Links

“Instead of a discussion of risk (which is both predictive and sissy) I advocate the notion of fragility, which is not predictive—and, unlike risk, has an interesting word that can describe its functional opposite, the nonsissy concept of antifragility.” --Nassim Taleb (Antifragile)

The Acquirers Podcast: Tulip Mania: Chris Bloomstran on Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway (LINK)

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

Oaktree’s Howard Marks Says Fed Support Isn’t Forever, Distress Coming (video) (LINK)

Apollo Asia Fund: the manager's report for 1Q20 (LINK)

When Failure Is an Option: A Trading Strategy Soaks Investors - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

To Hedge or Not to Hedge - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Media, Regulators, and Big Tech; Indulgences and Injunctions; Better Approaches - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: 185 — Open, Free, and Spotify (LINK)

Strategy under uncertainty - by Jerry Neumann (LINK)

Covid-19: Big shifts in the entertainment industry - by Sangeet Paul Choudary (LINK)

Innovation Can’t Be Forced, but It Can Be Quashed - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Related book (released tomorrow): How Innovation Works: And Why It Flourishes in Freedom

Fed Chair Jerome Powell on "60 Minutes" (video) (LINK)

The Pomp Podcast: 294: Cullen Roche Explains The Ultimate Breakdown Of The Federal Reserve (LINK)

Hidden Forces Podcast: How the Wealth Gap Drives Imbalances in Global Trade & Finance | Michael Pettis (LINK)

The Grant Williams Podcast: Super Terrific Happy Hour Ep. 2 - Inflation/Deflation (LINK)

The Daily Stoic Podcast: Ask Daily Stoic: Ryan and Historian Andrew Roberts Talk Leadership, Character and How One Person Can Change The World (LINK)

Recode Decode Podcast: Jon Meacham: America’s history can teach us how to hope for our future (LINK)

The Twilight of the Iranian Revolution - by Dexter Filkins (LINK)

Some Zoos, and Some of Their Animals, May Not Survive the Pandemic (LINK)

What's Different About the Coronavirus in Kids - by Sarah Zhang (LINK)

Mental Models For a Pandemic (LINK)

A review of The Great Mental Models, Volume 2 (LINK)

Links

‪"Great investing requires both generating returns and controlling risk. And recognizing risk is an absolute prerequisite for controlling it.... Risk means uncertainty about which outcome will occur and about the possibility of loss when the unfavorable ones do." --Howard Marks‬

Haters - by Paul Graham (LINK)

Berkshire Hathaway’s Culture of Trust (LINK)

Related book: Margin of Trust

Jim Grant on the Hidden Forces Podcast (LINK)

Aspen Ideas to Go Podcast: Netflix’s Ted Sarandos on Streaming, Competition, and What’s Next [H/T @JerryCap] (LINK)

A playlist of short videos on mental models [H/T @anshul81] (LINK)

Boeing Employees Mocked F.A.A. and ‘Clowns’ Who Designed 737 Max (LINK)

Meet 2020 AV2, the first asteroid found that stays inside Venus's orbit! (LINK)

Current Kindle book deals worth considering:

High Growth Handbook by Elad Gil ($1.49)

Genius: The Life and Science of Richard Feynman by James Gleick ($1.99)

Also, for audiobook listeners, I noticed that Cable Cowboy as well as Common Stocks and Common Sense are now available on Audible.

Links

"If something is too hard to do, we look for something that isn’t too hard to do. What could be more obvious than that?" --Charlie Munger (2006)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: Applying a Fundamental and Value-Oriented Approach to Investing [with David Abrams] (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: The Rashomon Effect (LINK)

Meatless Future or Vegan Delusions? The Beyond Meat Valuation - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Animal Spirits - by Lewis Johnson (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): Long-Term Thinking in a Start-Up Town (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Game of Phones (LINK)

a16z podcast: AI and Your Doctor, Today and Tomorrow (LINK)

Related book: Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again - by Eric Topol

Wernher von Braun and The American Moonshot (LINK)

The salty ocean of Europa: Table salt found on Jupiter's moon - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Inside the Cultish Dreamworld of Augusta National (LINK)

Links

"I’ve always said that the way to get a reputation for being a good businessman is to buy a good business.... It’s much easier than taking a lousy business...and showing how wonderful you are at it, because I haven’t seen that done very often." --Warren Buffett

The Race of Our Lives Revisited  - by Jeremy Grantham (LINK)

As a follow on to the original “Race of Our Lives” as part of the GMO Quarterly Letter from April 2013, Jeremy Grantham provides a detailed discussion of the long-term, slow-burning problems that threaten us today: climate change, population growth, increasing environmental toxicity. The piece focuses on the impact of all these three on the future ability to feed the 11 billion people projected for 2100, and highlights the severe implications of these issues if they are not resolved. One material advantage in addressing these issues is in the accelerating burst of green technologies, which may in the future be able to offset much of the accelerating damage from climate change and other problems. Yet despite these surprising technological advances, we have still been losing ground for the last few decades, particularly in the last few years. Somehow or other we must find a way to do better. We will need all the leadership, all the science and engineering, all the effort, and all the luck we can muster to win this race. It really is the race of our lives.

