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 13,450 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
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 …”
Grantham: AI CapEx is larger than any peacetime program in history
“AI Moving at warp speed, involving a greater CapEx program than has ever happened before outside of war.”
Grantham: Future markets might tax stocks to fund human price discovery
“In the end, you have to have some price work. You have to find a way of paying a few thousand good analysts to help price the equities, and I don't know how they will work it out. It's over my pay grade, but one day in the distant future, there might be a very…”
Grantham: Private equity and venture capital winners tend to stay winners
“Brilliant private equity and venture capital, and they are so much stickier than general money management. They don't turn over as fast in private equity and venture capital. The winners tend to stay winners.”
Grantham: Green Venture Capital Faces Two to Three More Bad Years
“And a lot more will fail, probably, given the level of help from the administration. I would think we're good for at least another two or three bad years.”
Grantham: Climate Denial Is Predominantly an American Phenomenon
“You don't find climate deniers around the world. You find a few in England, all extreme right-wing libertarians, and you find a small army in the US, but that's it. This is an American thing, climate denial.”
Grantham: Greenspan, Summers, and Levitt Blocked CFTC Subprime Regulation
“Greenspan and Summers and Levitt of the SEC waged war against the CFTC doing its job of regulating subprime instruments. They each, in turn, called up Brooksley Bourne, who was the boss, a lady of iron nerve and principle. They harangued her, saying, what are …”
Executive Hires Placed by VCs Have an Average Tenure Under 18 Months
“You look at the data of executive hires placed by a venture firm. Either an investor said, like, oh, you got to hire this guy. He's going to come in and totally change your go-to-market. This guy's going to blow revenue out of the water. Or it's through a tale…”
Baker: Evaluated analysts on clear factual arguments, not hit rate
“I didn't care whether the analysts at Fidelity got their stocks right or wrong. It was utterly immaterial to how I evaluated analysts. There's an analyst, he consistently had some of the worst stock picking metrics in the department. But I made a vast amount o…”
Baker: Investors must choose to panic early or double down late
“As an investor, you have to either panic early or double down late, and you have to be one of the two. It's hard to be both.”
Baker: Process-driven alpha in fundamental investing is quickly competed away
“By the way, you have to have a process, and you have to have the process that works for you, but any process that's repeatable that generates significant alpha, it's a very competitive world. It's going to quickly be armed away. In fundamental investing, any p…”
Top fund returns are driven by just two to ten key people
“I would just submit that any investment organization, no matter how big, there's somewhere between two and 10 people, and if you took those people out, and the organization had the exact same process, the results would be very different.”
Baker: Portfolio turnover is driven by volatility, not time horizon
“Turnover should be a function of how often you change your mind, and part of that in any discipline valuation-based process should be about how the stocks move. For me, turnover is mostly a function of volatility.”
Baker: Multi-manager hedge funds are driven by a few star pods
“At a lot of these multi-managers, there are a couple of pods, and maybe I am out of date, who are running a disproportionate amount of money with really good returns. The reason they have a disproportionate amount of money is because they have a long history o…”
Baker: Public companies targeted by short sellers should never publicly respond
“This is what you do the first time you get a short seller, write a report about you. Do not respond. I know it feels so personal. I know how personal it is, but just don't respond. Let the numbers do the talking. If you get in a public fight with them, it's ju…”
Baker: Private Markets Suffer Far More Bad Behavior Than Realized
“There is more bad behavior in private markets than I think people realize. FTX, it's very public, but these companies, they're not filing always audited financials. They don't have the controls. Particularly when something starts to go bad, there's a lot of ba…”
Baker: AI Is in Year Three of a 20- to 30-Year Cycle
“We're, I think, in the very early days of AI. If ChatGPT is to AI as Netscape Navigator was, we're in year three of what should be a 20, 25, thirty-year really exciting cycle or trend.”
Dietrich Foundation's massive venture allocation features a heavy China and India focus
“Our focus on China and India, it's a big chunk of our 52% that's venture.”
Grefenstette: Venture pricing is most distorted in early-stage AI startups
“The pricing is probably most distorted in the early stage about AI, because you look at these companies, and of course, no one has a crystal ball, but you're looking at something and saying, hey, this could potentially be a trillion-dollar outcome. The bet is …”
Grefenstette: 80% of founders pitching a16z use cheap open-source Chinese LLMs
“I think Andreessen came out recently and said, 80% of the founders that come to them are using open source Chinese LLMs, because it might be 70, 80% as effective, efficient, but it's a 10th the cost.”
Warrington: The era of creating $200B venture-backed companies in China is over
“Those days are over in the sense of there's a lot of things telling you that there's not really going to be the next two hundred billion dollar company, or at least it's harder to get there.”
