Investing

“And people Are, at least in my experience collectively, at least investing against the fact that they believe the speed is there, which is different from the market size. People are conflating the two things right now, in my opinion.”

“Which turned out to be unknowingly good training for what we do as investors, because you're looking at different businesses, understanding them in a deep manner, developing pattern recognition.”

“Investing is a craft. It's not a profession. It's like woodworking or glassblowing. There is no perfection. You're always getting a little bit better at what you're doing every time you make a decision.”

“Particularly those more esoteric ones, or really in the commercial and specialty space as very similar in spirit to the practice of what investing is, which you're deploying capital into uncertainty to achieve a return. That's true across both. And the risks t…”

“If you just ask for something and you get it back, it will give you generalities and it will drive everything to kind of an average, right? That's what these models are. So in order to get the best out of them, you need to engage with your knowledge, your expe…”

“I think I realized that in order to be a world-class investor, finances are actually secondary to human nature. Financial trends change every decade, every handful of decades. Something will, some new thing will pop up, you know, SPACs are this new thing. So l…”

“It might be That one of the biggest leaks in investing is too much activity. And the remedy for too much activity is actually to just busy yourself with bridge and books and playing pickleball and doing other things so that you are not prone to just sitting th…”

“If you go into a field that everybody likes and they like it a lot and have bid up the price, then your returns are not likely to be high. If they, if you go into a field where everybody else has been blind to the merits and says, I wouldn't touch that with a …”

“Anyone that's really succeeded in investing or trading is first and foremost a great risk manager.”

“Investing. Actually, yeah. Yeah, a hundred percent. It's, I think, the, something that I can do forever, like, and it's really enjoyable, and I really love, like, Being a part of the cutting edge things in technology, and like, advancing society, and human evo…”

“Someone put it to me well, they said that, you know, the long term is really just a succession of short terms that you either survived or were not kicked out of. And actually I realized over time there isn't, at least in politics, maybe it's more broadly in bu…”

“The only things that matter in life in investing are the founding, forming, and breaking of the great bubbles. That determines everything. If you can sidestep half of the pain, that will make all the difference in the world.”

“Buying is glamorous. Selling is the job.”

“To be a very successful investor, you have to be extremely, extremely single-minded. You need to come to your own conclusions. You cannot have others help you. It is not a team sport. That is probably the single most important thing. Whenever I see teams of in…”

“Fantasy football and investing, they're fundamentally the exact same thing. You have to have a differential opinion. If you just draft everybody where their ADV is, you're never gonna win.”

“If you can wrap your head around those concepts, You've learned 90% of what you need to know about investing before you've bought a single stock.”

“You know, just because you lost, you need to get back on your horse and take the same amount of risk, and it's very difficult.”

“If you have to serve like sum up doing well financially in one word, I think it's survival. That's true in your career. That's true for savings. That's true for investing. Absolutely. It's just survival.”

“Significant enough technology change, product change on the supply side unlocks much larger markets. And I think that's going to be, I mean, I think frankly, that's going to be like the single, like dominant trend in investing for like the next 30 years.”

“The way I learned to invest, ah, was to write down my criteria when I was making a decision. Every time I'd make a decision, I would then think, why am I making that decision? And then I write down the criteria and see how it would have worked in the past.”

“The great thing about investing, and the great investors to me actually are better at 70 than they are at 50, and hopefully, you know, I'm in my fifties, I'm better than I was when I did this at 30, and you just learn, right? You understand patterns better”

“Being good at that doesn't mean you're a great investor. It means that you're good at people yelling at you. It means you're good at handling abuse and being incredibly inefficient with your time, but you thought you were efficient.”

“Investing is an apprenticeship business. You don't learn it in school.”

“Investing is, is actually more about learning about your temperament than it is about the specific action that you're doing. Your temperament, actually, it's more about being in line with your temperament than not, or which game you're picking.”

“Operator. It's all about action. You know, it's all action, action, action. You got to do stuff, right? You're trying to do as many things as you can be super productive as an investor. It's like, sit on your hands. Inaction is your friend. All the money's mad…”

“I think investing is pattern recognition and everyone can draw their own, you know, Graphs out of those patterns, but you know, that's fundamentally the core thesis. Like you could be the smartest guy in the world, but if you don't see the patterns or if you d…”

“Investing is a forcing function for building a lot of financial literacy. You start to understand politics. You start to actually become a little bit more objective about politics, in my opinion, because you're looking at it purely from a lens of like, how doe…”

“But in investing, you know, it is wildly accountable. You, you're making predictions about which businesses are going to win and which are going to lose which, you know, to understand businesses are sort of complex social structures embedded in our society, wh…”

“There's one real skill set if you want to make a ton of money in investing and it is asking a lot of questions continuously. And never being scared that you don't know the answer because you're, it's a, You know, zero sum game. You either get all the informati…”

“But I don't think they're going away. So today meme coins are five percent of total crypto market cap. I think they'll always be here because investing is inherently about feeling like you're part of a community.”

