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 9 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
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…”
Gotham Capital generated 50% annualized returns before fees over its first decade
“We made 50% a year for those 10 years before our fees.”
Greenblatt: Top 50 urban minority students face 1-in-11 college graduation rate
“If you live in a top urban center, top 50 urban center, and you are low income or a minority, your chance of graduating college are one out of 11. We know that college graduates earn 70% more than high school graduates and high school graduates earn 30% more t…”
Greenblatt: Milken agreed to seed Gotham Capital after a single phone call
“And three years into it, one day I called my friend who was working for Mike Milken. And I said to him, gee, if I could raise X dollars, I'd go out on my own and run a fund. And he called me back the next day and said, Mike said fine.”
Greenblatt: Momentum investing has worked globally for 30 to 40 years
“Over the last 3040 years, whether in this country and across the globe with one or two exceptions, momentum has worked. Over the long term.”
Unprofitable billion-dollar companies from 2019 surged 75% in 2020
“If you bought every company that lost money in 2019, so this is pre-COVID, that had a market cap over a billion, there were 261 of them, you'd be up 75% this year.”
Greenblatt's early merger arbitrage failed after Cypress Gardens collapsed into a sinkhole
“One of the first deals I did in the first two months I was in business broke. I wrote about Florida Cypress Gardens was being bought by Harcourt Brace, and it was just a little theme park where they had alligators in the swamps and water skiing Santa Clauses, …”