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 1,728 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
Massey: Adjacent NFL draft picks outperform each other only 52% of the time
“Our 52% number is very much an outside view. It says, look, the base rate here is 52%, and that's across a lot of teams over a lot of years, and so I'm sure about that number.”
Xie: Players in the Philippines earn living wages playing blockchain games
“There's a DAO called Yield Guild Games that I've been participating and active in, and there have been people in the Philippines who have been earning a living wage playing.”
Walden: A large portion of proof-of-work mining energy comes from renewables
“I'm not, you know, defending this practice, but I'm just noting that a lot of these emissions are either sort of latent or a large part of the energy mix of proof of work mining is from renewables.”
Sonnenshein: Institutional allocators are rotating out of gold funds into Bitcoin
“Some investors are carving out some of their gold allocation and moving it into digital assets like Bitcoin. We don't find it the least bit coincidental that we saw some of the largest outflows on record from gold funds in Q four of last year when Bitcoin star…”
CFTC climate committee unanimously recommended requiring mandatory corporate climate risk disclosures
“What the recommendation was in the space of disclosures was that with some caveats, not, you know, everyone agreed that need to rethink disclosures, and I think the consensus unanimous decision was the current standard is it's like guidance around climate risk…”
Incoming Biden SEC chair will prioritize mandatory corporate climate disclosures
“So my suspicion is whoever is nominated or potentially in the queue for a SEC chairmanship, this will be a priority for the administration.”
Salem: Providence cut thousands of idle workers at Eircom
“And so we had to get rid of thousands of workers who literally just weren't doing anything.”
Fired active managers usually outperform the managers hired to replace them
“When you look at higher fire decisions, there's a number of higher fire decisions out there for active managers, where you fire the incumbent because he has a, you know, significantly bad three, five year return. You hire the new manager based on good past per…”
Vanguard's active franchise outperformed nearly 90% of peers over 35 years
“And we've been really doing a good job over the last 35 plus years of evaluating and doing due diligence on these managers, which has resulted in Vanguard, its active franchise has outperformed close to 90% of our peers on the active side.”
Dodson: Allocators systematically discount Black fund managers with identical track records
“So we secretly tested a 180 asset allocators managing over a trillion dollars in capital and almost every situation that an asset allocator looked at a high performing black lead fund and a high performing white lead fund. When they looked at these two cases, …”
Carlos Beltrán and Alex Cora led the Astros' sign-stealing scheme
“There was this specific makeup of the Astros clubhouse, in which one veteran in particular, one coach in particular, Carlos Beltran and Alex Cora, had a lot of influence in there. And in most ways, that influence was exerted in really positive ways, as far as …”
Success Academy's 20,000 low-income students outperform wealthy suburbs on state standardized tests
“We now have 20,000 kids. The vast majority, close to 90% are minority low income kids. They're only in New York City. And if you look at the 20,000 kids as a group on the math and English state test, they outperform the wealthiest suburbs. So they outperformed…”
Trailing five-year fund performance has near-zero correlation with future returns
“And we know that the last one, three, five years of performance correlate almost nothing with the next one, three, five. So the way to get the next one, three, five is looking at process and looking if it makes sense and looking if the manager is going to stic…”
Research shows diverse manager return distribution exactly matches general funds
“The research has shown that the distribution in diverse and women managers is exactly the same as the distribution in the general funds without a diversity lens.”
Mizuno: GPIF brand-name active managers delivered zero net alpha over 20 years
“GPF's brand name active managers portfolio delivered zero ultra net of fee. Over almost 20 years of GPF history.”
Higher corporate ESG disclosure leads to greater rating agency dispersion
“His name is George Seraphim, and he actually just put out research that demonstrated the more a company discloses about ESG factors, the greater the dispersion in ratings from folks like MSCI and Sustainalytics.”
Cain: Negotiation Gender Differences Disappear With Bargaining Zone Clarity
“It looks like that once Women have a good sense of the bargaining zone. A lot of these gender effects go away”
Siegel: Half of the world's population is now middle class
“For the first time in history, half of the world's population is middle class. By the standards of the World Bank.”
Inker: Stock market volatility of 17% vastly exceeds fair value's 1%
“There is very, very little volatility to the underlying fair value. It's about one percent a year. And yet the market has a volatility of 17. And that's a mismatch that says there must be some predictability to the market”
Inker: US manufacturing productivity has been net negative since 2011
“Productivity growth has been net negative. We are less productive making stuff than we were in 2011.”
Mauboussin: Portfolio managers underperform by ignoring their own position sizing rules
“Even there's some evidence if you ask portfolio managers to write down Ex ante, what rules they should follow to size their positions. A, they don't follow those rules, and B, there's evidence that they did follow their own rules, they would do better than the…”
Private equity historically made most of its profits below 7x EBITDA
“First, it said that private equity had made the majority of its money in deals done at less than seven times EBITDA.”
Middle-tier high-yield bonds deliver the highest expected credit returns
“And the long-term empirical research actually finds that that stuff, the sort of Goldilocks of the bond market, does better. That it actually has the highest expected returns.”
No errors were ever found in the UC Regents investigation
“And that to this day we stand behind entirely because there's never been one error found with the story. And it's a story of UC Regents and Jagdeep Basher.”
Tepper: About two-thirds of US industries have significantly less competition
“And the issue was he was trying to look at for the median industry. Are there fewer competitors? Is there less competition at the national level today versus 10, 20 years ago? And the answer is for about two thirds of industries, the answer is there's a lot le…”
Tobacco Divestiture Cost Florida $500 Million and California Billions
“One of the consulting firms did an analysis of the impact of tobacco divestiture on public funds. I think Florida's piece of that cost about five hundred million bucks. I think California was a couple of billion.”