Facebook’s Story Problem — and Opportunity - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Can The SEC Model Help Cure American Democracy? - by Carson Block (LINK)

The BABA 20-F....Financial Comedy Gold!! [H/T @wolfejosh] (LINK)

Turkey’s Growing Pains - by Peter Zeihan (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Lollapalooza Effect (LINK)

5 Mental Models to Remove (Some of) the Confusion from Parenting (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Boyd Varty – Track Your Life (LINK)

NASA launches a probe to study the most dangerous star in the sky: The Sun (LINK)

How To Read More Books — A Lot More - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T 25iq]: The Membership Economy: Find Your Super Users, Master the Forever Transaction, and Build Recurring Revenue – by Robbie Kellman Baxter

Links

"The speed of information really doesn’t make any difference to us. It’s the processing and finally coming to some judgment that actually has some utility...it’s a judgment about the price of a business or a part of a business, a security, versus what it’s essentially worth. And none of that involves anything to do, really, with quick information. It involves getting good information.... We’re not looking for needles in haystacks or anything of the sort...We like haystacks, not needles, basically. And we want it to shout at us." --Warren Buffett (1994)

"I’ve said in investing...that there’s more than one way to get to heaven. And there isn’t a true religion in this, but there’s some very useful religions." --Warren Buffett (1994)

Spies, Crime, and Lightning Strikes: The Value of Probabilistic Thinking (LINK)

Two Berkshire Takeaways and Thoughts on Competitive Markets - by John Huber (LINK)

The Moat Map - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Stop Reading So Much - by Sean Iddings (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Tren Griffin – Pulling the Thread (LINK)

Grant's Podcast: Loan sharks (LINK)

Adam Cohen, founder of Covenant Review, joins Grant’s for an insightful overview of our loosey-goosey credit market.

27 Incredibly Useful Things You Didn’t Know Chrome Could Do (LINK)

Best Evidence Yet For Water Plumes Erupting Off Europa (LINK)

The Hole Where All The Success Leaks Out (LINK)

Book of the day [H/T Jim Chanos]: A World Lit Only by Fire - by William Manchester 

Links

"If I go through my career, there's a lot of disappointments; there's a lot of things that didn't go right. But those aren't the things that make you. It's how you bounce back, and where you move on from there—and what you learn from those things. It's kind of 'the river flows'.... You have to make choices on where your life goes, but you never stop flowing. You never stop riding the river.... You kind of keep pushing forward, because you're going to have disappointments, you're going to have problems in your life, you're going to have different things that go wrong, but that's not what's going to define you. What's going to define you is how you recover from those things and how you move on." --David Tepper

David Tepper at Carnegie Mellon (videos) [H/T @LongShortTrader] (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3)

Inertia: The Force That Holds the Universe Together (LINK)

You Are Not Alone: The Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Related book: The Warren Buffett Shareholder: Stories from inside the Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting

Amazon: Glimpses of Shoeless Joe? - by Aswath Damodaran (LINK)

Tokenized Securities and the Future of Ownership (LINK)

Nature's Mechanical Secrets Could Help Build Faster Robots [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 149 — Zillow and Sustaining Aggregation (LINK)

How I Built This Podcast -- Panera Bread/Au Bon Pain: Ron Shaich (LINK)

The Investors Podcast: Mastermind Discussion 2nd Q 2018 w/ Jesse Felder & Tobias Carlisle (LINK)

Farewell, No. 16: scientists left 'miserable' after world's oldest spider dies aged 43 [H/T David] (LINK)

The arachnid is believed to have survived for so long by sticking to one protected burrow its entire life and expending the minimum of energy.

TED Talk: Is the world getting better or worse? A look at the numbers | Steven Pinker (LINK)

Related book: Enlightenment Now

The next epidemic is coming. Here’s how we can make sure we’re ready. - By Bill Gates (LINK)

What Bill Gates Fears Most - by Ed Yong (LINK)

"It is above all things necessary to form a true estimate of oneself, because as a rule we think that we can do more than we are able." --Seneca

Peter Kaufman on The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking (audio and transcript)

About the most educational 45 minutes of listening (or reading) one can receive...

