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 1,500 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
Aitken: The right allocation to Chinese renminbi assets is zero
“I'll just say generally that the right size exposure to renminbi assets is zero, and perhaps that's something we should take up in another conversation ahead of the Taiwanese presidential elections.”
Collins: Citadel's pod shop model is risk management, not actual investing
“No one has done it better than Ken Griffin. But one of the things that really struck me was that it's not investing. There's actually no part of investing to it. It's managing a bunch of tickers within a risk framework.”
Sacca: No reason to hire a financial analyst again after GPT-4
“I don't know why I'd hire a financial analyst again. It's a job I value, but at the same time, this thing in moments spit back compound annual growth rate analysis.”
Giannini: Private equity marks are legitimate and outperformance is real
“So I think what you're seeing in the private markets is actually what's happening. It's not that the value's Are inflated, or there's a lag factor. They're legitimate valuations, and it's why, by the way, you're in private equity. It just, sorry, it performs b…”
Douvos: Opportunity funds are a sneaky workaround to LP fund-size limits
“Now we've just started calling them opportunity funds, which by the way is just a sneaky way around the issue of my LPs don't want me to get too big. So I'll leave my core fund the same size, but I'll raise this opportunity fund.”
Jack Bogle carefully staged his personal origin story for journalists
“The only thing that's a real common denominator is Jack had this wonderful vision of who he was and how he wanted to be seen, and he nurtured that vision, and he had it down pat, so every journalist who came to spend some time with Jack would get the same stor…”
Van Vleet: Institutional Allocators Cannot Afford to Avoid China
“I think you can't afford not to be in China.”
Wall Street Repackaged Basic Governance As ESG To Charge 40 Basis Points
“I'll tell you how it happens because we have a lot of Wall Street firms who have a conflict of interest. They can wrap it into this new bottle and slap on another 40 base points of fees for it.”
UK Pension Rules Mandating Consultants And Beneficiaries Fueled The LDI Meltdown
“The UK were required to have a consultant, and were required to have participant beneficiaries on the committee, which are two problems that also led to this little fiasco in the UK around their LBI programs. You have too many amateurs in the room, and so you …”
Gave: US workforce obesity and opioid use severely constrain manufacturing reshoring
“The whole lockdown thing made a couple of problems that are inherent to the US and to the US labor force worse, most notably obesity, which prevents a lot of people from holding the type of manufacturing jobs where you have to be sitting up and doing a lot of …”
Harris: There are probably only 20 good long/short equity managers
“No, it's a very difficult model. There's probably only 20 good managers out there.”
Stavros: Private equity makes a mistake by concentrating equity in management
“I think private equity is making a mistake by aggregating all the economics in such a sliver of the company. We would all be better off as investors put aside the good to society by more evenly distributing it because the senior people are going to quickly tap…”
Seides: Warren Buffett won 10-year wager with a questionable decision process
“So I would say he won with the decision process that was questionable. We lost with a decision process that looked pretty good.”
Giannini: The 2008 financial crisis was private equity's best event
“That is when, to me, private equity, private markets established themselves. It was the greatest thing that happened to the industry. And I know people will go, that asshole, what's he saying that for such a horrible time. But it's because at that point, every…”
Giannini: LP advisory boards are a total waste of time
“I think advisory boards are a total effing waste of time. I have learned nothing. Here's what I've learned. Zero. Advisory boards are a place where LPs want to feel important and feel really good, and GPs want to make them feel important and really good, and s…”
Chhabra: The institutionalized David Swensen endowment model no longer works
“I'm not clear that the entire ecosystem of the Swenson model that had become so super institutionalized really works any longer. The fees are high, the fees are asymmetric, the LPGP risks are different, and I think we should explore different models, and I thi…”
Veremis: Crypto Regulatory Risk Is No Longer Systemic
“And then regulatory risk.
I don't think it's systemic anymore.
I could be wrong.
I think it was systemic in 2018.
You could have seen some really aggressive action against crypto back then.
Now, how can it be?
Like, I think, 30, forty million Americans hold so…”
Zell says he would repeat the Tribune buyout today
“If the Tribune scenario were presented to me today, I can't believe that I wouldn't do it again, because my assumptions were realistic.”
Drogen: Most long/short equity hedge funds gamble with beta, not alpha
“The biggest thing that coming into this world, even being a Geller, That I learned at Estimize in talking to so many of these firms about their process for generating trading ideas and fundamental estimates and all of this stuff is really that at the end of th…”
Drogen: Bitcoin is an investable global digital religion and Ponzi scheme
“This stuff was just religious proselytization as a financial asset. Like if you could own a digital religion, would you want to? Yes, absolutely. The first global digital religion that is basically a Ponzi scheme But you can own it. And that seems like a great…”
Drogen: Anyone claiming to know which crypto tech wins is lying
“My hypothesis here in this entire technology ecosystem, and this goes back to the mistakes that I made in 13 and 15, is I don't think anybody understands which one of these technologies is going to win long term. And if they tell you they do, I think they're f…”
Chris Voss: Relying on penalty clauses reveals poor negotiation skills
“If you're putting penalty clauses in your contracts, that means you're not a good negotiator.”
Drobny: The modern Yale model is effectively a levered S&P 500 position
“The problem with it today, as we discussed, is that most of the investments are equity allocations, and so you're basically getting a levered S&P position.”
