Michael Mauboussin
Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global · 5 appearances on the record.
computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →
analystauthoracademicinvestor@mjmauboussin ↗LinkedIn ↗michaelmauboussin.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
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.
120statements → 47claims → 42claims resolved → 88%fully supported → 3.83/5average certainty → 1.98/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 48said about them ↓
37 supported 4 partly supported 1 contradicted 5 not checkable as stated how the 47 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
3 predictions · 44 assertions · 6 opinions · 67 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 47 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 42 are resolved, and 5 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Michael argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
How they sound: not measured why? →
We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Michael Mauboussin on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.
Everything Michael Mauboussin said on Capital Allocators that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Mauboussin: Public equity returns exhibit the same power law as venture capital
“We associate power laws with venture, but if you let it play out in public markets, it's also the exact same power law. It's a power of compounding is the key insight.”
Mauboussin: Mega-Cap Economics Have Defied Classical Theory Since 2000
“Since 2000, roughly speaking, it feels like the economics of the biggest companies have been almost economic law defying by that. I mean, two things. One is they've grown faster than what we would expect big companies to do. And they've sustained very high ret…”
Mauboussin: Magnificent Seven Economic Profit Exceeds Market Cap Share
“When you take a look at the economic profit, so return on capital, less cost capital spread times invested capital, the economic profit Of the Magnificent Seven, it's actually larger than their market cap representation.”
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…”
Mauboussin: Portfolio managers underperform by ignoring their own position sizing rules
“Even there's some evidence if you ask portfolio managers to write down Ex ante, what rules they should follow to size their positions. A, they don't follow those rules, and B, there's evidence that they did follow their own rules, they would do better than the…”
Mauboussin: Funds Run by Three Portfolio Managers Generate the Most Alpha
“What it was found was that the funds that delivered the most Alpha were actually funds with three portfolio managers and better than single managers, and by the way, better than two and four.”
Mauboussin: As Overall Skill Improves In Any Field, Luck Drives Outcomes
“And the paradox of skills when both luck and skill are contributing to outcomes, which is most things, right? There are some things that are mostly skill like running races, but most things in life have at least a dollop of luck. It can be the case that a skil…”
Mauboussin: US Active Equity's $1 Trillion Gross Profit Was Erased By Fees
“The cumulative gross profit, I think we have 35 years of numbers, is about a trillion, trillion net positive gross profit. So gross profit positive more than, you know, ok, is a trillion dollars. Now, that also happens to be about what the fees were in that ti…”
Mauboussin: Active Managers Perform Best In Markets With Highest Explicit Indexing
“They found that in markets where the Explicit indexing was highest Active managers often did the best”
Mauboussin: Buying Fired Fund Managers Consistently Outperforms Buying Newly Hired Ones
“Study after study demonstrates that if you bought the funds that were fired and sold the ones that were hired, you actually, just because of regression toward the mean, you do much better.”
Mauboussin: Individual Cognitive Biases Often Cancel Out, Leaving Markets Efficient
“The fact that you and I are suboptimal and it's easy for us to show that we're suboptimal as individuals that doesn't necessarily translate into a market setting, right? Because our errors may cancel out. You're overconfident. You buy, I'm overconfident. I sel…”
Mauboussin: Liquidity, Not Leverage, Will Be The Next Major Market Systemic Challenge
“I don't suspect leverage is going to be the next big challenge, I do think liquidity might be the case.”
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…”
Mauboussin: Top 2% of public companies generated 90% of US wealth creation
“What's remarkable is if you distill that even one step further, the top two percent of that 28,000 created 50 trillion dollars. Of the 55 trillion in total. So just two percent of all these companies are essentially 90% of the total wealth creation.”
Mauboussin: Top Quintile Public Company ROICs Have Widened Lead
“The ROICs for the top quintile of public companies has distanced itself from the next quintile and sustained at a very high level”
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: 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…”
The other half of the tape: Michael Mauboussin's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 47 times in 28 episodes on Capital Allocators. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Ted Seides 14Annie Duke 7Patrick O'Shaughnessy 4Mason Morfit 4Paul Enright 3Cameron Hight 3Mark Baumgartner 2Jason Karp 2
Statements about Michael Mauboussin, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
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 →
Appearances (5)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Michael Mauboussin - Pattern Recognition and Public Markets (EP.370) | Feb 19, 2024 | 37m |
| BONUS – Michael Mauboussin on the Decision Education Podcast | Feb 4, 2021 | 27m |
| Michael Mauboussin – Consilient Observations in a Crisis (Capital Allocators, EP.127) | Mar 23, 2020 | 33m |
| Michael Mauboussin – Who's on the Other Side (Capital Allocators, EP.99) | May 13, 2019 | 43m |
| Michael Mauboussin – Active Challenges, Rational Decisions and Team Dynamics (Capital Allo | Jan 8, 2018 | 55m |