Michael Mauboussin
Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global. On 4 shows, 9 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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Michael Mauboussin is Head of Consilient Research at Counterpoint Global and an adjunct professor at Columbia Business School. He is known for his research on decision-making, capital allocation, skill versus luck, and analyzing competitive moats.
4shows
9appearances
222statements
69resolved
64supported
1contradicted
93%fully supported
79said about them ↓ Everything Michael Mauboussin said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Mauboussin: Tech companies are not overrepresented among top compounders
“The other thing he pointed out technology companies, they're not overrepresented actually.”
Mauboussin: Almost all top compounder stocks suffer 75%+ drawdowns
“He documented that almost every one of these great compounders had massive drawdowns at some point. And it was common to have drawdowns of 75% or more, but some were 80, 85% drawdowns.”
Mauboussin: Venture return dispersion leaves median and bottom firms with dismal results
“What we know is that there's huge dispersion in returns in venture capital. So if you own the top decile or top Quintile type of firms you do spectacularly well over time, but if you own the median firm or a bottom quartile firms, the results are actually quit…”
Mauboussin: Thesis-driven investors must pre-define probabilistic signposts to prevent bad deals
“If you do have a thesis, and by the way, I'm not adverse to that, but if you have a thesis, you should be thinking about so-called signposts, which is to say, if this thesis is correct, here are the things that we should see happen as we travel down this road,…”
Mauboussin: Four Key Conditions Required for Real Options Valuation to Apply
“Real options tend to be relevant when there's a lot of uncertainty, which is almost always true for young companies. Second, when we have an astute management team that knows how to cultivate and ultimately exercise options appropriately, when there's access t…”
Mauboussin: Investment success depends on win magnitude, not win frequency
“So it's not how often you make money that matters. It's how much money you make when you're right.”
Mauboussin: Less than 5% of public companies drive all market value creation
“Work by Hank Bessenbinder demonstrates that in public markets over long periods of time, most companies, public markets earn Returns less than the treasury bill rates. And it's like a handful, less than five percent of companies basically drive all the value f…”
Mauboussin: Consumer surplus and pricing power shield companies from nominal rate hikes
“You can't dodge the real rate increase, but you can dodge nominal rate increases if your company has pricing power. So this goes back to when we think about technology companies or any kind of company, are they delivering a good or service that creates consume…”
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: Taleb Fell Short Providing Frameworks to Measure Luck's Contribution
“I think Taleb's point, which of course is, is correct, is that we tend to underestimate the role of randomness or luck in, in the outcomes that we observe. But he, I think, came up short in actually giving people frameworks to think about the actual contributi…”
Mauboussin: Good Judgment Project found base-rate training most improved forecasting accuracy
“What they found was the training did improve people's accuracy of their forecasts, and it turned out they found the thing that was most important in that training was basically this, is this idea of teaching them about base rates, and reference classes, and ju…”
Mauboussin: Stimulus-fueled retail stock and options trading will end poorly
“We saw some people get a little bit of money, often just from the government and going into the stock market and trading, you know, options and stocks and so forth. You know, that movie hasn't ended yet, but we've seen this movie many times and that movie tend…”
Mauboussin: Entrepreneurs need irrational optimism, but investors must rely on base rates
“If you're an entrepreneur and you actually know the base rates of failures for entrepreneurs, you might never try in the first place, right? So there's this really interesting
tension, I think, between we want that optimism at the global level. We want peopl…”
Mauboussin: PE lockups protect investors from panic-selling at bad prices
“In some ways, I think that one of the advantages of private equity for, I will speak specifically to buyouts,
Is that investors can't pull their money out of these things.
And as a consequence, they don't see the volatility.
They have no chance to transact at …”
Mauboussin: Equities rebound strongly three months after a 20% market drawdown
“After a drawdown of 20% in the S&P 500, you wait three months. So now from the beginning of March through early June, and then you get involved. And then they looked at small cap and large cap value, small cap and large cap growth. And what they found essentia…”
Mauboussin: High market return dispersion reveals true active manager skill
“What we have shown is that it's very clear that the standard deviation of alpha is Is greatest following periods of high dispersion. So that's saying that high dispersion allows, the tide goes out, you know, who's wearing a swimsuit. High dispersion, that allo…”
Mauboussin: Noise explains 50% of the gap between elite and average forecasters
“The punchline of this, which was, I think, really the key lightning bolt, was that when they decompose this, they found that the difference between the best and the rest was 50% attributable to noise, 25 to bias, and 25 to information. So saying this different…”
The other half of the tape: Michael Mauboussin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 76 times in 43 episodes across the shows. 3 statements on the record name them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 14Ben Gilbert 9Annie Duke 8David Rosenthal 7Patrick O'Shaughnessy 4Mason Morfit 4Bill Gurley 4Paul Enright 3
Statements about Michael Mauboussin, by other people (3)
Gilbert: Venture Capitalists Historically Lack Financial Investing Fundamentals
“For the longest time, venture capital investors have not had a financial investing fundamentals background. They often come from being entrepreneurs and, you know, not, not necessarily the original VCs, but a recent trend. And so you have people that don't hav…”
Enright: David Ott Was Viking Global's Secret Weapon
“David is, I think, the secret weapon inside Viking, right? David is, if you took all of the aspects of Michael Mobison that everybody thinks is amazing, and then all the aspects of Steve Mandel, and you put them together, that's David Ott.”
