Michael Mauboussin
Head of Consilient Research, Counterpoint Global · 5 appearances on the record.
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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.
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: 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…”
Mauboussin: Venture capital and buyout returns lack reliable, standardized performance data
“The challenge in these things are things like venture capital is a good example where there just aren't really reliable data. You and I can look at the S&P. 500 returns or the Russell 3000 returns. We can agree pretty much that the numbers are right. Venture c…”
Mauboussin: Accounting losses often mask highly profitable investments in intangible growth
“So saying this slightly differently, you might have two companies They're both losing money, but one where the economics are fantastic, and you want them to lose money because they're engaging in NPV positive investments. Another company losing money that's ac…”
Mauboussin: Individual cognitive biases often cancel out in aggregate markets
“The point I try to stress is that it's not clear to me that those little things actually manifest in markets, right? Because They can cancel out, essentially. So the market is really, you're not competing. It's not me, Michael versus Ted. It's really Ted versu…”
Mauboussin: The wisdom of crowds fails when investor beliefs become correlated
“So the wisdom of crowds exists when you have Heterogeneous agents. Good aggregation mechanisms. So in other words, the information is being brought together and you have good incentives. And by the way, that should be your default assumption is that markets ar…”
Mauboussin: Investing's Biggest Error Is Confusing Fundamentals with Expectations
“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…”
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…”
Mauboussin: Additional information increases forecaster confidence without improving accuracy
“The research shows that as you give people additional pieces of information about something, the accuracy of their forecasts don't improve at all, or their bets don't improve at all, but their confidence tends to soar.”
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?”
Mauboussin: Retail Investing Surges Almost Always End Poorly For Individual Investors
“It's almost always the case when individuals get excited and start directly investing that the story doesn't end happily for them.”
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…”
Mauboussin: Genuine Consensus Is Rare Because Good Investment Ideas Are Controversial
“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.”
Mauboussin: Low Market Volatility Suppresses Active Fund Manager Performance Differentiation
“The small variance and performance of active managers, part of that's also a function of the volatility being low. And we can demonstrate that. So, you know, it's very difficult to distinguish yourself either favorably or unfavorably when the volatility of the…”
Mauboussin: NFL Teams Still Make Suboptimal Fourth-Down Decisions Despite High Stakes
“It's amazing that even like in the NFL, where there are huge stakes, There's still a lot of suboptimal decisions made. You know, the famous one is fourth, going forward on fourth down.”
Mauboussin: Outcome Bias Creates Crippling Career Risk For Under-Established Decision-Makers
“Bill Belichick goes four and a fourth down, and it doesn't work out. People give them the benefit of the doubt, but if you're a coach who's got a 500 team, it may be the correct decision, but you lose that game. People don't think about the quality of your dec…”
Mauboussin: Statistically Evaluating Managers Requires Longer Time Horizons Than Practice Allows
“Some of the academic work and some of the simulation work suggests that the time horizon is a little bit longer than it is practically. But the flip side is if I'm an allocator and I have someone who's underperforming, I don't really don't know if it's just a …”
Mauboussin: Margin Requirements, Not Interest Rates, Actually Drive Market Credit Cycles
“John's, I think, very provocative point is that it's not about interest rates. It's about margin requirements. It's about the ability to borrow. And we tend to think that if we lower interest rates, the world is going to be better and we raise interest rates i…”
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…”
Mauboussin: Genuine Expertise Requires a Predictive Model, Not Just Experience
“I guess the way you could say it is all experts have experience, but not all experienced people are experts. And so what Northcraft says is an expert is someone who has a predictive model that works.”
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…”
Mauboussin: Pattern recognition works better on micro than macro levels
“So I do think it's going to be more effective on the micro level than it's going to be on the macro level, because it's just a much simpler problem to try to parse.”
Mauboussin: Fundamental investors underutilize available decision aids
“Many fundamental investors don't really use those decision aids, or they don't use them as much as they possibly could, and so that's a fascinating area for us to explore, which is, are there decision aids at our fingertips that we're not accessing as fundamen…”
Mauboussin: Fundamental investors lack structured, quantitative position sizing
“I think most fundamental investors have some sense of why their position sizes are what they are, but in a sense, they're not quantitative or they're not completely structured.”
Mauboussin: US expected real equity returns reached mid-6% in January 2024
“January first, 20, 24, expected equity returns are eight and a half percent nominal. You take out the inflation expectations. Your real equity returns are from the mid sixes, low to mid sixes. Not great, not compelling, but a heck of a lot better than Real thr…”
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 |