Warren Buffett on stage at The Gatehouse Hands Up for Success luncheon

Link to video

Links

What I read during 2018 (and a few other book recommendations) - by Tamás Vincze (LINK)

Different Kinds of Information - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Demystifying Aviation Economics (LINK)

Platforms and Ecosystems: Enabling the Digital Economy (LINK)

More S1 Fun - by Fred Wilson (LINK)

2019 Ivey Value Investing Classes Guest Speaker: Paul Lountzis (video) (LINK)

The Meb Faber Show (podcast): Paul Lountzis - The Qualitative Characteristics Are Becoming Significantly More Meaningful And More Important In Company Analysis (LINK)

2019 Ivey Value Investing Classes Guest Speaker: Guy Gottfried (video) (LINK)

Investors Chronicle Podcast: Interview: A Ruffer guide to preserving wealth and making positive returns (LINK)

The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast): Lindsey Fitzharris (LINK)

Related book: The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister's Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine

Venture Stories: CPG, Defensibility, Finding The Next Instagram (LINK)

The Tim Ferriss Show: Neil Gaiman — The Interview I’ve Waited 20 Years To Do (LINK)

Related audiobook (included in the Audible sale below): The Graveyard Book

Book of the day: Flying Off Course: Airline Economics and Marketing

**********

For Audible Members, the current sale ($5 per audiobook) once again has many titles of note:

Antifragile

The Intelligent Investor

The Art of Learning

1491

Factfulness

Naked Statistics

Never Split the Difference

Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise

Deep Work

The Five Elements of Effective Thinking

The Creature from Jekyll Island

Tribe

Homo Deus

The Science of Energy

An Economic History of the World since 1400

The History of the United States, 2nd Edition

The History of Ancient Rome

The History of the Ancient World

Team of Teams

The Road to Character

The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can't Stand Positive Thinking

Ask an Astronaut

The Right Stuff

The Wisdom of Insecurity

The Obstacle Is the Way

A Guide to the Good Life: The Ancient Art of Stoic Joy

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

Links

Why Apple investor Warren Buffett won't be obsessing over Monday's event (video) [H/T Will] (LINK)

The Dilemma Facing a $358 Billion Investing Giant - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Grant’s Current Yield Podcast: Fed ahead (LINK)

Masters in Business Podcast: Roger Ibbotson Discusses the History of Finance (LINK)

a16z Podcast: Incenting Innovation Inside (LINK)

Related book: Loonshots: How to Nurture the Crazy Ideas That Win Wars, Cure Diseases, and Transform Industries

30 Animals That Made Us Smarter Podcast: Kingfisher and bullet train (LINK)

In the face of adversity, are you a Guernsey or a Brahman? (LINK)

Why Would an Animal Trade One Body for Another? - by Carl Zimmer (LINK)

Pretty Sly for a Whitefly - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Links

"People tend to underestimate low-probability events when they haven’t happened recently and overestimate them when they have happened recently. That is the nature of the human animal. You know, Noah ran into that some years back. But he looked pretty good after 40 days.... We believe almost anything can happen in financial markets. And the only way smart people can get clobbered, really, is through leverage.... So we have a great aversion to leverage and we would predict that a very high percentage of the smart people operating in Wall Street, at one time or another, are likely to get clobbered through the use of leverage. It’s the one thing that can prevent you from playing out your hand. And all of the hands we enter into look pretty good to us. But you do have to be able to play them out.... It’s just astounding what can happen in the marketable securities department. And the big thing you want to do is, at a minimum, you want to protect yourself against that sort of insanity wiping you out. And better yet, you want to be prepared to take advantage of it when I happens. " --Warren Buffett (2004)

Giverny Capital 2018 Annual Letter to Partners (LINK)

Bruce Flatt and Howard Marks on Bloomberg TV (LINK)

Aswath Damodaran on the Futurebuilders Podcast (Part 1, Part 2)

David Rosenberg on the Macro Voices Podcast (LINK) [Related presentation: The Year of the Pig (Lipstick won’t help!)]

