Nick Sleep

“Over about 14 years, They wind up 10 X-ing the money.”

“And so they start buying Amazon aggressively in 2005 around 30 dollars per share.”

“If you're thinking rationally and thinking about the long-term, you can subcontract the capital allocation decisions to them. You don't have to be buying and selling shares.”

“In 2014, Sleep and Zack returned their shareholder money and retired as fund managers at the ripe old age of 45.”

“Number one, what is the intended destination for this business in 10 or 20 years? Number two, what must management be doing today to raise the probability of arriving at that destination? Number three, and what could prevent this company from reaching such a f…”

“Nomad never used leverage, never shorted a stock, never speculated with options or futures, never made a macroeconomic bet, never traded hyperactively in response to the latest news, never dabbled in exotic financial instruments.”

“Nick and Zach told stockbrokers that it was pointless calling them with sales pitches since they relied on their own research to reach independent conclusions.”

“Nick and Zach buy at 14 cents. They cash out when the stock rebounds to 90 cents, and they're like, wow, we got a six X return. But Stagecoach winds up being a way better business than they realized, and the stock shoots up to almost four bucks.”

“Ephemeral information distracts investors, or entrepreneurs, or really anybody, from what matters. Nick notes that information like food has a sell-by date. Some information is especially perishable, while some information has a long shelf life.”

“Sleep, with characteristic indifference to conventional opinion, invested almost all of his fortune in just three stocks. At times, he and Zack had as much as 70% of their money in a single stock.”

“Only by looking further out than the short-term crowd can we expect to beat them.”

“The common sense outcome of that equation is that if one is certain of being right, one should invest the entire portfolio in that idea.”

“He says the biggest mistake an investor can make is to sell a stock that goes on to rise tenfold, not from owning something into bankruptcy, but that's what everyone thinks.”

“Good capital allocation takes many forms and does not necessarily require a firm to grow.”

“He says, the best investors aren't investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold.”

“This often works because there's normally a jewel at the heart of most companies that has often been used to fund new ventures. That jewel has been taken for granted by inpatient management. As the jewel becomes diluted by less successful projects, aggregate p…”

“On the busiest day in the run-up to Christmas this year in 2008, order volumes at Amazon were 16% higher than the previous year compared to the overall retail industry, which are down 10%.”

“Nick says, if it's the single best thought you have ever had in your life, it needs to dominate everything because you're not going to get many insights like that. And if it's your single best insight, your single best idea, then obviously it's what you should…”

“We would propose that if knowledge is a source of value add and few things can be known for sure, then it logically follows that owning more stocks does not lower risk, but raises it.”

“Nomad was not a particularly large fund, but over the years, it did make around two billion dollars for its clients, which were predominantly charities and educational endowments.”

“The greatest investors aren't investors at all. They're entrepreneurs who never sold.”