Michael Mauboussin
35 statements across 6 episodes · 10 bullish · 2 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Jan 8, 2018 by Michael Mauboussin · said 47 times in 28 episodes since 2017 · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Michael Mauboussin's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Ted Seides (14), Annie Duke (7), Patrick O'Shaughnessy (4), Mason Morfit (4), Paul Enright (3), Cameron Hight (3), Mark Baumgartner (2), Jason Karp (2)
tap a year for its mentions
2026 1 mention in 1 episode
2025 5 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2022 11 mentions in 4 episodes 3 per episode
- Annie Duke – The Power of Quitting (Capital Allocators, EP.273)
- Paul Enright – Inside Long-Short Equity Investing (Capital Allocators, EP.266)
- David Rosenthal and Ben Gilbert – Acquiring an Industry. Venture is Eating the Investment World 1 (Capital Allocators, EP.229)
- Josh Wolfe – Caution and Innovation at Lux Capital, Venture is Eating the Investment World 8 (Capital Allocators, EP.236)
- every mention in 2022, scene by scene →
2021 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2020 3 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2019 5 mentions in 3 episodes 2 per episode
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 →
Everything said about Michael Mauboussin, oldest first
Jan 8, 2018 positive
Jan 8, 2018
Mauboussin: Outside Views And Reference Classes Counter Our Illusion Of Uniqueness
“And the big one is, is that inside outside view, this idea of understanding past performance and how that applies. And, you know, as we go through life, everything feels unique to you. You know, you're moving from, you know, from New York to Boston. It feels l…”
Jan 8, 2018
Mauboussin: Keith Stanovich Distinguishes Rational Decision-Making Ability From General IQ
“Stanovich has made this really important distinction between IQ, which measures something very real, helpful, more of it tends to be better, and what he calls RQ, rationality quotient, which is the ability to make good decisions.”
Jan 8, 2018 positive
Mauboussin: Equity And Credit Investors Must Consistently Monitor Each Other's Markets
“So if you're an equity investor, you should understand what's going on in the credit markets and the options markets and CDS markets. Credit investors should understand equities and so forth, right? So just having other touchstones, I think is incredibly valua…”
Jan 8, 2018 positive
Jan 8, 2018 positive
Jan 8, 2018 negative
Mauboussin: Managing $70 Billion Is Far Harder Than Managing $7 Billion
“At Lake Mason Capital Management, we, you know, the AUM got to, I think, 65 or seventy billion dollars. It's a lot harder to run seventy billion dollars than it is to run seven billion dollars than it is to run seven hundred million dollars, and that's somethi…”
Jan 8, 2018
Mauboussin: Analysts Usually Evaluate Deals As One-Offs Rather Than Using Frameworks
“And I just found as an analyst over the years and a strategist and so forth that analysts, almost every deal, it's like a one-off right there. They're analyzing it without a framework. And if you have a framework for it just allows you to put things into conte…”
Jan 8, 2018 neutral
Mauboussin: Zero $100B+ Companies Have Grown Revenue 15% Annually Over Ten Years
“Let's look at every company that had initial revenues of one hundred billion or more, so obviously adjusted for inflation, and look at how they did in their subsequent growth rates for the next 10 years. And by the way, because this is such rarefied space, you…”
May 13, 2019
Mauboussin: Computers cannot model multi-order future effects missing from historical data
“Well, what would the world look like, and what are the primary, secondary, and tertiary effects of that happening? There is no program that can help you, computer that help you do that, because this is not in the data, right?”
May 13, 2019 positive
Mauboussin: Discretionary managers cannot compete with quants on short-term horizons
“Natural language processing and computers and so forth will allow some parts of the market to be very efficient in the short run. You can make shorter term predictions. And that will probably make that aspect of the market more efficient. And by the way, as a …”
May 13, 2019 positive
Mauboussin: Cognitive Diversity Boosts Fund Returns; Demographic Diversity Is Neutral
“There's only one paper that I've ever seen that attempted to tackle whether it was cognitive diversity or social category diversity that added value, and what that paper found, and it was a couple thousand mutual funds, and it's hard to tag these things really…”
May 13, 2019
Mauboussin: Luck-Driven Strategies Require Larger Sample Sizes to Prove Skill
“The more luck there is, essentially, actually, the more patient you have to be to see if a good process is going to reveal a skill over time. So it's sort of this backwards thing, like, you need larger sample sizes when there's more luck.”