"As to methods there may be a million and then some, but principles are few. The man who grasps principles can successfully select his own methods. The man who tries methods, ignoring principles, is sure to have trouble." --Ralph Waldo Emerson

Links

"That’s the beauty about investments. You only have to look at the ones that you feel capable of evaluating and you skip all rest." --Warren Buffett (2004)

Sanjay Bakshi talk: Fragility & Optionality in Business Models [free registration required] (LINK)

Death, Taxes, and a Few Other Things - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

The Big Short’s Steve Eisman raises bets against Canadian banks (LINK)

A fund manager made famous by the book The Big Short has turned his sights on Canada, betting that a tottering housing market and a sluggish economy will bring trouble for the country’s biggest banks. 

Steve Eisman, a portfolio manager at Neuberger Berman, is among a growing number of short-sellers taking positions in the likes of TD Bank and Royal Bank of Canada, in anticipation that the shares will fall. The moves come after property prices raced ahead of incomes for several years, boosted by loose lending, low interest rates and lax controls on foreign money. But new house prices in Canada slipped year on year in January for the first time since 2009, squeezed by tighter rules on mortgages and new taxes on foreign buyers, while the broader economy has begun to falter. 

“I’m calling for a simple normalisation of credit that hasn’t happened in 20 years,” Mr Eisman told the FT, while declining to name the banks he is shorting, or the full extent of his positions. He said the effects would hurt banks and the real estate sector, but would not be as intense as the financial crisis a decade ago in the US, when he and others saw huge profits from the implosion of the subprime mortgage market. 

“This is not ‘The Big Short: Canada’ — I’m not calling for a housing collapse,” he said.

Jamie Dimon: CEOs optimistic about business outlook (video) (LINK)

James Grant on CNBC (LINK)

Ten Lessons I Learned While Teaching Myself To Code (LINK)

Related book: Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World

Long Now: Seminars About Long-term Thinking: Chip Conley: The Modern Elder and the Intergenerational Workplace (LINK)

The After On Podcast: 45: Naval Ravikant (part 2) | End Games (LINK)

The Joe Rogan Experience (podcast) - Gary Taubes & Stephan Guyenet (LINK)

It’s Not Enough to Be Right. You Also Have to Be Kind. - by Ryan Holiday (LINK)

Holy spitting space rocks: Asteroid Bennu is active! - by Phil Plait (LINK)

Beware the Medusavirus - by Sarah Zhang (LINK)

After Two Decades, a Fishy Genetic Mystery Has Been Solved - by Ed Yong (LINK)

A scientist faced down the ultimate cold case: How did two groups of fish separately evolve genes for making antifreeze?

Links

"Security analysis is a severely practical activity, and it must not linger over matters that are not likely to affect the ultimate judgment." --Benjamin Graham and David Dodd (Security Analysis: Sixth Edition)

Dr James Simons, S Donald Sussman Fellowship Award Fireside Chat (Chat 2 - March 6, 2019) (video) [H/T @collabfund] (LINK)

Can goats empower women? - by Bill Gates (LINK)

Calpers Wants to Double Down on Private Equity ($) (LINK)

Can a Facebook Post Make Your Insurance Cost More? ($) (LINK)

A detailed short thesis on Tesla (LINK)

In the wake of one university’s headline-making failure, a look at business models (LINK)

The Disruptive Voice Podcast: Revisiting Resource Allocation in the Firm (with Clayton Christensen) (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Annie Duke – Wanna Bet? (LINK)

The Knowledge Project Podcast: Doing the Enough Thing (LINK)

WorkLife with Adam Grant Podcast: Networking For People Who Hate Networking (LINK)

A Doctor’s Prescription for More AI in Medicine (LINK)

Eric Topol makes the case for how artificial intelligence can improve health care, despite privacy concerns

The Rock Health Podcast: How AI Can Get Medicine Back On Track: Dr. Eric Topol (LINK)

