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 64 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
Gave: Europe's Energy Policy May Have Emboldened Russia's Invasion
“I think if Europe hadn't followed such a boneheaded energy policy, perhaps Russia wouldn't have invaded Ukraine.”
Jain: Google's operating margin would be single digits without depreciation changes
“If you look at Google, if they had not changed the depreciation policy, the margin would be high single digits, operating margin.”
Jain: Had Jain Global not launched, he wanted to create charter prisons
“If I hadn't started the hedge fund I would have run with that I've done nothing on is I was heavily involved in the charter school movement earlier in my life. I wanted to start charter prisons, basically private, not-for-profit prisons. Charter, the right win…”
Klarman: Private equity returns would look far worse without government rescues
“Had that rescue not happened when it did, you might see very, very different numbers out of private equity.”
Marshawn Lynch would have lost a yard on the infamous final play
“We had so many big guys that if Marshawn Lynch would have tried to run the ball, he would have lost a yard. That's a fact.”
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 …”
McLean: Without shale technology, oil prices would be $50 higher today
“In the absence of shales, I'm very confident that the oil price would be 50 dollars higher than it is today.”
Salem: Elon Musk's favorable narratives are driven by Tesla's reflexive stock price
“But I assure you that the narratives that are swirling on Elon Musk, particularly the favorable ones, would not be swirling and would not be of the character that they are if he weren't one of the wealthiest people in the world. That price has driven the stock…”
Dixon: Had RSS won, $150B would have flowed to internet users
“Social networks made last year, one hundred and fifty billion dollars. Had RSS won, and you had an architecture with no gatekeeper, I think it's credible to think that hundred and fifty billion dollars would instead flow to the edges of the network.”
Milken: Shunning the press early in my career changed financial history
“Had we been more public, had I gone on television more, or done more interviews, and I declined them all, it would have been different, and I think the course of history would have been different”
Craib: Jim Simons would make no money without leverage
“Jim Simons would make absolutely no money if it weren't for leverage. That's just how, how it works.”
Giannini: An ESG Filter Would Have Prevented Investors From Backing FTX
“It wasn't a fraud issue. It was a pure governance issue. If people had an ESG filter, they'd have never done that deal ever.”
Seides: Hedge fund odds were highly favorable; I would bet Buffett again
“I would make that bet at the same time. Again, I think the odds were highly favorable of winning. It just didn't play out that way.”
Wolfe: Denying Early Liquidity to CTRL-Labs Founders Was a Colossal Mistake
“What I realized was what I should have done, which was a colossal and historic mistake, was make sure that we gave some interim liquidity. Because if we had put a few million dollars in that founder's pocket early on, the ability to stay the course would have …”
Rieder: Lehman Brothers would have survived if Bart McDade became president earlier
“I'd say this to this study and people who were at Lehman Brothers would tell you this, if he became president two years earlier, Lehman would still be around.”
Thoma Bravo Would Be Larger Than SAP If It Never Sold Companies
“Now, in hindsight, based on where software has gone, we should have held all the companies. And if we would have done that, we would have been much larger than SAP.”
Peters: Without COVID stimulus, equities would have fallen 30% to 50% further
“And in the absence of what the fed and what the government have done with this, I think the equities would be down 30 to 50% from where they are right now.”
Williamson: Long-term behavior from US firms would have added $1T, 5M jobs
“In the United States over the decade leading up to 20 16, if the short-term companies in this country, and I know this is a big if the short-term companies in this country had been able to behave like the long-term countries, They would have created a trillion…”
A Bernie Sanders-style tax plan would barely dent the U.S. entitlement ratio
“And secondly, even if you do a Bernie Sanders level tax plan, which is basically taxing everything that moves, it only brings that ratio from five to one back to baby three and a half or 3.8 to one.”
Monk: Universities can build top VC portfolios by aggregating pro-rata rights
“If I was going to do it My way, I might have designed it like this, where we were creating all these little seed funds on each campus. Those seed funds would then collect rights to deals, and at the same time, we would collect rights to deals out of the IP off…”
A young Warren Buffett starting today would likely avoid public stock markets
“I think if you gave him a million bucks today, in 15 or 20 years, he'd be a billionaire again. But he probably wouldn't do it in the stock market.”
60% multi-asset hit rate in EM lost money once in 15 years
“If you had done that over the last 15 years, over roughly 20 countries, and you were right 60% of the time, in a fifteen-year bear market for emerging markets, you would have lost money in one year.”
Sullivan: Halting venture allocations in 1995 would have been a huge mistake
“We could have pumped the brakes in 1995, and it would have been a huge mistake.”
Papic: US assets would have peaked under Harris over four years instead
“I would argue that if Vice President Harris had won the election, we would be in the same boat in terms of the peak in U.S. Assets. We just wouldn't have as extraordinary of a sell-off. So what would have happened under Trump in 12 months would have probably h…”
Simkin: A five-year fund structure would have forced SIG out of ByteDance
“If we had entered our ByteDance position, and it was in a fund where the investors needed to get paid back in five years, we would have closed out of that position and made a little bit. It would have been happy day in the office, and we would have been out of…”
Housel: Wall Street Critics Would Have Packaged Subprime for $4M Bonuses
“What people missed is that if they had the same incentives as the banker from Lehman Brothers, and their boss said, hey, if you package these subprime bonds, we'll give you a four million dollar bonus. You would have done the same thing too. Of course you woul…”
Leveraged small-cap public equities outperformed the average private equity fund
“So if you leverage small cap public equities, we think you could have done better.”
