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 4,765 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
Jain: If Chinese firms compete in an industry, they will overproduce
“One of the big lessons investing is if Chinese are a competitor, be very careful because they will overproduce and kill you.”
Jain: Sector specialists are usually wrong at major market inflection points
“Because specialists at major inflection points are usually wrong. If you're not able to compare, you don't know what good or bad is.”
Grantham: Endowment boards struggle to manage giant egos of wealthy PE and VC donors
“Many committees are a nearly impossible task where, particularly in the endowment business, colleges, because rich graduates who've made big donations, Would love to sit on the board. They are treated with kid gloves because they're wonderfully good at making …”
Algorithms eliminated value investing alpha because computers do not feel embarrassment
“I do think this is why a lot of fundamentally based value strategies have struggled for a long time, because the alpha in those strategies Was being willing to own these stocks that other people were embarrassed to own because they were so out of favor. And yo…”
Wolfe: Smart employees at mega VC funds will likely never see carry
“The smart employees at those funds know that they will likely never see a dollar of carry. The larger the fund you raise, the harder it is to return in venture.”
Lyon: Risk managers are entirely useless in private drawdown funds
“I used to laugh whenever a drawdown private fund has a risk manager. I'm like, well, what does that person do? Because you don't hold cash. You don't hedge. Are they on your investment committee telling you what not to do? Because all of your risk comes from s…”
High-attribute young talent placed in senior roles quickly eclipses experienced executives
“I think to have a returns that are different, you have to have a belief that's different at the core. And our belief is that we can put a low experience, but high attribute person who's very young into an incredibly high senior leadership role. And in a short …”
Asness: Social media and ubiquitous data make market inefficiencies longer-lasting
“I think the ubiquity of data, social media, maybe indexing, these things have added up to a market where inefficiencies are bigger and last longer.”
Swensen: Private Equity Fee Burden Almost Guarantees Disappointing Returns
“He said, while illiquid markets provide a much greater range of mispriced assets, private investors fare little better than their marketable security counterparts, as the extraordinary fee burden typical of private equity funds almost guarantees delivery of di…”
Ballou: Private equity is the latest flawed 20-year financial model cycle
“We lawyers have this incredible ability to invent a flawed business model every 20 years. Right now, I would argue that it's in large part private equity. 20 years ago, it would have been subprime lenders. 40 years ago, it would have been SNLs. 60 years ago, i…”
Monk: Asset allocation performance depends 100% on organizational capabilities
“I think what we think is a best practice is to say, actually, 100% of your performance in your asset allocation is a function of your organizational capabilities.”
Douvos: Long venture horizons make lucky investors think they are smart
“That's the thing that's crazy about venture. It's like, you have a whole community of people who've been lucky who think they're really smart and the evaluation horizons are so long. There's like no feedback.”
Full-Fee LPs Subsidize Large Institutional Investors Taking Free Co-Investments
“Because of that, I'm not real thrilled when our GPs will raise five hundred million and then raise five hundred million worth of opportunity for direct co-invest. And my pushback on that is, well, so I'm really just subsidizing the other guy who's taking the c…”
Accounting stability in private assets may induce a negative illiquidity premium
“I'm even concerned that there are some large institutional investors who would be willing to pay up for the accounting stability of private assets, which might In some points of the cycle, induce a negative illiquidity premium.”
Libby: Non-lead venture capital firms offering generic operational help are redundant
“If you're not going to get one of the top VCs, you don't need five VCs that are all doing the same thing. Like, oh, we'll help you with talent, and we'll do this and that. 10 years ago that mattered, but now all those tools are available to the companies.”