Related book: Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again

The After On Podcast: 44: Naval Ravikant (part 1) | End Games (LINK)

The Fertility Doctor’s Secret (LINK)

Links

"[There are] misperceptions of the salesman as somebody who’s wearing a shiny suit selling somebody something that they don’t need. And so, we have a couple of responses to that. We have a specific response to that, which is actually the role of sales is...not to sell something you don’t need — it’s essentially to help somebody buy what they actually do need.... But even deeper than that, the thing I tell the engineers is, look, dealing with customers, it’s another systems problem. You are the master of solving a systems problem, which is how to get the computer to do what you want. People aren’t computers, they’re different, but there is a system for dealing people. You can engineer a system for dealing with people. And actually, when you work with top-end sales people, what you find is they have incredibly elaborate, very real systems. Like, very, very, very thoroughly thought-through kind of abstract systems of how they basically run a large-scale sales campaign and how they deal with the customer." --Marc Andreessen  (Source)

Warren Buffett describes Haven's plan to improve health care while controlling costs (video) (LINK)

Warren Buffett Is No Fan of Modern Monetary Theory (LINK)

Investing: Theory vs. Practice - by Massimo Fuggetta (LINK)

The Hidden Risk When You Own Stocks for the Long Run - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Understanding Brookfield and Oaktree’s US$500-billion colossus (LINK)

Stock Analysis: The Most Important Things (Plus, A Case Study) - by Vishal Khandelwal (LINK)

Why our fund managers would never own up to an error like Buffett did on Kraft Heinz (LINK)

Related book: The Courage to Be Disliked

Bill Gurley - Runnin' Down a Dream: How to Succeed and Thrive in a Career You Love [9/14/2018] (video) (LINK)

Decentralized Finance - by Fred Wilson (LINK)

Fives Steps Toward Fairness in College Admissions - by Rick Bookstaber (LINK)

a16z Podcast: For the Billions of Creatives Out There (LINK)

This special, almost-crossover episode of the a16z Podcast features Billions co-showrunner Brian Koppelman — who also co-wrote movies such as Rounders and Ocean’s 13 with his longtime creative partner David Levien — in conversation with Marc Andreessen (and Sonal Chokshi).

Recode Decode Podcast: European commissioner for competition Margrethe Vestager (LINK)

Yes, It’s All Your Fault: Active vs. Passive Mindsets (LINK)

FoundMyFitness Podcast: Dr. Matthew Walker on Sleep for Enhancing Learning, Creativity, Immunity, and Glymphatic System (LINK)

Related book: Why We Sleep

"The only thing each of us lives and loses is the present." --Marcus Aurelius 

Links

What is Amazon? - by Zack Kanter (LINK)

Spinning Gold - by Chris Pavese (LINK)

Counterintuitive Competitive Advantages - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

How Sears Lost the American Shopper ($) (LINK)

Microsoft, Facebook, trust and privacy - by Benedict Evans (LINK)

Some notes on the book Subscribed: Why the Subscription Model Will Be Your Company's Future - and What to Do About It (LINK)

Exponent Podcast: Fence-building vs. Axe-wielding (LINK)

Pivot with Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway (podcast): LIVE! From SXSW (LINK)

Venture Stories Podcast: The Case For Digital Minimalism with Cal Newport (LINK)

Related book: Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

The Epic Hunt for a Lost World War II Aircraft Carrier [H/T @pcordway] (LINK)

A New Discovery Upends What We Know About Viruses - by Ed Yong (LINK)

Sorfis Investments

As many of you already know, my thoughts about starting a Registered Investment Adviser have come to fruition, and Sorfis Investments is now open for business.

The initial letter mostly provides some background about me and how my career and investing philosophy have developed over the years. It’s probably too much detail for many of you, but given that I hope Sorfis will be my main focus for the rest of my investing career, I think it’s worthwhile to give you a written overview describing how I made my way from growing up in Ohio to starting Sorfis in Charlotte, North Carolina. That letter, as well as a sign-up form to receive future letters, can be found on the Communications page.