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 120 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
Mauboussin: Investors Selectively Remember Successful Pattern Recognition and Forget Failures
“We remember when pattern recognition led us to a good outcome, even if it was luck, and we forget about when it led to a bad outcome, even if it was bad skill. That's the other thing is we're very selective as to when we remember when it works and when we reme…”
Mauboussin: People Overapply Personal Experiences and Ignore Broad Base Rates
“The key thing to underscore in all this is that we all have our little mental databases. We've all had experiences. We've all had wins and losses. We value those, right? They're important to us. And so we tend to think that they're going to apply more than the…”
Mauboussin: Private equity buyouts represent 20% of public company delistings
“Since in the last 10 or 15 years, buyouts have been about 20% of delisting of public companies.”
Mauboussin: GM and GE remain top 20 lifetime wealth creators
“For example, you think about the leaderboard, the top 20 greatest wealth creators of all times, and it would include some suspects you would guess, which would be Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and Alphabet and so forth, but it also includes things you might n…”
Mauboussin: Top investment managers excel at curiosity and epistemic rationality
“The thing that almost always strikes me about the best managers that I know is I guess two aspects of it. One is they're always curious about the world and want to learn about the world. And so anytime you find someone in investing who's not curious, you shoul…”
Mauboussin: Robust company forecasts require calibrating against historical peer growth distributions
“And alternatively, and I guess what you'd want to also do to come up with a robust forecast is you might look at the history of all companies of that size and simply ask, what is the distribution of growth rates for companies of that size? And you'll see it's …”
Mauboussin: Environmental Rate of Change Dictates Exploration Versus Exploitation Balance
“It turns out that probability of peeling off the path is a function of the rate of change in the environment. So when the environment does not change rapidly, the ants go for mostly exploitation and very little exploration. When the rate of change is rapid, th…”
Mauboussin: Severe stress forces investors to shorten their time horizons
“The big punchline is that when we're stressed, these certain conditions for sure contributing to that, we shorten our time horizons. So precisely when we should be casting our eyes out on the horizon, we sort of look down.”
Mauboussin: High-Yield Spreads Are Half Their 2008 Peak
“And we're now, as of last day or so, about 900 basis points spread. We've seen episodes like this in 2016, 2012, but we are about half the levels of spread that we saw during the financial crisis.”
Mauboussin: VIX Prints Reached All-Time Highs Above 2008 Levels
“I believe it's correct to say that the prints we've had on the VIX and the clothes we've had on the VIX are at all time highs, higher than the financial crisis.”
Mauboussin: M&A, IPOs, and Buybacks Are Heavily Pro-Cyclical
“Things like mergers and acquisitions, share buybacks, IPOs, have historically been associated with high market levels, right?... And by contrast, M&A tends to dry up when you've had difficult times, IPOs dry up and buybacks dry up.”
Mauboussin: Single-Manager Funds Dropped From Over 75% to Under 25%
“By the way, in my career, it used to be almost all single manager PM funds. It was more than three quarters of them. Now that's less than a quarter.”
Mauboussin: Taiwan Study Shows Institutions Outperform While Retail Investors Lose
“Taiwan was a particularly nice data set because they could really identify the characters behind all these different trades, and they found that institutions delivered excess returns, individuals lost money,”
Mauboussin: Dodd-Frank Eliminated the Outsized Market Impact of Credit Rating Changes
“And it turns out the importance of credit rating changes went way up after Reg FD, which is super cool. So that was an example of asymmetric information. Mark recognized that that was important. Why it's an interesting natural experiment is that Dodd-Frank in …”
Mauboussin: Constant float allows Warren Buffett to invest counter-cyclically
“You think about guys like Warren Buffett, you know, one of the advantages is he's constantly has flowed. He always has money coming in the door and That really helps for you to be able to behave in a way that counters this pro cyclicality.”
Mauboussin: Manager Return Dispersion Spiked During Dot-Com Era Before Reverting
“So that standard deviation had been going down, down, down, sixties, seventies, eighties, into the nineties. And then there was a massive reversal where the standard deviation went way back up around the dot com period. And so there's a spike, and then it come…”
Mauboussin: Olympic Podium Finish Times Are Shrinking As Skill Levels Increase
“In most things, certainly physical endeavors, you know, we are grinding toward physiological limits, and if you look at things like marathon times, or sprinting, or swimming, and as you also know, that the times are converging, so the difference between gold, …”
Mauboussin: Unweighted Data Shows 40% Of Active Managers Beat Markets Annually
“Unweighted numbers, about 40% of managers beat the market in an average year. And the standard deviation is high. It's like 17% standard deviation.”
Mauboussin: Equity And Credit Investors Must Consistently Monitor Each Other's Markets
“So if you're an equity investor, you should understand what's going on in the credit markets and the options markets and CDS markets. Credit investors should understand equities and so forth, right? So just having other touchstones, I think is incredibly valua…”
Mauboussin: Wilt Chamberlain Shot Underhand Free Throws During His 100-Point Game
“That day that Will Chamberlain scored a hundred points in Hershey, Pennsylvania, he was shooting underhand free throws and made like 90% of them. And it was like one, and it wasn't captured on tape, and apparently it was kind of a one-off. He just did it a few…”
Mauboussin: Analogical Reasoning Frequently Breaks Down Across Breadth And Depth
“The short answer is that the number one way we use to compare things is by analogy. This is like that. And that is, that approach is incredibly effective if you've got the appropriate analogy, right? But it breaks down pretty quickly in terms of breadth and de…”
Mauboussin: Outside Views And Reference Classes Counter Our Illusion Of Uniqueness
“And the big one is, is that inside outside view, this idea of understanding past performance and how that applies. And, you know, as we go through life, everything feels unique to you. You know, you're moving from, you know, from New York to Boston. It feels l…”
Mauboussin: Bloomberg Columnist Matt Levine Is an Absolute Genius
“The author who, there are probably two authors who I never miss, and one is Matt Levine at Bloomberg, and that guy is an absolute genius. And, you know, look, he takes topics that are certainly, they're obviously sort of Topical things, but breaks them down in…”