Links

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Chris Bloomstran - An Update on Public Markets (LINK)

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

Grant’s Current Yield Podcast: Class is in session [with Bruce Greenwald] (LINK)

Broyhill Portfolio Update (LINK)

Boyar Quarterly Letter (LINK)

Greenhaven Road Capital Q1 Letter (LINK)

[More Q1 letters can be found HERE and HERE.]

The Investing Edge Podcast: Value Investor’s Edge Live #18: On The Water In The Tanker Markets With Frontline’s CEO (LINK)

Matt Ridley on The Glenn Beck Show on BlazeTV (video) (LINK)

68 Bits of Unsolicited Advice - by Kevin Kelly (LINK)

It’s my birthday. I’m 68. I feel like pulling up a rocking chair and dispensing advice to the young ‘uns. Here are 68 pithy bits of unsolicited advice which I offer as my birthday present to all of you.

I Am So Lucky - by Trey Mancini [H/T Linc] (LINK)

What you need to know about the COVID-19 vaccine - by Bill Gates (LINK)

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"We pay some very big money. We have managers that have made and will make in the tens of millions annually, and we have managers that, when we suffer, they suffer. But you’ve got to treat people fairly. Even though they don’t need the money, everybody wants to be treated fairly. And so the rationale for how you’re doing it should be understood, but there is no cross-Berkshire rationale at all.... The main thing to do is, in terms of market position and all that sort of thing, the real thing I really want to pay managers for is widening the moat that separates our business from our competitors’ businesses over time. Now, that gets very subjective, so I don’t have any perfect way of doing that. But that is always going through my mind in trying to design compensation systems." --Warren Buffett (2010)

Warren Buffett will soon tell us what he really thinks about stocks investing and the coronavirus pandemic - by Lawrence Cunningham (LINK)

The Anti-Amazon Alliance - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

When You Have No Idea What Happens Next - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Wizards of Dalal Street: Mohnish Pabrai on COVID-19 and world economy (video) (LINK)

Martin Stopford on "Coronavirus, Climate Change & Smart Shipping: 3 Maritime Scenarios 2020-2050” (video) (LINK) [Related paper HERE.]

State of the Cloud 2020 · Bessemer Venture Partners (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Josh Kopelman - The Past, Present, And Future Of Seed Investing (LINK)

Stoicism in a time of pandemic: how Marcus Aurelius can help (LINK)

The Ezra Klein Show (podcast): Bill Gates’s vision for life beyond coronavirus (LINK)

Antibody Tests Won’t Get Us Back to Normal - by Sarah Zhang (LINK)

Why the Coronavirus Is So Confusing - by Ed Yong (LINK)

A guide to making sense of a problem that is now too big for any one person to fully comprehend

Links

Information Regarding the 2020 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Shareholders Meeting (LINK)

Warren Buffett may have ditched airline stocks and spent $20 billion on stock buybacks, investor Chris Bloomstran says (LINK)

What the Coronavirus Crisis Reveals About American Medicine - by Siddhartha Mukherjee (LINK)

Medicine is a system for delivering care and support; it’s also a system of information, quality control, and lab science. All need fixing.

Nassim Taleb on warnings over systemic risks from global pandemics (video from last week) (LINK)

When Your Fund Beats the Market, Ask: Which Market? - by Jason Zweig ($) (LINK)

Brent Beshore chats with Tobias Carlisle on The Acquirers Podcast (LINK)

Macro Voices Podcast: Hot Topic #14: Crude Oil BLACK SWAN ALERT with Jim Bianco (LINK)

Today's Audible Daily Deal is worthwhile: Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My Years of Lockheed

The contenders – and challenges – in the race to cure Covid - by Matt Ridley (LINK)

A Complete History of Pandemics - by Vaclav Smil (LINK) [Excerpted from his 2008 book, Global Catastrophes and Trends: The Next 50 Years.]

Related previous post: Vaclav Smil on pandemics and growth

And for those analysts and aspiring analysts out there that may have missed the Friday afternoon post: Behind the Balance Sheet

Behind the Balance Sheet

Behind the Balance Sheet is an investment research and training consultancy. I watched its founder, Steve Clapham, on Real Vision earlier this year, and made a note to check out his online courses. While I hadn't yet gone and looked into them, Steve reached out to me to connect. After looking over his courses and a couple of recent blog posts ("10 Features of the post-Virus Investment Landscape" & "Amazon's Free Cash Flow"), I thought his work was worth highlighting here. 

Link to: Behind the Balance Sheet -- Courses

While Steve has given me access to some of the videos, I receive no other compensation for mentioning his work here. But I believe it may be worthwhile to some readers of this blog, and I think courses like this from experienced professionals will be a big part of the future of education in the world.

Links

"Unfortunately in this kind of work, where you are trying to determine relationships based upon past behavior, the almost invariable experience is that by the time you have had a long enough period to give you sufficient confidence in your form of measurement, just then new conditions supersede and the measurement is no longer dependable for the future." --Benjamin Graham ("Securities In An Insecure World")

Bill Gates on coronavirus: ‘It’s going to be a while before things go back to normal’ (video) (LINK)

Related article: The first modern pandemic - by Bill Gates

Horizon Kinetics Q1 Letter (LINK) [Audio review available HERE.]