“It's very industry by industry, right? Like for you and in investing, right? It's like the most power law thing imaginable. And where it's just like the top handful of companies each decade are the ones that matter such a disproportionate amount. And it's the …”

“And I think that we've almost like tricked the American public into thinking that investing is gambling.”

“Investor to me is a side job. It's a hobby.”

“I used to think that the hardest part of investing was buying the right assets, and I'm now fully convinced that the hardest part of investing is selling correctly”

“No, like there are many incremental steps between now and then that you want to track to and hold yourself accountable to. It doesn't mean you're trading every day or every quarter, but you want to be really thoughtful on this is why I bought it. These are the…”

“I think there's some parts of it that are temperament related, like just practicing deferred gratification. There's elements of it that are You know thinking about the world probabilistically, everything, just continuing to practice that every day or the uncer…”

“Investing is it's a completely different job at roughly each half order to order of magnitude. What I mean by that is you know, writing a 25,000 dollar check is a different job than a two 50 K check versus a 2.5 versus a twenty five million versus a two fifty …”

“Investing is one of the very few endeavors in life where the harder you try, the worse you're probably going to do. And yes, there are exceptions to that. Renaissance technologies. Of course, you can name the exceptions for people who tried very hard and did v…”

“The problem with making money is you think all of a sudden you're smart. Like, oh, I made money in this one area. I, you discount the fact that part of it is luck. There's always a luck factor. You discount the part that there's a lot of people involved in, in…”

“He goes, if you have a team, everybody just centers around the safe picks that we can all agree on. And he's like, you know, you'll never find the truly, truly contrarian hated and unloved things. If you invest as a team, because it's not a team sport.”

“Invest in strength, not lack of weakness.”

“The skill is often getting the thing taking off to take your money versus someone else's money, not picking amongst things that haven't launched yet and having feces about why one's going to do better than the other.”

“But the thing is that the more uncomfortable you feel, the better it probably is. And so as long as you know that, that takes away some of that uncomfortable feeling.”

“What I've learned to love about investing, Ted, is I view it to be a platform for self-discovery. It's effectively a mirror. It can reveal your policies, your insecurities, your temperament, what type of teammate you are, what type of communicator you are, jus…”

“Strong opinions loosely held is a common term, and I think that's what the North Star should be, or at least my view it should be, is you have to act on what you know while still doubting what you know.”

“And I started to see patterns where there are certain industries where there's some creativity involved, where it's difficult to connect cause and effect, that you just get these rules. People try to minimize career risk, and people try to sound smart. So you …”

“The problem in investing is that feedback quality is poor, at least for our flavor for investing. You're long-term, you're not making that many decisions, takes a long time to get the feedback, multiple years if you're right or wrong, and then there's just a t…”

“The first truth of entrepreneurship and investing is that the very big ideas are contrarian, because the contrarian is part of the reason why a bunch of large companies and competitors haven't already done it, why a bunch of other entrepreneurs haven't already…”

“So the idea that investing and money Is more akin to like your taste in music where nobody's right or wrong. Everyone's just has a different view of what's good and what's bad. It's hard to grasp that in a field like finance where it's taught as a math-based f…”

“Pessimists get to be right and optimists get to be rich. And so one thing we'll see when we go through these, I think is that the times where we said, ah, it's not going to work. Those are the ones where we have a higher hit rate, right? Because pessimists nat…”

“The great thing about this business, and the hardest thing about this business, is a lot of folks who are in our industry, there are people who got nineties and plus on every single one of their tests. And in investing, fifties, 55, 60 is pretty good. Now in a…”

“There's no difference between investing between men and women.”

“I think as creators, we're really good at generating money, but we don't know how to turn money into money. Because it's like. It's a totally different skill set. And then we don't know who to trust with that.”

“You have to do your own work. And whatever that means in a different situation, you can't just take for granted, even with someone who was perfectly aligned. He had so much of his own capital in this name, and he missed something that was totally obvious.”

“I didn't get the adrenaline rush I get out of being in the trenches of running a company, which I think is something that a lot of founders miss when they start investing.”

“The most successful people have an unusual level of beginner's mind and humility and Because if they're at the frontier or edge of their profession or their craft, they know exactly what their gaps are. Because, especially in investing, investing is a probabil…”

“In a chess game, if I lose it, the next round, tomorrow, I'm the same chess player. But investing, if I've lost money today, I have less money tomorrow to invest with. And the problem with a lot of people in investing is that they're, to become a decent invest…”

“When things are going up, it's easy to convince yourself you're a genius. And when things go down, it's easy to tell yourself that it was bad luck. And so much of what we do for a living is inverting that. And when things are going up, giving yourself, hey, yo…”

“If you see hundreds and hundreds of things each year, you're gonna be able to pick a few that are just obviously good, and so there's no such thing as too much sourcing. You just want tons and tons and tons of ideas, and you want an engine for producing those …”

“In investing, you don't get paid for degree of difficulty. Making a straightforward good investment that you have high confidences is good. You don't have to do the triple flip half gainer in investing to make a good decision. You can make a simple decision. D…”