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 64 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
Papa: Reframing Endeca as e-commerce sooner could have rivaled Shopify
“If I had framed the world as e-commerce sooner, we probably would have had a much longer runway as an independent company. We would have at least had a chance to enter the world of Shopify, but we didn't.”
Cook: Sunriver's internal data showed they exited structural short positions prematurely
“We were exiting some of our shorts, particular structural shorts too early. So we were taking a gain and then the short kept adding alpha even after we had exited. And so the data said, gosh, if we had just, I think we hold our shorts longer than the average h…”
Rubenstein: Carlyle could have been more profitable with a cutthroat culture
“We could have made more money and been more profitable had we been more cutthroat in hindsight.”
Asian currencies should have been hedged when current accounts exceeded 5%
“You know, if I could have one thing to do over, I would have realized that I should have hedged the currencies in Asia when current accounts went above five percent.”
Corre: Arbitrageurs should have maximized exposure to 2009 Pfizer and Merck deals
“This was true in 2009 when Pfizer was buying Wyeth and Merck was buying Shearing Plow. Both were trading at really, really attractive spreads, but you had to say, look, they're both pharma deals. If there's going to be an issue, there could be an issue with bo…”
Klarman: Baupost was originally planned as an allocator to outside managers
“Baupost would have been formed with me or without me, but my coming along maybe changed the trajectory, and they realized the original plan was to hand out the capital to smart money managers.”
Mullen: Prematurely exiting dot-com shorts cost him a 3x net worth gain
“So personally, I was short in the last tech boom in the early 21st century, and I got squeezed out of my shorts and lost a huge percent of my net worth. That 60 days later, I would have tripled my net worth.”
Enright: Viking's 2008 Returns Suppressed by the Volkswagen Short Squeeze
“I saw this firsthand in 2008, we were up in a way we're up in equities and we would have been up a lot in equities if you strip out the Volkswagen effect. Cause we got caught up in that just like everybody else.”
Veremis: Holding Bitcoin during the Greek debt crisis would have protected citizens
“We should have had some Bitcoin next to our Greek government bonds. It would have helped a lot.”
Wallace Foundation survived by divesting Reader's Digest stock before bankruptcy
“Had he not done that, and we were still in the public company stock of Reader's Digest, it went bankrupt in the 2000. And so yet another case study of the beauty of diversifying.”
Lamont: Not starting her own firm sooner was her biggest career mistake
“Not starting my own firm sooner. Absolutely. Change is hard, right? And you've done something for a long time. I think it's hard, and that absolutely should have done sooner.”
Samani: He would not have built Pristine if he studied hardware history
“I was way over indexing on the iPhone and the iPad, which were the two most recent ones and what turned out to be two of the most exceptional ones. And not appreciating how difficult it is to do new form factors and not looking at the Newton and a bunch of oth…”
Raina: March 2020 consumer demand equaled a full year of puzzle inventory
“If we had about a year's worth of product in our inventory, that that would have been shipped out in the third week of March.”
Scaramucci: If Lehman hadn't forced a stock sale, I'd have lost everything
“Every time in my career where I haven't done that, I've gotten blown out, except at that time, through the grace of God, I was forced out of the stock in 2005. I would have held that stock and lost all that money.”
Seides: 1992 college grads couldn't compete with today's finance applicants
“I never would have been able to compete with what I knew then with someone coming out of college today.”
Clear: Working out preserved his business through early entrepreneurial volatility
“And so much so that I almost feel like if I didn't work out, I don't even know that I would have a business anymore because I think the rollercoaster ride of entrepreneurship, especially those early years, it just would have got to me too much.”