Hamed: Early-stage venture capitalists are effectively just merchant bankers
“The term that most people in venture capital wouldn't want me to use Is that we're sort of merchant bankers. We run around, we invest some of our own capital. And then our job is to tell the rest of the market that they should invest at a higher price. And so …”
Grinda: Employer reference checks on startup founders are a negative signal
“We tried doing reference checks on founders and realized that they were a negative signal. Some of the very best founders were horrible employees. They would talk back to their bosses. They would work on their startup at their job. They had the worst reference…”
Trigg: Hiring a head of HR leads leaders to outsource vital duties
“When you hire someone to be the head of HR, what do you do? You start outsourcing, I think, very important duties as a leader. You know, if I suddenly need to let somebody go, I'm not going to go do that. Or if I do have a difficult conversation with somebody …”
Samani: Fundamental long-term crypto investors should reject mean reversion on principle
“I reject kind of the notion of mean reversion as a point of principle, given our mandate to be long-term fundamental investors.”
Jain: Ethereum 2.0 requires unsolved computer science; Solana only required engineering
“Whether we're talking about Ethereum, two point O near Polkadot, those are sharded blockchains and they require some meaningful Computer science breakthroughs to happen in order to actually function and deliver what they needed. Solana did not need that. Solan…”
Seides: Immediate push to back new diverse-owned funds is structurally misguided
“A lot of the response that I've seen from the people I talked to is we're going to go invest in a diverse manager, a diverse owned manager and my contention all along is that's incredibly misguided because the structure of the industry today was created based …”
Bonafede: Only reinforcement learning can dynamically moderate portfolio risk
“As it learns to maximize the reward, the model, I don't mean to give it human characteristics, but it will moderate risk because it can see that taking full advantage of the underlying patterns may not lead to the best reward, and there's No other optimization…”
Grantham: Diversified venture capital has stock-market-level risk with higher returns
“Venture capital, not surprisingly, has a higher return than the stock market because of the riskiness of each individual unit. But if you have a diversified portfolio, you have no more risk than the stock market, but you have a higher return.”
Grantham: Moderate inflation supports faster growth and better worker treatment
“A moderate amount of inflation is completely compatible with a healthy economy, faster growth rates, and better treatment of the workers who have been sadly neglected in the US in particular.”
Monk: Allocators hide data fearing stakeholders will block high-fee strategies
“I think there's a lot of investment professionals at these organizations that believe that if they reported it to the stakeholders wouldn't let them pursue the strategy that they believe in their heart of hearts is needed to meet the obligation of the plan. So…”
Chamath: Mega-Scale Investment Firms Must Maximize Fees Over Carried Interest
“But if you really want to get to mega scale and run hundreds of billions of dollars and make it a business, you have to over-orient and over-index on fees and not really focus that much on carried interest.”
Passive investor ESG proposals are mostly value-neutral or value-destructive
“And they might have 10 or 15 ideas for ESG change. And, you know, of those, call it 10 ideas. Five might be value neutral. Three might be value destructive, a waste of time or a waste of capital without return. And two might be value accretive.”
Inker: Assuming an automatic illiquidity premium across private equity is dangerous
“This assumption that you get paid an illiquidity premium for anything that happens to be illiquid is I think dangerous. I think it is going to cause you not to be focused on the question of, all right, if I think this is about operational excellence, why do I …”
Kraus: Passive investing and high-frequency trading do not create price discovery
“Passive models do not discover prices. High frequency trading trades around prices, but it doesn't create price discovery. It creates liquidity, but it's not price discovery. It's not determining value.”
Fitzpatrick: PE pays advisors high fees while obscuring performance for ten years
“And if you're a financial advisor and you're recommending private equity, first of all, it's the thing you can sell where you get paid the biggest fees usually. And nobody's gonna know if you're right or wrong. For 10 years.”
