The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 8 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Concentrated investing is a great investing model but a terrible business model
“I don't think that's a business model. I think that's a great investing model. I don't think that's really a viable business model, except for the longest term investors.”
Gotham Capital traditionally concentrated 80% of its portfolio in six ideas
“Well, the big picture, our portfolio six to eight ideas were traditionally 80 plus percent of our portfolio.”
Gotham hires elite quant engineers for risk balancing but bars stock selection
“We have a tech guys who are very sophisticated, you know, one guy, one Google code jam, another one's MIT chess jam. And we need those guys to balance our portfolios, but they're not picking stocks. I picked those guys because they have no idea how to pick sto…”
Gotham Capital generated 50% annualized returns before fees over its first decade
“We made 50% a year for those 10 years before our fees.”
Greenblatt: Staking small fundamental hedge funds is inefficient and overly labor-intensive
“I'm not wild about the idea of owning a piece of business where it's very labor intensive. These are usually very small shops with one, two or three managers who are working really hard to get a good return. And so while it's very helpful to get them started i…”
Seides: Joel Greenblatt's early Gotham fund compounded at 50% for ten years
“And not only were they six to eight positions, but he took as much risk as he could. He used to use leaps instead of just cash, you know, securities or stocks. And they compounded at 50% a year for 10 years, and then he retired.”
Greenblatt's early merger arbitrage failed after Cypress Gardens collapsed into a sinkhole
“One of the first deals I did in the first two months I was in business broke. I wrote about Florida Cypress Gardens was being bought by Harcourt Brace, and it was just a little theme park where they had alligators in the swamps and water skiing Santa Clauses, …”
Six broken deals in 1986 slashed Gotham's returns from 80% to 30%
“I had in my portfolio five or six merger deals that were going on, whether I had a piece of a security or I had some iteration of it, and I thought that was diversity. In my portfolio, but it turned out it was all the same bet. You know, is the financing going…”