Link to: Peter Kaufman on The Multidisciplinary Approach to Thinking

.....

An excerpt always worth keeping in mind:

Lou Brock set the Major League record for stolen bases with the St. Louis Cardinals many years ago. And he once said, ‘Show me a man who's afraid of appearing foolish and I’ll show you a man you can beat every time.’ And if you’re getting beat in life, chances are it’s because you’re afraid of appearing foolish. 

Links

"I'm curious. I want to know how things work. And even more importantly, I want to know what's going to happen. And what's going to happen is often related to what has happened." -Seth Klarman

BPIAA 2017 Distinguished Alumni Honoree Video: Seth & Michael Klarman [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

3 Tips from Warren Buffett on Becoming a Better Person (LINK)

Half Life: The Decay of Knowledge and What to Do About It (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Benford’s Law (LINK)

Making it Look Easy is Hard Work - by Ben Carlson (LINK)

The Best and Worst Performing Stocks Since the March 2009 Start of this Historic Bull Market [H/T Abnormal Returns] (LINK)

Audience vs. Traffic - by Scott Galloway (video) (LINK)

The Quest to Bring 3-D Printed Homes to the Developing World [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Britain's housing crisis is caused by the wrong kind of regulation - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

Freakonomics Radio Extra: Satya Nadella Full Interview (LINK)

Three Key Questions About Donald Trump’s Summit with Kim Jong Un - by Evan Osnos (LINK)

Supervolcano Goes Boom. Humans Go Meh? - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"You don't necessarily get it right the first time.... Henry Ford, as you may know, failed twice before he started the Ford Motor Company in 1903. The test isn't whether you get the greatest business idea in the world the first time out. The test is whether you keep learning as you go along what your strengths are, what you can do for your customers, what you can bring especially to the party. And to do that, you need...a genuine desire—day in, day out—to delight the customer." -Warren Buffett

The Micro PE Reality Check - by Brent Beshore (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Thinking From First Principles (LINK)

Pretenders and Ghosts: Stealth promotion network exploits financial sites to tout stocks (LINK)

KPMG Acts Globally But Keeps Scandals Local ($) (LINK)

Masters of Scale Podcast: How To Do Good And Do Good Business with Starbucks' Howard Schultz (LINK) [The Schultz part really starts around the 11:40 mark.]

People Don't Actually Know Themselves Very Well - by Adam Grant (LINK)

Everyone Is Going Through Something - by Kevin Love (LINK)

What tennis and philanthropy have in common - By Roger Federer  (LINK)

The Fish That Makes Other Fish Smarter - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Do Adult Brains Make New Neurons? A Contentious New Study Says No - by Ed Yong (LINK)

It’s the latest chapter in a century-long debate about whether neurogenesis continues throughout humans’ lives.

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)

Links

“Whenever one thing becomes a commodity, humans make something else valuable.” - Tim O'Reilly (Source)

Bill Gates discussing his efforts to find a cure for Alzheimer's, after revealing that his father suffers with the disease (video) (LINK)

Howard Marks on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Related link from last week: Howard Marks Memo: Latest Thinking

How Jamie Dimon, Jeff Bezos and Warren Buffett got together to change American health care [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Amazon Health - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Jack Ma’s Secret to Great Customer Service - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Naive Realism (LINK)

Dan Carlin's Hardcore History Podcast: Show 61 - (Blitz) Painfotainment (LINK)

Pain is at the root of most drama and entertainment. When does it get too real? This very disturbing and graphic show looks into some case studies and asks some deep questions. WARNING Very intense subject matter.

Charles C. Mann in conversation with Tyler Cowen (podcast) (LINK)

Long Now Podcast -- Charles C. Mann: The Wizard and the Prophet (LINK)

Related books to the two links above: 1) The Wizard and the Prophet; 2) 1491; 3) 1493

Links

Bill Gates' new favorite book of all time is Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now, which will be released to the public next month (LINK)

Tom Gayner on the Full Disclosure podcast [H/T @svafier] (LINK)

How I Built This Podcast -- Dell Computers: Michael Dell (LINK)

Bayes and Deadweight: Using Statistics to Eject the Deadweight From Your Life (LINK)

The Bayesian Trap (video) (LINK) ["The thing we forget in Bayes' theorem is that our actions play a role in determining outcomes, and in determining how true things actually are.... So I think a really good understanding of Bayes' theorem implies that experimentation is essential. If you've been doing the same thing for a long time and getting the same result that you're not necessarily happy with, maybe it's time to change."]