Thoughts on Berkshire’s Deployable Cash (LINK)

A Historic Opportunity in Small Cap Stocks (LINK)

‘The American Tailwind’ - by Frank K. Martin (LINK)

Paul Singer's April letter to Elliott investors (LINK)

Raoul Pal's April Global Macro Investor newsletter is now available for all to read (LINK)

Understanding Money, Credit, and Debt - by Ray Dalio (LINK)

BIS paper: Insurance regulatory measures in response to Covid-19 (LINK)

My Restaurant Was My Life for 20 Years. Does the World Need It Anymore? (LINK)

With 100,000 stores set to close by 2025, mall owners face this legal hurdle next (co-tenancy clauses) (LINK)

A Shift in Investment Strategies Post-Coronavirus — COVID-19 Virtual Roundtable (video) (LINK)

Recode Media Podcast: Matthew Ball on how the pandemic will remake TV, movies and video games (LINK)

MacroVoices Podcast: #216 David Rosenberg: Stagflation is coming but not yet (LINK)

How I Built This with Guy Raz (podcast): How I Built Resilience: Live With Guy and Simon Sinek (LINK)

Conversations with Tyler (podcast): Philip E. Tetlock on Forecasting and Foraging as a Fox (LINK)

Infinite Loops Podcast: Morgan Housel – The Psychology of Money (LINK)

Related book: The Psychology of Money: Timeless lessons on wealth, greed, and happiness

The first modern pandemic - by Bill Gates

Link to: The first modern pandemic: The scientific advances we need to stop COVID-19.

The coronavirus pandemic pits all of humanity against the virus. The damage to health, wealth, and well-being has already been enormous. This is like a world war, except in this case, we’re all on the same side. Everyone can work together to learn about the disease and develop tools to fight it. I see global innovation as the key to limiting the damage. This includes innovations in testing, treatments, vaccines, and policies to limit the spread while minimizing the damage to economies and well-being. 

This memo shares my view of the situation and how we can accelerate these innovations. (Because this post is long, it is also available as a PDF.) The situation changes every day, there is a lot of information available—much of it contradictory—and it can be hard to make sense of all the proposals and ideas you may hear about. It can also sound like we have all the scientific advances needed to re-open the economy, but in fact we do not. Although some of what’s below gets fairly technical, I hope it helps people make sense of what is happening, understand the innovations we still need, and make informed decisions about dealing with the pandemic.

Links

"If I think I can make very good money, as we did on Harley-Davidson, with a very simple decision, just a question of, 'Are they going to go broke or not?' as opposed to a tougher decision, 'Is the motorcycle market going to get diminished significantly? And, you know, are the margins going to get squeezed somewhat?' And all of that. I’ll go with a simple decision." --Warren Buffett (2010)

The Art of Survival - by Ian Cassel (video) (LINK)

Giverny Capital 2019 Annual Letter to Partners (LINK)

How Tech Can Build - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

In the Coronavirus Era, the Force Is Still With Jack Dorsey (LINK)

2015 article... That Time I Tried to Buy an Actual Barrel of Crude Oil (LINK)

Invest Like the Best Podcast: Manny Stotz - Frontier Markets Investing (LINK)

The Amish Health Care System [H/T @jtepper2] (LINK)

PBS FRONTLINE: Coronavirus Pandemic (video) (LINK)

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"That's how history unfolds. People weave a web of meaning, believe in it with all their heart, but sooner or later the web unravels, and when we look back we cannot understand how anybody could have taken it seriously." --Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus)

Howard Marks says the stock market rebound is not reflecting reality (LINK)

Oil Plunges Below Zero for First Time in Unprecedented Wipeout (LINK)

Less Than Zero: What Oil's Crazy Day Means ($) (LINK)

Kyle Bass on CNBC (video) (LINK)

Hin Leong Failed to Declare $800 Million Losses (LINK)

Esports and the Dangers of Serving at the Pleasure of a King - by Matthew Ball (LINK)

Book Notes: Whole Earth Discipline (LINK)

Yes, Even Introverts Can Be Lonely Right Now - by Adam Grant (LINK)

COVID-19: What’s wrong with the models? - by Peter Attia (LINK)

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.

Links

Charlie Munger: ‘The Phone Is Not Ringing Off the Hook’ (LINK)

"The Practice of Value Investing" by Li Lu (November 2019 speech, translated) (LINK)

Has This California Lab Fixed America’s Covid Test Problem? - by Michael Lewis (LINK)

Who Pays For This? - by Morgan Housel (LINK)

Rob Arnott: Why the Stock Market Hasn't Even Gotten Cheap Yet (video) (LINK)

The NBA and Microsoft - by Ben Thompson (LINK)

Mohnish Pabrai and Francis Chou Q&A with Harvard class (podcast) (LINK)

Value Investing with Legends Podcast: Dan Davidowits & Jeff Mueller – Compounding with Polen Capital (LINK)

MacroVoices Podcast #215 - Chris Cole: Dragon portfolio revisited in the eye of the storm (LINK)

Related paper: "The Allegory of the Hawk and the Serpent"

The Peter Attia Drive Podcast: #107 - John Barry: 1918 Spanish flu pandemic—historical account, parallels to today, and lessons (LINK)

Related book: The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History