoping to do." --Warren Buffett (1999)

What Exactly Happened to David Einhorn? (LINK)

The Hidden Risk of Passive and Index Hugging - by Rick Bookstaber (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Platforms Versus Aggregators (LINK)

Eric Topol reviews Bad Blood, John Carreyrou's book on the Theranos saga (LINK)

Scott Adams talks to Naval Ravikant (video) (LINK)

How the Enlightenment Ends - by Henry A. Kissinger (LINK)

How Tom Wolfe Changed My Life - by Scott Kelly (LINK)

Related book: The Right Stuff

"Why — that’s the most important question of all. And it doesn’t apply just to investment. It applies to the whole human experience. If you want to get smart, the question you’ve got to keep asking is: Why? Why? Why? Why? And you have to relate the answers to a structure of deep theory. And you’ve got to know the main theories. And it’s mildly laborious, but it’s also a lot of fun." --Charlie Munger (1999)

Links

"A person who knows little likes to talk, and one who knows much mostly keeps silent. This is because a person who knows little thinks that everything he knows is important, and wants to tell everyone. A person who knows much also knows that there is much more he doesn't know. That's why he speaks only when it is necessary to speak, and when he is not asked questions, he keeps his silence." - (After) Jean Jacques Rousseau (via A Calendar of Wisdom)

Filters in Harmony (What Warren Buffett, Charlie Munger, Scott Adams, and Jordan Peterson have in common) (video) (LINK)

Overcoming Your Demons - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Amazon is Relentless (LINK)

FT Alphachat podcast: Should Amazon be broken up? (LINK)

Lina Khan, a writer and fellow at New America, joins FT Alphaville's Alex Scaggs to discuss how the tech company's unique organisational structure and business strategy raise possible antitrust issues that current law isn't particularly well designed to address. It's the subject of Khan's paper, "Amazon's antitrust paradox", recently published in the Yale Law Journal.

Apple’s New Open Office Sparks Revolt (LINK)

Role-Play Screening - by Eric Cinnamond (LINK)

The Absolute Return Letter, September 2017: Two Sides of the Same Coin (LINK)

Rarely have equity bulls and bears disagreed more than they do at present. We look at both the bull case and the bear case, and then we introduce a longer-term structural angle, which is largely ignored by both bulls and bears. This third side of the coin is based on the fact that inflation is structurally low, and that central banks may be committing a serious policy error by targeting 2% inflation, when it is almost impossible to drive inflation to those levels.

Origin Stories podcast: Ancestor (LINK)

Just recently, the news media announced the discovery of a 13 million-year-old fossil ape called Alesi. This remarkable fossil was found in Kenya, and it’s from a time period where there’s a big blank spot in the fossil record of our family tree. Alesi tells us something new about the very early evolution of apes and even shows what the common ancestor of humans and all the other living apes might have looked like. In this episode, Isaiah Nengo tells the story behind the discovery.

The Parasite That Wires Plants Together - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"While it's true that only large positions can get you into trouble, it's equally true that only large positions can make a big contribution. (This is one of the great dilemmas in investing.)" -Howard Marks (Source)

Apollo Asia Fund: the manager's report for 2Q17 (LINK)

We are patient with companies which are having short-term difficulties - perhaps to a fault, but when managers respond to each setback with sensible steps, the results are usually good in the end, and we sometimes learn more about the business characteristics during such periods. When our confidence dwindles, however, we pay more and more attention, and may trim; if it is lost, we try to exit completely, rather than trying to be too clever about the price.

Conversations with Tyler (podcast): Atul Gawande on Priorities, Big and Small (LINK)

How Digital Platforms Increase Inequality (LINK)

Waking Up podcast: Sam Harris talks with Geoffrey West (LINK)

Related book: Scale

Waking Up podcast: Sam Harris talks with Scott Adams (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show: Morning Routines and Strategies (podcast) (LINK)

This is a special episode of the podcast. After more than 200 conversations with the world's top performers, you start to spot certain patterns. These are the shared habits, hacks, philosophies, and tools that are the common threads of success, happiness, health, and wealth. These commonalities were the premise of my most recent book, The New York Times #1 bestseller Tools of Titans -- a compilation of my favorite lessons, routines, and tips of many of my guests. In this episode, I've gathered some of the best advice from past guests about morning routines.