Florida SBA Claims Credit for Reversing Airbnb's Disputed Territories Policy
“We engaged Airbnb. They have done a one 80 on the policy that they were pursuing in the disputed territories. It was announced publicly about two weeks ago.”
O'Shaughnessy: Momentum forecasts fundamental growth better than valuation multiples
“What fascinates me about this is momentum does a better job of forecasting future fundamental growth than price does. So the highest momentum decile has better future fundamental growth than the most expensive, let's say PE decile or free cashflow yield decile…”
O'Shaughnessy: Momentum Alpha Exhausts Within One Year and Reverts to Negative Returns
“So you earn all of your momentum, all of your alpha, rather, in the first one year holding period, and then you actually need to get the hell out, because it reverts. And typically, depending on where you're looking at the data, within two years or so, it's ac…”
Mauboussin: Funds Run by Three Portfolio Managers Generate the Most Alpha
“What it was found was that the funds that delivered the most Alpha were actually funds with three portfolio managers and better than single managers, and by the way, better than two and four.”
Long/short equity managers are generally poor at shorting stocks
“Pretty good data out there that long, short managers, and I'm sure you know this, are good at picking stocks. Not as good at shorting stocks on average. Some are good, but not as good on average.”
Ariely: A $30 cash bonus cost Intel 5% to 6% in worker productivity
“In the money condition, it went up by about six percent on the first day, went down by 12% the next day. It actually backfired and went slightly up toward the control condition on the next two days, not catching up, though, to the control condition. And in gen…”
CalSTRS Hires Money Managers Using State Cement Procurement Rules
“But frankly, it takes me almost nine months to hire a money manager. Because of the procurement rules, I have to use the same rules that Caltrans uses to buy cement, or somebody else buys equipment. I have to use that to hire money managers. They don't recogni…”
CalSTRS Runs Internal Strategies at One-Tenth the Cost of Wall Street
“Frankly, we can run money at one-tenth the cost of hiring somebody here on Wall Street to do the same thing”
Schwimer: Francisco Mejía Dropped Lawsuit and Paid Big League Advance's Legal Fees
“Francisco ended up dropping the case. We actually countersued him. We settled the countersuit. He paid a portion of our legal fees for the case, and then wrote a very long apology that was highlighted actually in the Sports Illustrated article that came out ab…”
Wolfe predicts a massive pullback in institutional LP allocations to venture capital
“Private equity generally, of which venture capital is like, you know, the tiny bit that's generally clustered into that ass glass, I think is going to see a huge pullback in at least new allocations, if not the pace of allocations.”
Wolfe: WeWork will face severe downside operating leverage when economic conditions contract
“The operating leverage that those businesses, by the way, get on the upside is huge. But once you have this precipitous pruning and these people start disappearing, I think the operating leverage that you get on the downside is going to be really painful. And …”
Underfunded public pensions will miss 7% returns due to heavy bond allocations
“You can see it easily in the state and city funds that are seriously underfunded, even if they're assuming a seven, seven and a half percent rate of return, which they're not going to get, because they've got 25% in two and a half, three percent bonds. They're…”
Friedman: The US will experience real wage inflation
“One view that is completely different from other people is I believe there will be real wage inflation in this country.”
Scaramucci: CFIUS blocked the SkyBridge sale on dubious national security grounds
“The Genworth deal just gets approved by CFIUS, but the Skybridge deal doesn't, and it's not approved for national security reasons, ok?”
Chinese Corporate Dollar Bonds Are Heavily Absorbed by Domestic Banks
“So we're told for years that all these Chinese property companies and Chinese corporations are borrowed in dollars. If the dollar goes up and the Fed tightens policy, they're in, in a world of pain. And this young man managing a Chinese bank balance sheet in B…”
China can sustain 5% to 6% growth without infrastructure spending
“That part of GDP is actually growing quite robustly and will continue to grow, I think, for another at least five to seven years, maybe even 10, but also not forever. And because that's growing at almost 10% a year now, and it's about half of the Chinese econo…”
Mauboussin: US Active Equity's $1 Trillion Gross Profit Was Erased By Fees
“The cumulative gross profit, I think we have 35 years of numbers, is about a trillion, trillion net positive gross profit. So gross profit positive more than, you know, ok, is a trillion dollars. Now, that also happens to be about what the fees were in that ti…”
Mauboussin: Active Managers Perform Best In Markets With Highest Explicit Indexing
“They found that in markets where the Explicit indexing was highest Active managers often did the best”
Mauboussin: Buying Fired Fund Managers Consistently Outperforms Buying Newly Hired Ones
“Study after study demonstrates that if you bought the funds that were fired and sold the ones that were hired, you actually, just because of regression toward the mean, you do much better.”
Monk: Financial services captures about 40% of US corporate profits
“We have an asset management industry and financial services industry that's capturing about
40% of all after tax corporate profit in America.”
Monk: Financial intermediation unit costs are higher than a century ago
“Even the research shows us that we may now have a 10 X fold increase in trading activity from the 19 sixties, but our financial services industry is less efficient today than it was a hundred years ago.
The unit cost of intermediation is higher today than it …”
Cambridge Associates Study: Over Half of Top Venture Funds Are Funds I-III
“Hambridge Associates did a study, and they looked at post-two thousand venture funds. The cohort of top 10 funds in each vintage year, typically more than half were funds with a Roman numeral lower than Roman numeral three.”