Adam Carr
President and Portfolio Manager, Orbis Investments · 1 appearance on the record.
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investorexecutivefounderorbis.com ↗
Adam Karr directs client capital in the Orbis Global Equity Strategy and leads the global investment teams at Orbis Investments, which he joined in 2002. He also serves as vice chair of Northwestern University's Board of Trustees and founded the education initiative SEO Scholars San Francisco.
27statements → 2claims → 2claims resolved → 3.81/5average certainty → 1.74/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated →
1 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted how the 2 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
2 assertions · 1 opinion · 15 insights · 9 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 2 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 2 are resolved. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Adam argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
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Everything Adam Carr said on the Knowledge Project that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Karr: Scaling into new positions is an error driven by regret aversion
“So when I'm initiating a position, I tend to scale into it. So let's say I want to take it to three percent of capital. I'll buy 50 basis points, you know, another 50 and I'll scale into it. Turns out that's wrong. The bias that I'm demonstrating the reversion…”
Karr: Orbis avoids investing in attention-seeking and high-lifestyle CEOs
“Generally not. I mean, it's a part of the mosaic of, you know, what will be the driver. I mean, it's an interesting thing with CEOs are like, what are the characteristics that allow one to be in that seat? And they're not always correlated with the skills that…”
Karr: Fund managers are only as long-term as their clients allow
“You might say, I'm a long-term investor, but you're only going to be able to be as long-term as your clients allow you to be, right? If you're in a position that's offsides to kind of the market sentiment at that time, and you have in your mind that, you know,…”
Karr: Anyone can have any mentor by studying public records obsessively
“You can have any mentor in the world that you want. There's so much out there, like, pick somebody that you really respect, and just, like, be a sponge, get obsessive, learn everything you can about them. How did they do it? What did they do? Like you can real…”
Karr: Deep research reveals when consensus bear cases form bull theses
“Some of my favorite investment situations are the bear case is the bull case. So there's this common bear narrative. And if you don't kind of do it on your own work, if I were bringing up this name and I was talking to someone, they would have told me all of t…”
Karr: High personal overhead ruins investors' risk-adjusted decision making
“How you run your personal life. Very much impacts your ability to make good decisions, particularly if they go sideways, right? And so you see people in the industry who then, you know, adopt a certain lifestyle, a certain fixed cost base, and then, like, you …”
Karr: Cigar-butt investing is profitable but difficult to scale
“And so if you're playing cigar butts which can be very profitable. But it's difficult to scale that. And so as his capital grew over time, you know, you have to think about how you show up and how you approach it.”
Karr avoids betting on management-driven public market turnarounds
“Very leery to go into turnaround situations where I'm betting on the management team making some kind of dramatic change. Like the base rates suck. It's very difficult to do”
Karr: Studies show emotional awareness improves investor performance
“There are studies that show that those people that are better at describing what emotions they're feeling end up demonstrating better investment performance.”
Adam Karr: Persuasion in Stock Pitches Undermines Objective Risk Assessment
“There's a tendency to want to convince somebody or persuade somebody to buy a stock. And so when you're persuading, and you may not as equally kind of pull out the potential risks or other factors to weigh against that.”
Adam Karr: Breakthrough Investment Insights Come From the Last 5% of Research
“Like I like to say the magic's in the last five percent, you know, all of the standard stuff, you know, you've got to do and looking at the balance sheet and understanding the core strategies and the key drivers of P&L, et cetera. But really like getting to th…”
Karr: Brad Jacobs buying Con-way was an exceptional capital allocation decision
“Probably one of the best capital allocation decisions I've seen in my investment career. We bought a company called Conway. It was a complete pivot from the stated strategy at the time.”
Karr: Orbis invested about $1B into XPO after short report
“And we probably put a billion dollars into it on the back of that. And the stock was extremely dislocated.”
Karr: The base rate of corporate rollups is bad
“The common trope is rollups never work. And it's true. Like the base rate on rollups is not good. It doesn't mean all rollups don't work. What are the factors and common hallmarks of rollups that are successful? And are those conditions precedent here?”
Karr: Long-Term Investors Must Track Interim Milestones to Adapt
“No, like there are many incremental steps between now and then that you want to track to and hold yourself accountable to. It doesn't mean you're trading every day or every quarter, but you want to be really thoughtful on this is why I bought it. These are the…”
Karr: Investors must practice deferred gratification and probabilistic thinking daily
“I think there's some parts of it that are temperament related, like just practicing deferred gratification. There's elements of it that are You know thinking about the world probabilistically, everything, just continuing to practice that every day or the uncer…”
Karr: Orbis will not tilt portfolios based on US election outcomes
“And I'm not going to position and tilt the portfolio for a particular outcome. One, because I wouldn't be well served to do that. But two, to this point, like it's unknowable. And so I just want to be resilient as opposed to spend all this time obsessing on, i…”
Karr: Orbis performance fees are refundable during periods of underperformance
“So we, all of our fees are performance-based, but they're refundable. So when we go through these periods that we're underperforming, we refunding fees back to them in the same ratio.”
Karr: Orbis invests with a four-to-five-year horizon
“So we consider ourselves long-term investors. We're trying to take a four to five year view to be infinite investors, right?”
Karr: A 55% win rate is strong; expect to be wrong often
“And then you, you're investing in like, if you're right, 55% of the time, like you're doing pretty darn well. And so being wrong a lot is an important concept to internalize.”
Karr: Orbis has required analysts to run paper portfolios for decades
“One of the things that we do is all of our analysts run paper portfolios or model portfolios. And this is something we've done for decades.”
Karr: Orbis runs a dedicated four-person team to track investor biases
“One of the things that we did a couple years ago which has been really interesting is we created this, what we call decision analytics initiative, right? So we have a standalone team for individuals. We went out and got third party software and we run all thes…”
Adam Karr: Identifying a Company's Core Driver Anchors Long-Term Ownership
“When you've grinded on it enough and you get to that point, if you've really been able to dial into that thing that is the driver, that can be a real ballast to help you through as an owner and a holder of it.”
Karr: Investors must aggressively investigate emerging red flags outside main thesis
“If you're over myopically focused on one thing that you think is the important thing, you need to keep your mind open that there may be other things in the mosaic that are critical, and that when you do see those
And we started to get a little bit of the flags…”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| Adam Karr: The Investing Blueprint | Nov 12, 2024 | 47m |