May 13, 2019
Mauboussin: Investment Committees Should Always Use Independent Ballots for Decisions
“And once again, for example, a simple rule, if you're ever voting on something, it always should be independent ballots. What is not uncommon is for people just to go around the room and say, hey, Ted, what do you think? So, you know, Ted, you're a really impo…”
May 13, 2019
Mauboussin: Edge Requires Both Information Insight and Implementation Efficiency
“The other thing I'll just say in doing this research, I probably underappreciate it, which is that there's really a market for information. So figuring things out or what you want to do, but there's also a different market, like an asset market for how to impl…”
Mar 23, 2020 neutral
Mauboussin: Market information cascades propagate using identical network dynamics to physical viruses
“This is also how ideas spread. We talk about this really much in the context of markets. What is an information cascade? It's an idea propagating across a network. Why do we all come to uniform beliefs and markets from time to time? Same basic. It's a mind vir…”
Mar 23, 2020
Mar 23, 2020
Mauboussin: Frequent Portfolio Monitoring Amplifies Myopic Loss Aversion
“The more frequently you look at the market, the more likely you are to see losses. And so myopic loss aversion says for people who frequently revisit their portfolios, they're more likely to see losses, hence suffer from aversion, and hence increase their equi…”
Mar 23, 2020
Mar 23, 2020 bullish
Mar 23, 2020
Mar 23, 2020 positive
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 …”
Feb 4, 2021 positive
Mauboussin: Robust company forecasts require calibrating against historical peer growth distributions
“And alternatively, and I guess what you'd want to also do to come up with a robust forecast is you might look at the history of all companies of that size and simply ask, what is the distribution of growth rates for companies of that size? And you'll see it's …”
Feb 4, 2021 neutral
Mauboussin: Base rates are vastly harder to apply in power-law domains
“So some Base rate distributions are fairly well behaved, you know, things like sales growth rates for companies, obviously things like, you know, a lot of things that are normally distributed in life, like the heights of people and so forth. And then there is …”
Feb 4, 2021
Feb 4, 2021
Mauboussin: Assigning Probabilities Compels Deeper Analysis and Better Discussion
“Just asking people to assign a probability, just that app, as you point out, compelled sort of a much more thoughtful process, which then led to a much more, you know, much richer discussion around the issues. So you're right. Probably the calibration is sort …”
Feb 4, 2021
Mauboussin: Exploration Naturally Decreases and Exploitation Increases With Age
“When you're young, you know, exploration is much more interesting than exploitation, right? So you want to try out the new restaurant, meet new people and so on and so forth. And as you get older, right? Well, your payoffs are much more finite, right? And ther…”
Feb 4, 2021
Mauboussin: Environmental Rate of Change Dictates Exploration Versus Exploitation Balance
“It turns out that probability of peeling off the path is a function of the rate of change in the environment. So when the environment does not change rapidly, the ants go for mostly exploitation and very little exploration. When the rate of change is rapid, th…”
Aug 15, 2022 positive
Feb 19, 2024 neutral
Mauboussin: Non-Financial Companies Built Cash Rather than Investing During Easy-Money Era
“What did companies actually do? None of that stuff. They actually didn't invest more. And so what capital structures got more conservative cash balances. Built up on balance sheets is excluding financial services companies.”
Feb 19, 2024 neutral
Mauboussin: Companies Ignore Cost of Capital and Rely on a 15% Hurdle Rate
“So it turns out it's really interesting that companies, they calculate their cost of capital. They know it, but they don't use it. For almost everything they do, they use a hurdle rate, and that hurdle rate's roughly 15%. So whether the cost of capital goes to…”
Feb 19, 2024
Mauboussin: Intuition and Expertise Only Function in Stable, Linear Environments
“One of the ways to think about this, and this actually frames pretty much the whole report as well, is that you're likely to see expertise work or intuition work, candidly, is when you have environments that are relatively stable, where the relationships are l…”
Feb 19, 2024
Feb 19, 2024 negative
Mauboussin: Simple Algorithms Beat Expert Forecasters in Complex Markets
“And so what we know, and this has been extraordinarily well documented by folks like Phil Tetlock, psychologist, University of Pennsylvania, and others is that in quotation marks, expert forecasts, they tend not to be very good at it. In fact, typically simple…”
Feb 19, 2024
Mauboussin: Investors Selectively Remember Successful Pattern Recognition and Forget Failures
“We remember when pattern recognition led us to a good outcome, even if it was luck, and we forget about when it led to a bad outcome, even if it was bad skill. That's the other thing is we're very selective as to when we remember when it works and when we reme…”