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 13,421 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 112 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
Dorsey: Adobe's Aggressive Pricing Makes Customers Eager to Switch to AI
“You're seeing this right now with Adobe. There's an AI problem here. Had they not been so aggressive in pricing over time, would the customers be as willing to switch to new AI tools? It's an interesting counterfactual to think about.”
Dorsey: Dorsey Passed on CoStar Due to CEO Stock Sales and Misalignment
“The CEO in that case was successful, but for a founder, he largely had sold stock along the way, so he didn't retain a large ownership stake in the company. If all that spend and competing with Zillow didn't work out, shareholders were probably going to suffer…”
Dorsey: Fortune 500 CEOs Rise via Corporate Politics, Not Capital Allocation
“How does someone get to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company or a Euro stocks 50 company? By demonstrating skill as a capital allocator all through their career? That's a giant pile of hooey. They do it by being a good self promoter, a good corporate politician…”
Dorsey: Discounted Cash Flow Models Undervalue Moat Businesses by Assuming Fading Returns
“The thing that a DCF is quite poor at, even though people think it's long-term oriented, is that mathematically a DCF assumes that the multiple fades.
It assumes that returns on capital fade to cost capital.
But if we're looking for Modi businesses and we're t…”
Csicsko: Public equities have vastly outperformed broad private markets recently
“You pair that with a public market that's vastly outperformed, the broad private market measured on, say, a Cambridge index level, and it's causing most people I know to have very difficult conversations around what is the future path of private allocation in …”
Private market allocations are not essential without consistent public outperformance
“We do discuss and say that privates are not essential. Meaning we should choose to have them because of the return we believe they will deliver over time. And that return needs to be in excess of what's offered in public markets.”
Williams College endowment no longer backs dedicated oil and gas funds
“Similarly, we no longer do funds dedicated to the extraction of oil and gas.”
Jain: Asset managers must prioritize absolute returns over relative benchmarks
“Relative is fine in an up market, but over the long run, if you don't have absolute returns, nobody needs you. You don't pay bills with relative performance. In a bull market, everybody thinks a relative, but if you want a long-term survival, you need an absol…”
Jain: GQG's research team is half journalists hired to criticize investments
“Now we have an equal amount of journalists and traditional analysts. Their job is to take the opposite view by default. Journalists are pretty good at that. I've learned a lot hanging out with journalists. Half the team is journalists who basically criticize e…”
Jain: Hedge funds charge too much in today's highly efficient markets
“Fees, I think what's the biggest problem in hedge funds? They charge too much. There's only so much juice in the game. These are efficient markets. It's not like seventies. Buffett can do whatever sitting, reading Moody's manual and pick up stock two times ear…”
Jain: Software has low entry barriers; almost none survive 30 years
“If you look at it, how many companies have survived in software business over 30 plus years? Microsoft is an exception, and maybe Oracle, it's a lower barrier to business.”
Jain: GQG holds almost zero exposure to tech and semiconductors today
“Today, for example, in 12 months now, we have almost nothing in semiconductors. We have almost nothing in tech.”
Jain: Nvidia invested in over 50 of its own customers recently
“NVIDIA invests in over 50 plus of their customers in the last six, nine months.”
Jain: Established software at 10-12x earnings shows strong growth and lock-in
“Look at software today. We feel that it's a very intriguing area. These established businesses, but 10, 12 times earnings and folks feel they're completely going out of business. There's no sign of that. Not only that, they're growing 20% in some cases, and yo…”
Jain: Altria outperformed Meta, Microsoft, and Amazon over the past five years
“Cigarette volume has been declining at seven, eight percent in US. And guess what, last five years? Altria has outperformed Mera. I think now Microsoft and Amazon last five years.”
Jain: Position sizing should follow credit analyst logic, not equity conviction
“The sizing should be based on how a credit analyst would think. You can't have a very large position in monoline business, which operates a very narrow niche. Can't do it. So if you think about how does S&P would give AAA, it would never give AAA to an E&P com…”
Jain: Exxon generates $50B cash flow vs AMD's $9B at comparable valuations
“Exxon is almost similar market cap as AMD. Depending on the oil prices, this year they generate probably fifty billion of clean free cash flow. AMD will be lucky if they generate nine.”
Jain: SpaceX generates $18B in revenue but loses $5B
“SpaceX is wonderful, but eighteen billion revenue and five billion loss.”
Kim: PE IR hiring is broken, prioritizing external personas over actual skills
“The whole industry is upside down. People aren't looking for skills, they're looking for personas. If you have a great persona that actually fits, you'll get the job even though you have no experience.”
Kim: Junior IR professionals out-earn deal peers; IR partners earn less
“So what's kind of interesting is that the younger you are in their career, actually the more money you make relative to your peers because the younger professional gets to do some of the selling. Occasionally actually gets to advise the GP because you're trave…”
Three days of managed account transparency beats three years in a fund
“Derek and I have joked before, you learn more about a manager on three days on Dockside than three years if you invested in a fund. You understand what they do, what their portfolio looks like, how it evolves.”
Pensions mistakenly incentivized hedge funds to lower volatility and gather assets
“The average hedge fund out there, down the fairway hedge fund, us dumb pensions did the wrong thing by incentivizing them to run lower vol and take in more assets and collect that management fee.”