Links

"Nature smiles at the union of freedom and equality in our utopias. For freedom and equality are sworn and everlasting enemies, and when one prevails the other dies. Leave men free, and their natural inequalities will multiply almost geometrically, as in England and America in the nineteenth century under laissez-faire. To check the growth of inequality, liberty must be sacrificed, as in Russia after 1917. Even when repressed, inequality grows; only the man who is below the average in economic ability desires equality; those who are conscious of superior ability desire freedom; and in the end superior ability has its way. Utopias of equality are biologically doomed, and the best that the amiable philosopher can hope for is an approximate equality of legal justice and educational opportunity. A society in which all potential abilities are allowed to develop and function will have a survival advantage in the competition of groups." -Will and Ariel Durant (The Lessons of History)

I'm a week late to a couple of thought-provoking reads from last week; the second of which I was waiting to link to until I tracked down the paragraph above: 1) PHILOSOPHICAL ECONOMICS: Diversification, Adaptation, and Stock Market Valuation; 2) The 1 Percent Rule: Why a Few People Get Most of the Rewards - By James Clear

The second article above also reminded me some wisdom from Peter Kaufman, as told via the East Coast Asset Management Q4 2014 letter:

I highlighted last quarter that Peter Kaufman, Editor of Poor Charlie’s Almanac and CEO of Glenair, presented an important insight during a talk to our Security Analysis class last fall. Peter shared his belief that there is one principle that explains the progress of inorganic (physical universe - compounding), organic (biology - evolution) and human systems (human achievement). He concluded the answer was Dogged Incremental Progress Over A Long Period of Time. 

Why Your Financial Adviser Can’t Be Conflict Free - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

When Warren Met Jorge Paulo: Buffett and Lemann Recall Their First Deal [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Grant's Podcast -- Episode 7: Free speech for bears (audio plays) (LINK)

Marc Cohodes, famed short seller, shares his approach to investing and a few actionable ideas with Grant’s.

How I Built This podcast -- Instacart: Apoorva Mehta (LINK)

Bill Gurley on This Week in Startups (audio/video) [H/T @trengriffin] (LINK)

The Walt Mossberg Brand - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Scott Adams on the Art of Charm podcast (LINK)

To Be a Genius, Think Like a 94-Year-Old [H/T @maxolson] (LINK)

When I asked him about his late-­life success, he said: “Some of us are turtles; we crawl and struggle along, and we haven’t maybe figured it out by the time we’re 30. But the turtles have to keep on walking.” This crawl through life can be advantageous, he pointed out, particularly if you meander around through different fields, picking up clues as you go along. Dr. Goodenough started in physics and hopped sideways into chemistry and materials science, while also keeping his eye on the social and political trends that could drive a green economy. “You have to draw on a fair amount of experience in order to be able to put ideas together,” he said.

Book of the day (recommended by Bill Gurley his interview above): Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure

Links

Bill and Melinda Gates' 2017 Annual Letter: Warren Buffett’s Best Investment (LINK)

Our 2017 annual letter is addressed to our dear friend Warren Buffett, who in 2006 donated the bulk of his fortune to our foundation to fight disease and reduce inequity. A few months ago, Warren asked us to reflect on what impact his gift has had on the world.  

What follows is our answer to him.

Ian Cassel talks with Patrick O’Shaughnessy on the Invest Like the Best podcast (LINK)

Related book: Intelligent Fanatics Project

Over 30 Years of Value Insights from Martin J. Whitman [H/T @chriswmayer] (LINK)

Winter 2017 Issue of Graham & Doddsville (LINK)

Anatomy of a Bull Market [H/T @awealthofcs] (LINK)

John Huber’s 2016 Letter to Investors (LINK)

Sequoia Fund's Q4 2016 letter [H/T @spmullin] (LINK)

How the Flash Crash Trader Lost His $50 Million Fortune [H/T @muddywatersre] (LINK)

The Rise and Fall of a K Street Renegade [H/T @PlanMaestro] (LINK)

Scheduling Your Energy, Not Your Time - By Scott Adams (LINK)

Related book: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

'Extraordinary' levels of pollutants found in 10km deep Mariana trench (LINK)

This Beetle Bites an Ant’s Waist and Pretends to Be Its Butt - by Ed Yong (LINK)

What Mirrors Tell Us About Animal Minds - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

Michael Lewis talks with Barry Ritholtz (podcast) (Part 1) (LINK)

Related book: The Undoing Project

Inside Costco: The Magic in the Warehouse (LINK)

Why Mohnish Pabrai Likes GM, Fiat, and Southwest Air (LINK)

Why is Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) like a Belly Button? - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Howard Buffett Steps Down From Coke Board to Focus on Charity [H/T Will] (LINK)

Kevin Kelly's updated version of his essay "1,000 True Fans" (LINK)

Understanding Social Platforms (free eBook) (LINK)

Is Sugar Killing Us? - by Gary Taubes (LINK)

