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Mauboussin: High-Return Companies Should Maximize Investment Over Positive Free Cash Flow
“Some people think, oh, you want positive free cashflow. Well, the answer is not really. I mean, what you want is you, if you can invest at a high return, you want to invest as much as you humanly possibly can, right? That you have access to.”
Mauboussin: As Average Skill Increases, Luck Ultimately Dictates Outcomes
“The paradox of Gil says, and activities were both skill and luck contribute to outcomes, which is most stuff as skill increases, luck becomes more important.”
Mauboussin: Stock Outperformance Requires Exceeding Priced-In Market Expectations
“Your stock price reflects a set of expectations about the future financial performance of your company. And it behooves you to understand what's priced in. And if you want to do really well from the point of view of the stock market, you have to not only meet,…”
Mauboussin: Competitive Advantage Requires Outearning the Cost of Capital
“And so we argue that a competitive advantage should have two features. One is an absolute one. One is a relative one. The absolute one is you should have returns today or returns that are promised to be above your cost of capital, right?”
Mauboussin: Industry Shakeouts Offer Prime Investment Opportunities as Markets Consolidate
“When it rolls over, you know, so in other words, the number of companies is declining. It's actually really interesting time to invest because usually the industry itself is continuing to grow and it's a fewer number of companies that are capturing the spoils,…”
Mauboussin: Entry Valuation Barely Matters for Startups That Reach $10B
“Whether the thing's worth fifty million or a hundred million, if it's going to be worth ten billion in 10 years or three years, like it doesn't really matter that much what you pay for it today.”
Mauboussin: Tesla's Stock Surge Saved Its Underlying Business Fundamentals
“So I think that it was not too many years ago that, that Tesla was sort of skating on thin ice in terms of finances and so forth. And then as a stock took on a life of its own, the stock went up a lot that allowed them to raise capital and get themselves on mu…”
Mauboussin: Relative Skill Gaps Between Top and Average Performers Have Narrowed
“What we've seen in domain after domain is relative skill gaps have narrowed. The difference between the very best and the average is less today than it was in the past.”
Mauboussin: The Distribution of Active Manager Alpha Has Consistently Narrowed
“One of the ways we can measure that is to look at the standard deviation of excess returns, right? So alpha, right? So excess returns. So, so you'd imagine and if you'd imagine If you're an active manager, what you want is a big fat bell shaped distribution, r…”
Mauboussin: Investors Should Expect Muted Returns Across All Asset Classes
“I think that the, you know, we should have relatively muted expectations for returns in all asset classes. I know we had, we're going to have, we're up for another great, but you know, because of where we are with risk-free rates and credit spreads and so on a…”
Mauboussin: Cash Flow, Not Accounting Earnings, Drives Business Value
“It's not about earnings that, that matters. It's really about cashflow. So the ultimate driver value of business is cash. Not accounting earnings.”
Mauboussin: Strategy and Valuation Must Be Integrated to Evaluate Businesses
“You have to combine these two things to understand a business and to do evaluation properly. So in other words, the litmus test of a strategy is that it creates value. And you really can't understand or value a business until you understand the competitive sit…”
Mauboussin: Investors Should Reverse-Engineer Stock Prices to Identify Expectations
“So the idea is to say a stock price, or it could really be any asset price, a price of an asset, but let's say a stock price reflects a set of expectations about future financial performance. So the first step is to say, what do I have to believe for this to m…”
Mauboussin: Asset Prices Reflect a Distribution of Potential Probabilistic Outcomes
“Expectations investing, I should have been more explicit about it, is very probabilistic, right? So what we're really trying to do is think through scenarios. So The if-then kind of scenario. So we're getting knowledge that the price today is just one of many …”
Mauboussin: US Corporate Intangible Investments Reached $2 Trillion in 2021
“Back in 2001. So the year the first book came out capital expenditures and intangible investments. And this is for like called the Russell 3000. So basically us public companies Was about the same amount, 636 hundred and forty billion, something like that. So …”
Mauboussin: Intangible-Asset Businesses Produce Much Fatter Outcome Tails
“So if you think about, you know, sort of the tails pushing out the tails relative to traditional businesses, that's the way I think the way I think about it, there are more extreme good things and more extreme bad things than what we had witnessed in the past.”
Mauboussin: Walmart Had Negative Free Cash Flow for Its First 15 Years
“Walmart for the first 15 years that it was public had negative free cashflow for each of those years. Walmart was profitable on the income statement, but they were investing like crazy.”
Mauboussin: Great Investors Are Differentiated by Temperament, Not Technical Skills
“What differentiates good to great investors has little to do with their sort of technical skills, like their ability to build spreadsheets or whatever, and much more about their temperament. And in particular, their ability to make decisions under some sort of…”
Mauboussin: Higher Market Volatility Increases the Value of Real Options
“So in an option, what you want is lots of volatility. You want lots of volatility, right? Which is sort of counter. So the more volatile the world is, the more valuable the option is.”
Mauboussin: Stock-Fueled Roll-Up Strategies Eventually Collapse Under Scale Requirements
“Often where the gig ends up is that they have to do deals that are so large to perpetuate their growth rate, to perpetuate, to fulfill the expectations that it just becomes like essentially An insurmountable task.”
Mauboussin: Base Rates Are the Single Most Important Mental Model
“If you asked me to, if I could go back to my twenty-year-old self and say, whisper in the ear and say, there's one mental model to sort of put into your life, I would say base rates.”
Mauboussin: Basketball Is the Least Luck-Driven Major Professional Sport
“Basketball is a sport that's furthest away from randomness. So the most essentially skilled dictates the outcomes.”
Mauboussin: Top Venture Capital Firms Retain Return Persistence Unlike Public Equities
“And so it turns out if you look at venture capital in particular by the way, in public equity markets, very limited persistence, right? So if you did really well last year, your expected value is closer to the average the following year. Buyouts. They used to …”
Mauboussin: Replicating Bill Miller's 15-Year S&P Outperformance Will Be Extremely Difficult
“Bill Miller beat the S and P 500 for 15 years in a row. I think that's going to be very difficult for anyone to do again for the same reasons we talked about.”
Mauboussin: Investors Should Seek Niches Where They Are the Smartest
“If it's investing, the answer is try to find a game where you think you can be the smartest person, have the opportunity to be the smartest person in the room.”
Mauboussin: 2001's Top 10 Companies Excluding Microsoft Lost $460B Over 20 Years
“So if you took Microsoft out, so you bought the other nine turns out their market capitalizations are down It's about four hundred and sixty billion dollars in the 20 year period.”
Mauboussin: Two of 2021's Top 10 Public Companies Weren't Founded in 2001
“Interestingly, by the way, three of the top 10 companies today were not public in 2001, and two of the top 10 were not founded, had not been founded yet.”
Mauboussin: Low-Cost Producers Rely on High Capital Velocity
“Low cost producers tend to have low margins and high capital velocity.”
Mauboussin: The Median Venture Capital Deal Earns No Return
“The median Venture deal earns nothing. And many venture deals lose money, but the tails are super extreme.”
Mauboussin: Journaling Probabilistic Forecasts Provides an Essential Decision Scoring System
“Probabilistically, if you can write down, I think there's an X percent probability. This is going to happen by Y date. It gives you the apparatus for a scoring system that can be super helpful.”
Mauboussin: Rate of Mean Regression Depends on the Skill-Luck Continuum
“So you can actually figure out not just, we all know that regression toward the mean happens, but you can actually figure out the rate at which it happens by understanding sort of where you fall in this continuum, which is super cool. It's a very powerful ment…”