AI edge requires the willingness to discard tools after two weeks
“I think the more competitive it comes from not just building the tool, but being willing to throw out the tool two weeks later because of how fast technology is progressing. And I don't even say that facetiously because Sherpa, Everest, those tools, we're lite…”
Perelman: GSP only rolls up sectors that were previously consolidated
“Alex touched on it earlier, we're only doing roll-ups in categories and asset classes and businesses that have been consolidated before. The benefit to that is there is off the shelf Tech solutions that have been created to manage these businesses in a multi-u…”
Perelman: GSP avoids roll-up categories with bolt-on multiples above 8x cash flow
“We are actively avoiding categories where the bolt-ons are trading outside of our price range. There are categories today that people are having success rolling up, whether they be Resi HVAC or pest control, or in a prior cycle, perhaps VET, where the platform…”
Sloane: PE DPI Slump Creates Succession Logjams and Withholds Carry
“One of the effects of the DPI problem in the broader industry is not just on LPs. It's also on investors, right? And you think about VP, principal, MD, even partner level investors who've been at firms for a while and haven't seen their carry paid out. There a…”
Comegys: The S&P 500 Should Not Be Your Benchmark or Portfolio
“The S&P 500 should not be your benchmark nor your portfolio.”
Comegys: Vanguard Believes Private Assets Belong in Every Portfolio
“We believe privates belong in everyone's portfolio.”
Stutman: Low-empathy leaders can build relational closeness through deep understanding
“They've learned to create relational closeness without empathy. They've learned to create it without being warm and fuzzy and giving people a lot of couch time. What they've done is they've invest deeply in those people and understanding them.”
Private Asset Obsession Destroyed Endowments' Ability to Invest Countercyclically
“Historically, endowments have done a great job of that, but in the last 10 or 15 years with the obsession of private assets, that tool has been taken out of the toolkit.”
India Faces Severe Macro Pressures From AI Disruption and Energy Dependencies
“India right now is going through a very difficult period. It's got a double whammy now of being in the crosshairs of AI because of IT services and the huge part of their economy that that sector represents. It's got the risk that it's facing from the Iran war,…”
Liquidity Constraints Will Trigger Indiscriminate Selling Across Private Credit Markets
“There will be indiscriminate selling in private credit. There's good reasons why many of those companies will be sold, but there'll be many reasons where it's just liquidity that's driving prices down.”
Non-traded BDCs recreate the structural asset-liability mismatches of the past
“Maybe we do a non-traded BDC, which was now up to 2018. That's where I was like, well, this is the original asset liability mismatch that you tried to cure by doing a drawdown fund because You might have all the investors looking for the exit, even though it's…”
Public BDCs show massive valuation discrepancies on identical syndicated club loans
“There's some obvious ones where you see, let's just say public BDCs that own the same club deal, the same loan. One BDC versus another, or two or three versus a fourth BDC, there's a massive variance, in a second lien especially, where you're like, wait, the f…”
Certain private credit loans drop from par to zero in one quarter
“Then you have micro situations where loans are getting marked from hundred to zero in one quarter.”
The software sector will experience a coming wave of debt defaults
“We're going to have a wave of defaults in the software space.”
Lending against ARR without equity upside is venture lending without warrants
“You're doing venture lending without warrants.”
Saba Capital is tendering for Blue Owl's OBDC-II fund at a discount
“We are tendering for one of the Blue Owl funds, their Blue Owl OBDC-II, which we're going to see if there is any demand for liquidity at a discount to NAV.”
Private credit BDCs are mislabeling industry concentrations in their loan portfolios
“Literally putting in every loan into Claude or ChatGBT to figure out what do they think it is. There has been some mislabeling of concentrations.”
Private credit returns depend entirely on fund-level leverage to attract investors
“One of the issues with private credit is all the returns are predicated at leverage at the fund level. You need fund level leverage to get anyone excited about it. If anyone came out with a unlevered BDC, it would be a yawn, especially after fees.”
Grantham: Asset managers get fired in bull markets, not bear markets
“People think you get fired for underperforming in bear markets, which is nonsense. In a serious bear market, the client becomes catatonic.”
Grantham: Big asset managers cannot commercially survive fighting major bull markets
“If you're a big company, you can't fight a major bull market. It's ridiculous. It's terrible business. You have to roll with the punch.”
Grantham: Every Two-Sigma Asset Bubble Historically Reverted to Pre-Bubble Trends
“In major countries, there was no exception to the principle that an overpriced market at two sigma, which is just a statistical measure. If you look at the price, you look at the breakout on the upside. If it's two sigma, there is no exception to the rule that…”
Grantham: Navigating major bubbles is all that matters in long-term investing
“The only things that matter in life in investing are the founding, forming, and breaking of the great bubbles. That determines everything. If you can sidestep half of the pain, that will make all the difference in the world.”
Grantham: Investors should own non-US and emerging value stocks
“For a long time now, you should be owning non-US stocks, developed value stocks, and emerging country value stocks.”
Grantham: The US stock market is completely overpriced
“The US is simply too high priced from top to toe.”
Grantham: Super-Bubbles End When Speculative Market Leaders Dramatically Underperform
“I developed a singular rule that only has occurred four times in U.S. History. The stocks that have been leading the charge up 70% in 1928, the meme stocks in twenty-twenty, up huge amounts. When they start to underperform dramatically, the market, as the bull…”
Grantham: AI rally aborted the full crushing of the 2022 super-bubble
“The invasion of chat and AI ruined my perfectly good bear market. I still got a bear market. It was way over 20% decline, but it wasn't the crushing of a super bubble that would have happened. Without the great investment associated, the capex associated with …”