Related book (Taubes' new book, which will be released December 27th): The Case Against Sugar

Scott Adams' "Persuasion Reading List," updated to include the book Impossible to Ignore (LINK)

Books of the day:

The Age of Wonder: The Romantic Generation and the Discovery of the Beauty and Terror of Science - by Richard Holmes

Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works

Links

Today's Audible Daily Deal ($2.95): TED Talks: The Official TED Guide to Public Speaking

Jonathan Haidt: Can a divided America heal? (TED video) (LINK)

Scott Adams on Predicting President Trump (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio Rebroadcast: How Much Does the President Really Matter? (audio) (LINK)

Mohnish Pabrai Lecture at Peking University - Oct 14, 2016 (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Sebastian Mallaby at the LSE discussing his latest book, The Man Who Knew: The Life and Times of Alan Greenspan (audio) (LINK)

How Blockchain Will Change Your Life - by Ginni Rometty (LINK)

Related books: 1) The Business Blockchain; 2) Blockchain Revolution

Stephen Dubner on Tim Ferriss' podcast (audio) (LINK)

Brain Pickings: Carl Sagan on Moving Beyond Us vs. Them, Bridging Conviction with Compassion, and Meeting Ignorance with Kindness (LINK)

Related book: The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark

Links

Today's Audible Daily Deal looks interesting ($2.95): So You Want to Start a Brewery?: The Lagunitas Story

Latticework of Mental Models: Alternative Histories (LINK)

Influencer Interview: Bill Ackman (video) [H/T Will] (LINK)

Berkshire's Abel Targeted by Pilots Union Over Board Secrecy [H/T Will] (LINK)

The latest in the 'Under the Hood: What’s in Your Index?' series from Horizon Kinetics: How to NOT Invest in the Dynamism of Emerging Markets: Through Your Emerging Markets ETF (LINK)

Scott Adams' Explanation of Trump’s Persuasion Skills (among other things) (video) (LINK)

Links

For those curious to see the legend we named Boyles Asset Management after, see THIS video (it starts at the 6:05 mark).

Latticework of Mental Models: Framing Effect (LINK)

Henry David Thoreau on Success (LINK)

Buffett's Unconventional Investments (LINK)

Beer before Steel: Ranking 30 Industries by Fundamental Equity Performance, 1933 to 2015 (LINK)

The Man Who Built Silicon Valley: A Tribute to Andy Grove (LINK)

Related book: Only the Paranoid Survive

The Investors Podcast discusses a trip to Mohnish Pabrai's annual meeting (at the beginning of the show) (LINK)

John Hempton with some comments on Valeant Pharmaceuticals (LINK)

History’s First Quadruple-Wizard - by Scott Adams (LINK)

George Mumford talks about his book, The Mindful Athlete, at Google (video) (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T David]: Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry

Links

Solution Aversion: On the Relation Between Ideology and Motivated Disbelief (LINK) [Related article, HERE.]

There is often a curious distinction between what the scientific community and the general population believe to be true of dire scientific issues, and this skepticism tends to vary markedly across groups. For instance, in the case of climate change, Republicans (conservatives) are especially skeptical of the relevant science, particularly when they are compared with Democrats (liberals). What causes such radical group differences? We suggest, as have previous accounts, that this phenomenon is often motivated. However, the source of this motivation is not necessarily an aversion to the problem, per se, but an aversion to the solutions associated with the problem. This difference in underlying process holds important implications for understanding, predicting, and influencing motivated skepticism.

Sam Altman: Unit Economics (LINK)

Edge #449 Edge Master Class 2015: Philip Tetlock: A Short Course in Superforecasting (Class V) (LINK)

Hedge fund leader John Burbank bets on emerging market rout (LINK)

In an interview with the Financial Times, Mr Burbank said years of QE had caused a misallocation of capital across the world, while the end of QE last year triggered a dollar rally with consequences that were only now beginning to be realised. 

“The wrong people got the capital — emerging markets countries and corporates and a lot of cyclical companies like mining and energy, particularly shale companies — and this is now a major problem for the credit markets,” he said. 

... 

“All of that turmoil around the world will come back and slow down capex and hiring and consumer buying in the US, and that will make the Fed realise they should be easing and not hiking,” he said. 

“I think we are on the precipice of a liquidation in emerging markets, and this feels the way that the fourth quarter of 1997 felt.”

Nassim Taleb's short video at the TOCICO Conference (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

In this short video, Nassim Taleb, author of The Black Swan, Fooled by Randomness and Antifragile, introduces the concept of Antifragile to the Theory of Constraints International Conference held in Capetown South Africa from 6-9 Sep 2015. The theme of the conference was how to use Theory of Constraints to transform organizations and people from Fragile (harmed by volatility) to Robust (not harmed by volatility) to Antifragile (benefit from volatility).