Alexander Hamilton’s Deep Advice (LINK)

Ed Yong talks to producer Orla Doherty about The Making of Blue Planet II’s Incredible Deep Ocean Episode (LINK) [As I watched this episode over the weekend, I don't think I've ever watched something and said "Are you kidding me?" so many times. From the creatures I didn't know existed to the abundance of life in unexpected places, it was fantastic—and the type of thing that I hope will inspire some young people to get interested in the sciences.]

Links

“If you live according to nature, you will never be poor; if you live according to opinion, you will never be rich.” - Epicurus (via Seneca)

Latticework of Mental Models: Domain Dependence (LINK)

At Google, Eric Schmidt Wrote the Book on Adult Supervision - by Steven Levy (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: The Future of Tech, with Chris Dixon (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Trends in Cryptocurrencies (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Fintech for the People (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Episode 135 — Two Is Better Than One (LINK)

FT Alphachat Podcast:  Hernando de Soto on the economics of property rights (LINK)

Kindness scales - by Seth Godin (LINK)

Richard Thaler's Nobel Lecture (video) (LINK)

Beetle Penises May Hold Clues For Better Medical Devices [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Links

Power Laws: How Nonlinear Relationships Amplify Results (LINK)

Can Fund Manager Bill Miller Use Earthquakes to Predict the Market? - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

Ray Dalio on the Recode Decode podcast (LINK)

Related book: Principles: Life and Work

Apple at Its Best - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Detroit: From Motor City to Housing Incubator [H/T @morganhousel] (LINK)

Dennis Rasmussen on EconTalk discussing his book The Infidel and the Professor: David Hume, Adam Smith, and the Friendship That Shaped Modern Thought (podcast) (LINK)

Dinosaur mass-extinction let mammals come out in the day (LINK)

The Elegant Mathematics of Vitruvian Man, Leonardo da Vinci’s Most Famous Drawing: An Animated Introduction (LINK)

If you're an Audible member, my favorite audiobook so far this year, Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage, is free for today only as part of Audible's 20th anniversary celebration.

Quote of the day (the book was first published in April 2007, so this was likely written sometime in the 2006-early 2007 timeframe):

“Likewise, dictatorships that do not appear volatile, like, say, Syria or Saudi Arabia, face a larger risk of chaos than, say, Italy, as the latter has been in a state of continual political turmoil since the second war. I learned about this problem from the finance industry, in which we see “conservative” bankers sitting on a pile of dynamite but fooling themselves because their operations seem dull and lacking in volatility.” –Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan

Links

The Lessons of Leonardo: How to Be a Creative Genius - by Walter Isaacson (LINK)

Related book: Leonardo da Vinci

Warren Buffett’s “2 List” Strategy: How to Maximize Your Focus and Master Your Priorities [H/T Kevin Rose] (LINK)

Howard Marks: Nobody knows what will happen (interview) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Bias from Incentives and Reinforcement (LINK)

Stop Wasting Time - by Ian Cassel (LINK)

Will You Be Ready When the Stock Market Crashes Again? - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

A Half Dozen Lessons about the Right Burn Rate (Post Product/Market Fit in a Connected World) - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

How I Built This podcast -- Stonyfield Yogurt: Gary Hirshberg (LINK)

How the Feuding Kellogg Brothers Fought their Cereal Wars (podcast) [H/T Linc] (LINK)

Related book: The Kelloggs: The Battling Brothers of Battle Creek

Grant's Podcast: Resources roundtable (LINK)

Jim Chanos on Bloomberg last week (video -- Chanos enters at the 24:30 mark) [H/T ValueWalk] (LINK)

Mutual Fund Observer, October 2017 (LINK)

Seth Godin: "You're doing it wrong" (LINK)

Author and NYU professor Scott Galloway on the Recode Decode podcast (from a couple of weeks ago) (LINK)

Related book (released tomorrow): The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

Freakonomics Radio (podcast): “Tell Me Something I Don't Know” on the topic of Behavior Change (LINK)

Desert Island Discs: Siddhartha Mukherjee (audio) (LINK)

Edge #500: Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination - A Conversation With Tim O'Reilly (LINK)

Related book: WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us

Why T. Rex's Puny Arms Are a Sign of Strength (LINK)

Links

Farnam Street: Why You Shouldn’t Slog Through Books (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Fundamental Attribution Error (LINK)

A Half Dozen Lessons About Writing and Getting a Book Published - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Amazon Takes Over the World - by Scott Galloway (LINK)

Related book: The Four: The Hidden DNA of Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google

A High-End Mover Dishes on Truckstop Hierarchy, Rich People, and Moby Dick [H/T @oddballstocks] (LINK)

Related book: The Long Haul: A Trucker's Tales of Life on the Road

Tool-wielding monkeys push local shellfish to edge of extinction [H/T @edyong209] (LINK)

Links

The Audible Daily Deal for today ($3.95) is the latest from Lawrence Krauss: The Greatest Story Ever Told--So Far: Why Are We Here?