Bergstrom: New Allocators Cannot Replicate Legacy Platform Fund Conviction Today
“I think if we were to approach that manager today, we wouldn't be able to develop the level of understanding and conviction that I think we have now.”
Lamont: Google and Amazon wouldn't exist without 1990s internet mania
“If we hadn't had a mania, we wouldn't have funded things like Google and Amazon, some of the great companies of today.”
Grinda: Uber and Airbnb would probably never have existed playing by rules
“I mean, think of Uber or Airbnb, right? If they tried to play by the rules, they probably, they would have never existed.”
Gilbert: Webvan would have beaten Instacart if it had modern capital
“If there was the capital available to those startups, then the way there is today, then perhaps I wouldn't be ordering from Instacart yesterday. I'd be ordering from web van because they would have been able to stay the course because at scale, that business m…”
Bonafede: The 2020 quant breakdown would have worsened without Fed intervention
“Had the Fed not stepped in, you probably would have seen the true aftermath of what Can happen with concentrated investments in the same kind of relationships in the same kind of data.”
Trigg: Buying Dell and Yahoo over Apple and Google damaged WCM
“We were buying Dell instead of Apple, eBay instead of Amazon, Yahoo instead of Google. I mean, those three trades alone would have had, had they been done differently, would have had dramatically different results for that domestic product.”
Papic: Germany Bailed Out Greece to Prevent a Crippling Deutschmark Appreciation
“Say Germany during the Euro area crisis, highly expert reliant economy. If they had abandoned the Euro, the Deutschmark two point O would have appreciated 20, 3040, 50, 60%, and then bye-bye Germany. So hell yes, they're going to pay for Greek debt, like high …”
Warren Buffett's net worth would be just $10 million without extreme longevity
“Let's say that Buffett, instead of starting to invest when he was 11, let's say he started investing when he was 25, like a normal person. You graduate college, you get some money. He started when he was 25. And then let's say he retired when he was 65, like a…”
Pricing carbon in 2000 would have cheaply capped warming near 1°C.
“Had we addressed this 20 years ago, wouldn't have been that costly. We could have had a very smooth transition, and the maximum temperature would be somewhere around where we are today. Which is to say, not great, but not catastrophic.”
Fitzpatrick: Platform hedge funds cut struggling managers prematurely
“And if he was at a platform shop, he doesn't make it till September.”
Full Portfolio Put Protection in 2007 Would Have Cost 300 Bps
“We even, I remember in oh seven being called into the Department of Finance to ask myself and the counterpart at CalPERS to price out buying puts for the entire portfolio. And we came back and said, you know, it'll cost you 300 basis points on the return. Woul…”
Simple Cash Would Have Beaten VCU's Complex 2020 Interest Rate Overlay
“We had great insight in 20, 21, 22, that rates were going to go up. We put on an overlay and the way we expressed it was all wrong. It was too complicated. It would have been simpler to have no position at all and not have lost money on the hedge or just taken…”
Mahr: LTCM Would Not Have Failed Without 50x Leverage
“If long-term capital management hadn't been running a fifty-x leveraged strategy, They wouldn't have ended up in the trouble that they ended up with.”
Concentrating in Select U.S. Stocks Was the Best Strategy Last Decade
“We continue to be a believer in diversification despite the fact that being invested in a handful of stock in the U.S. Equity markets would have been the best choice over the past 10 years.”
Pompliano claims Google would have sold early for slightly more money
“Google, they just got a little bit more money offered to them early. They would have sold.”
Maples: Ridesharing could not succeed before smartphone GPS chips enabled location matching
“If you had had the idea for ride sharing before the iPhone four S had a GPS chip, you could have been right about the future, but you wouldn't have been able to build a system that embodied your idea about the future. Riders and drivers wouldn't have been able…”
Asness: Multi-manager pod shop model completely defied his past intuition
“If you had told me 20 years ago that here's my strategy, I'm gonna go find people I think are really good at this, Pay them a lot. Charge that to the underlying investor. So the fees are, when you add it all up, are gigantic. And then I'm going to fire them ra…”
AAA CLOs would have buffered banks during the 2023 banking crisis
“If you look at the banking crisis of the spring of last year, look, if banks would have owned AAA rated CLOs instead of some of the bonds that might be in the Bloomberg aggregate bond index, CLO AAAs might've traded to 97 cents on the dollar or something like …”
Forman: Rapid endowment growth prevented Yale from reaching private asset targets
“So it probably would have been fully built out sooner had the endowment not grown as much, but it was growing so fast that we were always trying to project where we needed to be and we would never get there. And that was true in all private asset classes.”
Daniel: FrontPoint's subprime trades would get PMs fired at modern Citadel
“Because I can imagine if someone took what we were doing way back when and put it in a Millennium slash Citadel native IDEO model, we'd probably be fired on the spot.”
Coinbase erred strategically by launching peripheral products in 2014 and 2015
“I think one thing that we screwed up a bit at Coinbase is throughout 2014, 2015, we tried to launch all these new products. We were launching like a tip button that you could embed and tip people on Reddit. We were very focused on merchant integrations for peo…”