Tepper: High corporate margins stem from pricing power, not efficiency
“That paper itself started tied the high profit margins to competition and pointed out that it's not because these firms are just that much better and more efficient. They're getting a higher return on assets and it comes from scale. Rather, they end up with pr…”
Tepper: Economic Inequality Stems from Lack of Competition, Not Capitalism
“What Piketty talked about certainly does happen, which is that you end up with an increase in inequality. And it doesn't come because there's a fatal flaw in capitalism. It comes because essentially there's not enough competition. Capitalism itself is not func…”
Fiduciary Duty Must Trump Political Divestment Mandates For Pension Managers
“Listen, we really need to separate the fiduciary duty and the political policy as it relates to health and dangerous products like cigarettes, because I can't really hold a manager accountable for beating the S&P 500 and then tell him he can't own one of the f…”
O'Shaughnessy: High quality metrics do not generate excess returns; low quality destroys them
“In the quantitative sense, high ROEs or gross profitability or whatever your measure of quality is really isn't indicative of strong future excess returns. What's really useful about quality is that very bad quality, so really over levered balance sheets, comp…”
O'Shaughnessy: Publicly sharing quant findings produces stronger signals via feedback
“In quant research, this is really interesting, which is that you actually get a stronger signal. We found when you share your general findings, not necessarily the code or the particulars, but the general findings with a broad audience, then all of a sudden yo…”
Moodgal: Only Allocate to Managers Who Have Survived a Fund Blowup
“And for me, post-crisis, I will say to everyone, only invest with someone who's blown up or been at a firm that's blown up. Because unless they've been through a tough time, you won't know how they're going to handle it, how they're going to treat their invest…”
Divestment Fails to Bring About Social Change
“We have proven time and again for the last 20 years that divestment does not bring about any social change, and people have to realize boycotts are generally ineffective unless you can get everybody Involved in them.”
Beshore: Competitors inflate bids by 30-40% with no intent to close
“Oftentimes we'll lose deals because other groups will come in and throw out a valuation that's 30, 40% higher than ours. They have no intention of ever closing. And on top of that, if you're a fundless sponsor, you don't even raise the capital yet. You haven't…”
Duke: Managers should fire a salesperson who closes 100 percent of sales
“And then all of a sudden you have a salesperson who's closing a hundred percent of their sales. And by the way, if you can't change that, you should fire them.”
Secular Stagnation Is a Policy Choice, Not an Inevitable Reality
“Secular stagnation is a euphemism for policy failure, meaning that secular stagnation is a choice.”
Pfeffer compares crypto diversification to playing slots on the way to poker.
“And I, the analogy I use is that, to me, diversifying inside crypto is like, A champion, a world champion poker player trying to smooth out her earnings by playing slots on the way to the table. You know, you're actually increasing risk and decreasing expected…”
Hamed: Venture valuation is broken by pricing all equity at senior rates
“The term valuation is broken, right? We basically take, let's take the price of the most senior security and ascribe that to the price of every other security, regardless of the structure and call the cumulative number, the value. Which is like totally bullshi…”
Large Venture Capital Funds Benefit Their Partners More Than Their Investors
“So, like I said, those funds will continue to do well, but some of the venture funds that we've seen grow quite large end up doing much better for their partners than they do for their investors.”
Golden: In investing, theory can outweigh conflicting empirical data
“Being able to have an appreciation of theory over data in the right bounds is key. You know, there are times when you want to say, if the data don't support the theory, the data are wrong, right?”
Hochfelder: Mega-funds of $20B+ inevitably force managers to abandon selectivity
“When you've seen the rise of these individual closed-end funds that are 20 plus billion dollars to be deployed over a four-year period. You can be the world's most extraordinary investor, but if you have that much scale, you are going to be forced to deploy.”
Hochfelder: Public alternative managers prioritize AUM growth over investment selectivity
“You've seen more and more mega cap managers that are publicly traded, alts asset managers. Their share price is ultimately going to be a function of their AUM growth. People follow incentives. They are doing the right thing by their shareholders to grow. We ha…”
Moyo: Board interviews should test for black swan resilience, not past returns.
“Anybody who is going to be in front of me as a board member is qualified. I don't need them to necessarily relate to me how they built a team or generated returns. The fact that they're there tells me that they've done that. What I'm interested in is how do th…”