investing

“I've always thought that in the world of investing, it's just really rare to have an honest consensus. You know, most good investment ideas are controversial. It's very rare that everyone says this is obviously brilliant or obviously right.”

“It's not the stuff that you do not know that's going to hurt you in the world of investing. That's not what's going to hurt you. It's the stuff that you think you know with absolute clarity and absolute axiomatic fact, ok? It's your unstinting conviction and b…”

“I'm talking about if you are really an exception in the way you invest, you don't have to index. You can do something that's really different, but you have to be really good at your exceptional way of doing things, and you have to be not very widely followed o…”

“And the less you do, the more you benefit is the reality about investing. Because usually what you do is you make mistakes.”

“But one common theme that we all make mistakes on is the emotional side. Like none of these mistakes were because somebody used too aggressive of a growth assumption or an inappropriate discount rate or didn't understand the business. It was always like either…”

“I would say the investing side of it is maybe like fourth or fifth on the list of things that they're really spending time talking to each other about.”

“The biggest mistake in the investment business is a failure to distinguish between between fundamentals and expectations, which is to say, when fundamentals are good, we all want to buy. Welcome to the human race, right? And when fundamentals are bad, you want…”

“And the reason a read, do checklist is really helpful is it takes the emotion out and gives you an action plan. And I think we need something akin to that in the world of investing, which is take the emotion out, have an action plan, and allow people to act on…”

“Luck in some ways is, is really anathema to sports, right? We work hard and we game plan and we strategize and we compete and we sweat. We don't want to think that this is just in the hands of fate or coin flip. I mean, in some ways, luck is very much at odds …”

“I think loss aversion and omission bias are two things that in investing and also in sports have us making some really suboptimal choices, but like shooting overhand free throws, at least we're on the right side of convention.”

“Poker has all the same principles that I think make a good investor, except what's amazing about poker is you learn them much faster. The concepts of pot odds, And money management, and basically process over outcome.”

“And I find that that's actually relatively rare in investing. I think a lot of people are very story driven, and they're very idiosyncratic driven, so they're bottoms up, quote unquote. And they don't say, well, I'm gonna do X, but would X if it were applied a…”

“And I still, to this day, think being a good writer is a really great tool to being a good investor. It's important to be able to, I think, articulate how you're thinking about things. It's important to Be able to simplify your ideas down to a few key principl…”

“There are actually very few original thinkers. Everybody copies everybody else, but they all pretend to be doing their own thing. So the peeve is that people claim to be doing original work, but you know, they're just copying other people's stuff. And you see …”

“Execution is a million times harder than investing. I would tell you that running a company is, and I think most people have done both would tell, like running a company is so much harder than being an investor.”

“I also think it's an important part of deliberate practice. So if you were a basketball player and you were playing a game at the end of the game, you get video that you can go break down, you know, how'd you do, you know, did you show some tendency to me and …”

“There are two points of view in life. One, the way you see it, and one, if you're not a human, how would you see it? And in that sense, that duality has actually stuck to me, and you'd be amazed how useful it is in investing.”

“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…”

“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 …”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“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…”

“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”

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”