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
Capital Allocators 47
Acquired 16
the Knowledge Project 8
20VC 5
2026 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2025 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 24 mentions in 10 episodes 2 per episode
- Annie Duke – The Power of Quitting (Capital Allocators, EP.273)
- Amazon.com · Acquired
- Paul Enright – Inside Long-Short Equity Investing (Capital Allocators, EP.266)
- The Playbook: Lessons from 200+ Company Stories · Acquired
- Benchmark Part I · Acquired
- David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert – Acquiring an Industry. Venture is Eating the Investment World 1 (Capital Allocators, EP.229)
- Will Quist: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really “Venture Capital” | 20VC #924 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- Howard Marks & Andrew Marks: Something of Value · Acquired
- 2 more episodes that year, every mention in 2022 →
2021 9 mentions in 5 episodes 2 per episode
- Complexity Investing & Semiconductors with NZS Capital (Extended Cut) · Acquired
- Ted with Jenny Heller – Compounding Knowledge and Relationships (Capital Allocators, EP.185)
- Ted with Patrick O'Shaughnessy – Lessons from the World's Elite Money Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.184)
- 20VC: Aleph's Michael Eisenberg on Why Generalists Over Specialists, Why Boutique Smaller Firms Over Multi-Stage Firms, Portfolio Construction Theory, Capital Concentration Limits and How To Think Through Reserve Allocations with Market Cycles in Mind?
- 20VC: Annie Duke on Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions, How To Evaluate Risk, The Theory of Sunk Cost in Venture & How to Optimise Both the Discussion and Quality of Investment Decisions
- every mention in 2021, scene by scene →
2020 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2019 8 mentions in 6 episodes 1 per episode
- Jason Karp – From Hedge Funds to Health and Wellness at HumanCo (First Meeting, EP.12)
- Patrick O'Shaughnessy – O'Shaughnessy Asset Management (First Meeting, EP.01)
- 20VC: Benchmark's Bill Gurley on 5 Traits Benchmark Look For When Adding To The Partnership, Why The Abundance of Capital Is Today's Biggest Challenge in VC & The Right Way To Think About Market Size When Assessing Opportunities
- David Zorub - The Path to a Hedge Fund Launch (Capital Allocators, EP.96)
- #50 Josh Wolfe: Inventing the Future
- #49 Brent Gilchrist: Goal Mining
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
2018 11 mentions in 7 episodes 2 per episode
- Clare Flynn Levy and Cameron Hight - Moneyball for Managers (Capital Allocators, EP.43)
- Mark Baumgartner – Luck, Risk and Uncertainty at the Institute for Advanced Study (Capital Allocators, EP.77)
- Ben Reiter – Moneyball 2.0 (Capital Allocators, EP.64)
- Brian Portnoy – From Complex to Simple (Capital Allocators, EP.57)
- Basil Qunibi - Moneyball for Allocators (Capital Allocators, EP.42)
- Annie Duke - Improving Decision Making [Capital Allocators, EP.39]
- Seth Masters – Investment Polymath (Capital Allocators, EP.38)
- every mention in 2018, scene by scene →
2017 6 mentions in 5 episodes 1 per episode
- Jeffrey Solomon – Vision, Tenacity, and Empathy (Capital Allocators, EP.09)
- Deep Dive into Hedge Funds (Capital Allocators, EP.34)
- Paul Johnson and Paul Sonkin – The Perfect Investment (Capital Allocators, EP.32)
- Chris Douvos – Venture Capital's Super LP (Capital Allocators, EP.14)
- The Bet with Buffett (Capital Allocators, EP.05)
- every mention in 2017, scene by scene →
2016 1 mention in 1 episode
2015 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Michael's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| CAPITAL ALLOCATORSLEDGER | Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global | 5 | 120 | 88% 37/42 | full record on Capital Allocators → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global | 1 | 35 | 100% 11/11 | full record on 20VC → |
| KNOWLEDGE PROJECTLEDGER | Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global | 2 | 35 | 100% 6/6 | full record on the Knowledge Project → |
| ACQUIREDLEDGER | Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global | 1 | 32 | 100% 10/10 | full record on Acquired → |