Scott Adams on Tim Ferriss’ Podcast (LINK)

Related book: How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big

A Hubble image from the Large Magellanic Cloud (LINK)

Book of the day: The Rise and Fall of the Conglomerate Kings

Links

A Dozen Things Learned from Charlie Munger about Risk (LINK)

Related book: Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor

James Tisch On Value Investing [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Value investing — you’d be crazy not to (LINK) [Related book: Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics]

So why, given these numbers, hasn’t every long-term investor in the world been buying value for the last 50 years, and (eventually) eroding the advantage in doing so? The answer is simple: because they are crazy. They stereotype businesses as either good or bad and then extrapolate endless (and unnecessary) pessimism for the latter. It’s an irrational overreaction. 

So there you have it. If you want to be the one to make the money all you have to be is slightly less crazy than most other people. Be sane enough to look for value, to buy value, and then wait for that value to come good and your long-term profits are as good as in the bank. That’s the good news. 

The bad news is that there isn’t much value around at the moment: Société Générale’s Andrew Lapthorne notes that in the US at least “EV/Ebitda ratios have rarely been this high” in the past 20 years. So where do you go?

An Oliver Sacks collection (LINK)

Oliver Sacks, who died from cancer on 30 August, was a neurologist with a difference. He focused on individuals, rather than on populations, and wrote graceful books instead of papers. This collection brings together comment on Sacks’s life and work, and his own writing from the archives of Nature Publishing Group.

Matt Ridley: Demography does not explain the migration crisis (LINK)

Scott Adams: How to Spot a Wizard (LINK)

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: That Was Not a Crash (LINK)

Hand-in-hand with the exaggeration of the recent decline as a “crash” and “panic” is the exaggeration of investor sentiment as being wildly bearish. The actual shift has been from outright bulls to the “correction” camp, but that’s a rather meaningless shift since anyone but the most ardent bull would characterize current conditions as being at least a market correction. Historically, durable intermediate and cyclical lows are characterized by a significant increase in the number of outright bears. That’s not yet apparent here. Indeed, Investors Intelligence still reports the percentage of bearish investment advisors at just 26.8%. 

It’s generally true that one doesn’t want to sell stocks into a crash (as I've often observed, once an extremely overvalued market begins to deteriorate internally, the best time to panic is before everyone else does). Still, the recent decline doesn’t nearly qualify as a crash. For the record, those familiar with market history also know that even “don’t sell stocks into a crash ” isn’t universally true. Recall, as an extreme example, that from September 3 to November 13, 1929, the Dow Industrials plunged by -47.9%. The market briefly recovered about half of that loss by early 1930. Even so, it turned out that investors would ultimately wish they had sold at the low of the 1929 crash. By July 8, 1932, the Dow had dropped an additional -79.3% from the November 1929 trough. In any event, the recent market retreat, at its lowest closing point, took the S&P 500 only -12.2% from its high, and at present, the index is down just -9.7% from its highest closing level in history. To call the recent market retreat a “crash” is an offense to informed discussion of the financial markets.

Links

TED - Jim Simons: A rare interview with the mathematician who cracked Wall Street (video) (LINK)

THE MUSEUM OF ART AND FINANCE, GALLERY 1: TULIPMANIA (LINK)

Robert Shiller on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Scott Adams: The Tells (for cognitive dissonance) (LINK) [This also reminded me of the book I finally started recently, which might be the science compliment to Adams' entertaining post: Strangers to Ourselves]

Why Elephants Don’t Explode: How Nature Solves Bigness [H/T @TimHarford] (LINK)

Related books:  

Why Size Matters: From Bacteria to Blue Whales  

The Forest Unseen: A Year's Watch in Nature

Henry David Thoreau on Reading (LINK)

Links

Rescuing Mes Aynak: Mega Copper Deal in Afghanistan Fuels Rush to Save Ancient Treasures (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Tech’s Biggest Ideas and How They Take Hold (LINK)

Nate Silver on the Masters in Business radio podcast (LINK)

Related book: The Signal and the Noise

Evan Osnos' article on Donald Trump and his campaign (LINK)

Scott Adams continues his look into Donald Trump's persuasion tactics - Trump VS Bush: Persuasion Wars (LINK)

Brad Katsuyama’s Next Chapter (LINK)

In Times of Market Panic (LINK)

The Method in the Market’s Current Madness - By James Surowiecki (LINK)

James Grant on CNBC this morning (Video 1, Video 2)

