Links

My year-end letter at Sorfis is in the proofreading stage. If you are interested in receiving it as soon as it is released next week, you can sign up on the website HERE. 

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Greenlight Q4 2019 Letter (LINK)

Fundsmith Annual Letter (LINK)

Apollo Asia Fund: the manager's report for 4Q19 (LINK)

Wealth Is What You Don’t Spend - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Every Company Will Be a Fintech Company (LINK)

Paul Tudor Jones on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Ray Dalio on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Brian Moynihan on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Stephen Schwarzman on CNBC (video) (LINK)

David Rubenstein on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Carlos Brito on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Rebecca Kaden – Thesis Driven Investing (LINK)

The James Altucher Show: 531 - Jocko Willink (LINK)

Related book: Leadership Strategy and Tactics: Field Manual

The Knowledge Project Podcast: #74 Jeff Hunter: Embracing Confusion (LINK)

Finding the One Decision That Removes 100 Decisions (or, Why I’m Reading No New Books in 2020) - by Tim Ferriss (LINK)

Hey, maybe the dinosaur-killer asteroid really did act alone! (LINK)

Industry growth and competition...

"Investors have consistently lost money by assuming that if they invest in the equity of companies engaged in a growth market it is logical that they must make money. They should take a leaf from the book of US investors in the 1970s who correctly identified air travel as a growth market and then underperformed the market by investing in airline stocks. How? Because they missed the point that the link between growth in air travel and the profitability of airlines was about to be broken by the intervention of a force called deregulation. More air miles were flown, but at lower and lower fares." --Terry Smith ("Accounting for Growth")

"Any time you get more and more people competing in any given area, generally, the economics deteriorate. And the economics have deteriorated for newspapers, although they’re still enormously profitable in relation to tangible equity employed, but they do not have the same economic prospects, if you look at the future stream of earnings, that it looked like they had 20 or 30 or 40 years ago. And television, again, the margins have been maintained surprisingly well, but the audience keeps going down.... So, that has to erode economics over time. Cable was thought to operate pretty much all by itself, and the telecoms come in. Very few businesses get better because of more competition." --Warren Buffett (2006)

"It’s simplicity itself. It will be a rare business that doesn’t have a way worse future than it had a past." --Charlie Munger (2006)

"There’s industries we know that may have a wonderful future, but we don’t have the faintest idea who the winners will be, so we don’t think about those.... So there’s a whole lot of things we don’t think about. Charlie and I have a number of filters that things have to get through very quickly before we’re willing to think about them. And sometimes we’re thought of as rude...because people will call us and they start explaining some idea to us, and it just doesn’t make it through the first filter or two. So we...think we’re saving their time if we just politely say, you know, that we just have no interest, and we don’t want to have you finish the sentence."  --Warren Buffett (2012)

"We have found in a long life that one competitor is frequently enough to ruin a business." --Charlie Munger (2012)

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

Terry Smith, Fundsmith LLP, March 2019 Presentation (video) [H/T @iancassel] (LINK)

Related book: Accounting for Growth

Disney and the Future of TV - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Disney CEO Bob Iger lays out details on company’s Netflix competitor (video) (LINK)

GMO White Paper - Thinking Outside the Box: How and Why to Invest in a Climate Change Strategy (LINK)

Interview Transcripts Tell Story of Fed Over Past 50 Years ($) (LINK)

Transcripts of more than 50 interviews with top Federal Reserve officials and staffers offer an inside view of central bank-operations over the past 50 years, including internal debates and pressures from the White House. 

Among the documents released Friday are interviews with former Fed leaders Paul Volcker, Alan Greenspan and Janet Yellen as part of an oral history project in advance of the central bank’s centennial in 2013.

Notes from Toronto - by Chris Mayer (LINK)

Uber's Coming out Party: Personal Mobility Pioneer or Car Service on Steroids? - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: Robert Greene on his book “The Laws of Human Nature” (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: A Community of Loonies (LINK)

HBR IdeaCast Podcast -- HBR Presents: After Hours (LINK)

Harvard Business School professors and hosts Youngme Moon, Mihir Desai, and Felix Oberholzer-Gee discuss news at the crossroads of business and culture. In this episode, they analyze the current food delivery wars and garner some lessons in crisis management from Boeing.

FT Alphachat Podcast: Odette Lienau on the most complicated debt restructuring in history (LINK)

The Peter Attia Drive (podcast): Matthew Walker, Ph.D., on sleep – Part III of III (LINK)

Related book: Why We Sleep

Cracking the Code: A Toddler, an iPad, and a Tweet - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

Hubble lights up Saturn’s aurorae - by Phil Plait (LINK)

A Natural History Museum Is Under Fire for Hosting Brazil's New President - by Ed Yong (LINK)

'Extraordinary' 500-year-old library catalogue reveals books lost to time (LINK)