Drobny: 14 years in, crypto lacks any use case beyond speculation
“And so right now I hear the word constantly, we're in the early innings, but crypto has been going on since 2008 now, so we're 14 years into it. And there still isn't really a core use case other than speculation and capital raising. There's no businesses that…”
Drobny: Endowments are not smart money; committees just fund obvious investments
“People think endowments are the smart money, and I disagree. I think endowments are often run by committee And of a dozen smart people in the room that are paid a lot of money that give money to the obvious stuff. And committees kind of push people towards tha…”
Sethi: Social Capital marketed data capabilities ahead of actual execution
“I don't think we successfully did that, but I think we did successfully marketed it ahead of what we could do, but we did bring some of the brightest minds around the table.”
Sethi: VCs demand high ownership targets because they are bad pickers
“A lot of the reasons why people focus on ownership, it's a hard thing to say is that they're just bad pickers. So if you say I can focus on 20, I want 10, 15, 20% ownership in this company. It's because they believe that if they make failure somewhere else tha…”
Papic: Commodities offer the best downside portfolio protection in stagflation
“And ironically, I think the best downside risk protection is commodities, which is weird because commodities should be correlated to growth. So when growth suffers, commodities should suffer with them. That's not really a good hedge the way bonds were. But I t…”
Papic: China's CCP legitimacy depends on living standards, not Taiwan
“The Chinese Communist Party can be a legitimate domestic political force without reunifying with Taiwan. We know that because they haven't, and they're legitimate. They continue to rule China. Whereas we don't know what would happen to the Chinese Communist Pa…”
Wolfe: Geopolitical Rivalry with China and Russia Eclipses Climate Change
“So I think that those two forces are really going to be probably the most important thing to me, more important than climate change, more important than a lot of the things that have captured the current zeitgeist.”
AngelList's high-volume seed indexing strategy functions like buying lottery tickets
“Portfolio construction is an underappreciated yet important art, but a lot of the new entrants just want to buy lottery tickets, and then you, everybody bows at the altar of power law, and you've got AngelList putting out reports saying the secret is to invest…”
Black: Buying wide-moat businesses cheaply is flawed today
“That whole notion, and we've talked about this before of buying wide moat businesses cheaply, I think is flawed today because everybody's trying to do the same thing.”
Jain: Solana is high-speed broadband compared to Ethereum's dial-up infrastructure
“And now we have Solana, which is like broadband, To Ethereum's dial-up.”
Visser: Reading books is a waste of time compared to web surfing
“I no longer think books are a good use of time in any way, shape or form. They're a waste of time, but they have a content, but you're not going to consume as much content with a book as you will with surfing, 20 different web pages on the same topic where you…”
Whalen: Mega private equity funds act as misaligned coupon clippers
“The large, huge funds that are raising that are, we call them the coupon clippers that are raising, sure, I'm going to offend some people, but too much money, and it's misaligned”
Tian: Alibaba's asset-light business model is an "original sin."
“That's exactly the way that Alibaba did the business, and I actually, I think it's potentially an original sin. It's the way that eBay thought, and it didn't really work out that well for them versus, let's say, an Amazon.”
Martin: Tesla is worth only $40 to $50 per share on cash flows
“I think, wherever Tesla is now, 500 plus a share, 600. It's probably, in our brains, I'd pay 40 or 50 bucks a share, but as a multiple Of the cash flow.”
Ford: China is an ambitious strategic competitor, not an enemy
“I'm pro-China. I'm open about it in the sense that I admire what they've accomplished in the last 34 years. I admire where they're going as a country. They are ambitious, just like the United States is ambitious, and they are a very strong strategic competitor…”
Grantham: Investors should own as few U.S. equities as possible
“I do recommend owning as few US equities as you can face.”
Monk: Public pensions contrive asset allocations to hit aggressive return targets
“In the case of public pension funds, yes, like you'll have actuaries come along and do a pretty rigorous Examination of the liabilities. They'll tell you what your asset allocation strategy would be, but then it gets complicated because the assumptions underpi…”
Seides: SPAC Sponsor Equity Offers Best Risk-Reward Since Subprime Short
“The sponsor equity in a SPAC is the best risk reward available in the markets anywhere that I've seen since the subprime short.”
Long-horizon retail retirement savers need private equity the most
“Let's think about a target retirement fund, 50 year horizon, multi-asset class, single nav, rebalanced with return premiums that could be somewhere two to 400 basis points over public markets. I would argue that those investors are the investors who need priva…”
Dixon: Bitcoin is too eccentric to scale to billions of users
“I think Bitcoin's important, but I think a little too eccentric for the billions of people kind of scale.”
Dodson: Allocators cannot fulfill fiduciary duty without bias reduction
“And that mirror is asking folks to be accountable to the optimization and fiduciary duty that they've signed up for and realize that without bias reduction, that is not being met, and there needs to be a big investment in innovation and getting these tools rig…”
Chamath: Venture Capital Now Yields Worse Beta Than S&P 500
“That as the number of entrepreneurs have gone up, the amount of capital has gone up, and the returns have come down, where now you're signing up for 10 to 12 years of illiquidity, and a market beta that's worse than owning an S&P index fund.”
MLB contradicted its ethical stance by rushing Steve Cohen's ownership approval
“Baseball having just gotten through this huge ethical scandal. We've cleaned up the game. We've kicked Jeff Luno out for a year. We've kicked the manager out. We really care about ethics. And then they turn around and they rush through the approval process. A …”
Papic: Public market ESG is meaningless; real edge is in private markets
“Now, the problem I have, though, is that in the public markets, there's clearly this kind of rubber stamp of ESG that I think a lot of investors have already figured out is almost meaningless. Because you have these ESG indices that are like everybody but poor…”
Chabran: Carried interest is a cheap alignment option versus real sweat equity
“We all know that the alternative markets have generated this optionality, which will be by way of carried interest, incentive fees, that people would put as a The alignment of interest, I actually think, you know, it's a fairly cheap option compared to any oth…”