Reciprocation Bias (LINK)

Tiny changes can have big implications - by Sanjay Bakshi (LINK)

Inside Amazon's foray into fashion as it takes on the high street  with its own new brand [H/T @Wexboy_Value] (LINK)

Reid Hoffman has billions of dollars and one of the best networks in Silicon Valley. Here’s how he’s using them to take on Trump. (LINK)

Recode Decode podcast: The race for self-driving cars is on (Chris Urmson, CEO, Aurora) (LINK)

What Jason Zweig read this summer (LINK)

Kirkus Reviews: Leonardo da Vinci – by Walter Isaacson (LINK)

Links

Nassim Nicholas Taleb on Work, Slavery, the Minority Rule, and Skin in the Game (EconTalk podcast) (LINK)

The Uber Dilemma - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

The Butterfly Effect: Everything You Need to Know About this Powerful Mental Model (LINK)

When Cheaper P/E Ratios Mean Nothing - by Jason Zweig (LINK)

What’s Happenin’ - by Eric Cinnamond (LINK)

An interview with Kenneth Jeffrey Marshall, author of Good Stocks Cheap (LINK)

Now Advising China’s State Firms: The Communist Party ($) [H/T Matt] (LINK)

A push to establish the Communist Party in Chinese state enterprises is rolling through Hong Kong, raising corporate-governance concerns in one of the year’s best-performing stock markets. 

Since 2016, at least 32 Chinese state-owned companies or units listed in Hong Kong have proposed changes to their corporate structures to install Communist Party committees that advise their boards of directors. The moves, most coming in recent months, are prompting questions from market participants about who holds power at these companies, and whether they will be run for the benefit of investors. 

The changes follow directives from Beijing, which has been pushing to establish the Communist Party’s role in corporate charters on the mainland. They make explicit what many had already assumed: that China’s ruling party—the country’s sole governing authority despite the existence of several other political parties—keeps a tight grip on the country’s state-owned firms. Those firms now make up the bulk of Hong Kong’s market.

How I Read When Researching a Book - by Cal Newport (LINK)

The Next Chapter in a Viral Arms Race - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You have also taken Warren Buffett to task. 

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

Valuing Tech's Titans (video) (LINK)

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

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

Grant’s Podcast: Summer breeze (LINK)

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

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

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

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

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

Stoic reminders for everyday practice (LINK)

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

Links

Phil Ordway's talk on human misjudgment (LINK)

Here is a copy of a talk I gave at John Mihaljevic's excellent conference in Zurich last month. The goal was to "update" Charlie Munger's famous talk "The Psychology of Human Misjudment" to include more recent examples and the work of Kahneman and Tversky. The best part is probably the contribution of Jason Zweig -- collaborator with Kahneman on his book and leading expert on all things behavioral and investing -- who was kind enough to share his thoughts. A big thank you to him for that and to John for hosting an excellent event.

[Related to the above, the Word file I'll probably update at some point to include a bunch of things Phil added to the research via his talk: Charlie Munger's "The Psychology of Human Misjudgment"]

Farnam Street: A Primer on Critical Mass (LINK)

Latticework of Mental Models: Echo Chamber Effect (LINK)

A Dozen Lessons on Investing from Ed Thorp - by Tren Griffin (LINK)

Related book: A Man for All Markets

Baupost Readies Dry Power Amid Frothy Markets (LINK)

Grant’s Podcast: An invigorating interview with Trey Reik of Sprott Asset Management (LINK)

Adventures in Finance podcast: The Hedge Fund That Almost Broke the World (LINK)

Before the hundreds of billions in corporate bailouts and trillions in central bank interventions, there was a time when we believed there was no way our financial models and investment strategies couldn’t be wrong. That was until a hedge fund came along that threatened to bring down the global financial system in 1998. 

Jesse Eisinger talks with Barry Ritholtz on the Masters in Business podcast (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show: When to Quit – Lessons from World-Class Entrepreneurs, Investors, Authors, and More (LINK)

Everything you need to know about the dichotomy of control - by Massimo Pigliucci (LINK)

The Success of Paying People to Not Cut Down Trees - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Humpback Whales Remix Their Old Songs - by Ed Yong (LINK)

The Great American Solar Eclipse of August 21, 2017 (Part 1) - by Phil Plait (LINK)