Bobby Jain: Multi-manager hedge funds are effectively bank prop desks
“The multi-managed industry was the prop desks. It's not that different. The culture shock of moving from CS to Millennium was not that high at all. It was the same thing. A lot of it was the same people, as there was a transfer of people from the prop desks to…”
Jain: Alpha is privatizing as multi-strategy firms favor employee capital
“The biggest trend in our business is the privatization of alpha. Where the alpha is residing on the prop shops, as well as the multi-strategy firms, the multi-strategy firms over time have more and more employee money. And less and less available to investors.…”
Jain: Next-Gen Portfolio Managers Seek Compensation Autonomy, Not Operational Isolation
“The view of a PM in this industry is, they want autonomy. Especially the people in the next generation don't necessarily want autonomy. They want autonomy of compensation, but they don't necessarily want autonomy of lifestyle. So they want to say, if I make mo…”
Jain: Building a Multi-Strategy Fund Sequentially Creates Severe Infrastructure Problems
“The whole system wants you to create sequentially. They say, Bobby, why don't you start in one area? Start a billion and a half dollar fundamental equities business or quant equities. When that works, go do the next thing. Normal. The problem is now you starte…”
Gilmore: CalPERS historically destroyed value through pro-cyclical de-risking during crises
“One of the things that has attracted value from the CalPERS experience has been a tendency to be too pro-cyclical. If you think back to the time of the financial crisis, Various assets were liquidated. Risk was taken off. That was done in part because of conce…”
Gilmore: A simple stock-bond mix closely tracks most complex pension portfolios
“You can take a simple combination of equities and bonds, and it will track the actual portfolio very closely. And that'll be the case for most pension funds.”
Gilmore: CalPERS recommended a 75/25 reference portfolio with 400bps active risk
“We've recommended a 75% equity, 25% bond portfolio. We've recommended an active risk range around 400 basis points.”
Gilmore: National security concerns make government capital controls quite possible
“One thing that I wouldn't like to see would be forms of capital controls, but that's quite possible.”
Gilmore: Total portfolio approach captures hybrid investments that SAA buckets miss
“If you're sitting there with a strategic asset allocation, and you've got all these asset classes, it could be that you've got a hybrid, where does it sit? Or there could be something that's new, and you don't have a bucket for it. It's hard to do. With the to…”
O'Connor: Deglobalization and sticky inflation are highly bullish for natural resources
“We're in a world with high for longer sticky inflation, certainly a breakdown of the free trade agreements that were happening so easily. Previously, there's a lot of re-onshoring. Unfortunately, we've seen the best of the geopolitical environment from securit…”
Lewinsohn: Direct lending shifted from overhyped to underrated
“Direct lending, which is a big part of what we do now, got very hyped up. Everyone's saying, oh, you have to do it, whether it's allocators, investors, GPs. And now has gone all the way to the point that people are so afraid of it. They miss what's great about…”
Lewinsohn: Software concentration is the biggest threat to direct lending portfolios
“The biggest threat is industry concentration in software going to impact portfolios in a way that wasn't expected when they were under it.”
Lewinsohn: Chinese expansion will drive severe chemical market overcapacity by 2030
“If you look at the amount of ethylene and propylene that they're bringing on, and then go to 20 30 and shut all of the European and Japanese capacity, in 2030, you'd have more over capacity than you have now.”
Lewinsohn: Wall Street is running out of places to hide credit residuals
“We think that Wall Street is getting a little short on places to stick the stumps. They're coming up in special situations funds. They're coming up in interval funds. They're coming up in places that people may not appreciate what happens when you're not getti…”
Lewinsohn: Private asset-backed risks will hurt specific funds, not the global economy
“I don't think that it would create systemic problems. Just like every hedge fund in the world wants to call a recession constantly because they're desperate for the volatility. Everyone wants to constantly say, what's the next systemic thing? Because the impac…”
Global leadership in emerging market asset management is an unoccupied space
“Global leadership in EM asset management is an empty space. There is nobody out there who can answer the question for allocators, big or small. How much should I invest in emerging markets? In what asset class? In what region? In what style? With whom? And whe…”
Emerging market deal flow cannot support single-country mono-asset funds
“The deal flow in emerging markets Will not support mono asset class, single country, sub-regional funds, and therefore the people who raise that money end up deploying it badly.”
Monoline mid-sized emerging market managers will inevitably go out of business
“If you are a monoline
Mid-sized emerging market manager, public or private.
It is not a question of, are you going out of business?
It's a question of, when are you going out of business?
Because of the question you asked, the cycles. Unpredictable and violent…”
China is currently a trade, not a long-term investment
“Since then, China went from the darling to uninvestable to today. It's a trade. It's not an investment.”
Kleinman: Asset management growth is constrained by origination, not capital
“The whole industry thinks in terms of capital formation. I just got to raise more capital and I'll deploy it. We flipped that on its head and said, no, the limiter of our growth is not capital. We've never had a situation where we've had good ideas and haven't…”
Kleinman: Asset management will stop segmenting by public versus private in 5-10 years
“And the way you cut the asset management industry in five or 10 years, I'm not sure is going to be based on public and private. It'll be based on other risk categories, but that's not a good definition of what's risky and what's not risky anymore. I think you'…”
Kleinman: Apollo Holds Lower Leverage and Fewer PIK Loans Than Competitors
“Our private equity portfolio is more defensive than most of our competitors. Our credit portfolio is for sure much higher rated, much less leverage, much less portfolio leverage. Our private lending portfolio has a fraction of the pick loans or other aggressiv…”
Kleinman: Private equity cannot scale like credit due to concentrated dealmaking
“There's only so much you can deploy in private equity. When you are making six or eight consequential decisions a year, there's only so much capital you can deploy on that basis. In the credit business, instead of buying a hundred million of this particular bo…”