Hussman Weekly Market Comment: Risk Turns Risky: Unpleasant Skew, Scale Dilation, and Broken Lines (LINK)

The same lesson has been learned and re-learned by investors across a century of market cycles. When a previously overvalued, overbought, overbullish market is joined by internal deterioration – with numerous securities, sectors, industries and securities simultaneously breaking down, accepting market risk is typically not rewarded, and stocks instead become vulnerable to air-pockets, free-falls, and crashes. Range-bound markets, particularly at elevated valuations, often offer a false sense of security; making investors believe that their risk is low because day-to-day volatility is contained. Last week's market loss was initial and quite contained from the standpoint of current valuations. My view is that under the market conditions we presently observe, investors face the continued potential for steep, vertical losses. That outlook will change as market conditions change. 

I’ll emphasize, as usual, that the message here is not “sell everything.” The message is to understand where we are in the market cycle from the standpoint of a century of reliable evidence, and to act in a way that meets your investment objectives. Align your portfolio with careful consideration for your tolerance for losses over the market cycle; with your willingness to miss out on interim market gains should they emerge; with the horizon over which you will actually need to spend from your investments; with the extent that you believe that history is actually informative for making investment decisions; with the extent to which alternative investment outlooks are supported by evidence, ideally spanning numerous market cycles. I am not encouraging buy-and-hold investors to depart from well-considered investment plans or to abandon their discipline; only that they take every step to ensure their portfolio is actually aligned with their true risk tolerance and investment horizon.

Quote of the day:

"I think it’s essential to remember that just about everything is cyclical. There’s little I’m certain of, but these things are true: Cycles always prevail eventually. Nothing goes in one direction forever. Trees don’t grow to the sky. Few things go to zero. And there’s little that’s as dangerous for investor health as insistence on extrapolating today’s events into the future." -Howard Marks, The Most Important Thing

Links

A Dozen Things Learned from Charlie Munger about Making Rational Decisions (LINK)

A Dozen Things Learned from Charlie Munger about Mental Models and Worldly Wisdom (LINK)

Related book: Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor

Jason Zweig: 5 Things Investors Shouldn’t Do Now (LINK)

Benedict Evans: Ways to think about cars (LINK)

The Short-Termism Myth - By James Surowiecki (LINK)

Why One Of The Best Athletes In The World Refuses To Compete (LINK)

Scott Adams: The Day You Became a Better Writer (2nd Look) (LINK)

Your Brain, Your Disease, Your Self (LINK)

Links

Scott Adams: Wizard Wars (LINK)

In Praise of Slowness: Challenging the Cult of Speed (LINK)

The Meaning of Kissinger - By Niall Ferguson (LINK)

Related book: Kissinger: 1923-1968: The Idealist

This Is a Fine Time to Be a Big Corporation [H/T Matt] (LINK)

Jim Grant: The Fed Will Not Raise Rates In 2015 (video) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Edge Master Class 2015: A Short Course in Superforecasting (LINK)

Related book (released next month): Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction

Links

Mark Zuckerberg's latest book club book is also a Charlie Munger recommendation, Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters (LINK)

Charles Brandes and the orthodoxy of value investing (LINK)

Related book: Brandes on Value

Bruce Berkowitz's Semi-Annual Letter (LINK)

Horizon Kinetics: Asia Opportunity Second Quarter Commentary (LINK)

Fred Wilson: The Bull Case For Solar (LINK)

Scott Adams: Living by the Odds (LINK)

Book of the day: The Contrarian's Guide to Leadership

Quote of the day, from Seneca:

"...it is praiseworthy to pursue wholesome studies even if they lead to no practical outcome. Is it so remarkable if those who attempt to scale the heights do not attain the summit? But if you are a man, look up with admiration at those who attempt great things, even if they fall. This is the sign of a noble heart--to aim at high things, measuring one's effort, not by one's own strength, but by the strength of one's nature, and to envisage enterprises beyond the accomplishment even of those equipped with heroic courage."

Links

Charlie Munger on Frozen Corportion [H/T @Sanjay__Bakshi] (LINK)

NEUROECONOMICS AND THE ART OF PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT (LINK)

Related book: Your Money and Your Brain

Delivering Alpha Conference Notes (LINK)

Scott Adams: The Judgy Bubble (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T Pat Dorsey, via the Value Investing Podcast]: Jannie Mouton: And then they fired me

In that podcast, I believe Pat Dorsey also mentioned Cintas, which deworsified its very good business a bit by getting into the more capital intensive document shredding business. I was reminded of it after the Stericycle news today, which will be interesting to see if it ends up being a similar deworsifier for it as well.