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 21 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
Scilipoti: In Raging Bull Markets, Experience and Knowledge Become Handicaps
“During raging bull markets, knowledge is superfluous, and experience is a handicap. Because if you have the benefit of knowing what happened in all the other blowups, you know how painful it could be. But if you've never experienced it, and every time somethin…”
Scilipoti: AI Automation Destroys the Financial Analyst Training Ground
“If that junior person doesn't learn, doesn't get on the in on the ground floor, they'll never learn to be able to make all those connections.”
Scilipoti: Private equity blindly piles into companies Nvidia invests in
“If you see that my name as a key investor and a leader in this industry is making an investment in this company, well, then what does everybody else do? Warren Buffett tells you he's buying something. What does everybody do? They go buy it. Well, if NVIDIA is …”
Scilipoti: Acquisition costs are not one-time expenses for serial acquirers
“If making acquisitions is part of my business model, there are no longer one-time costs.”
Scilipoti: Boards must represent broad stakeholders, not just calculated shareholder value
“The role of the board is to embrace the position of and the viewpoint of the shareholder, and or the stakeholder, I, we always, always focus on the shareholder, but stakeholders, stakeholders, employees customers, the communities the company works in, the comp…”
Scilipoti: Passive Index Investing Is Essentially Automated Momentum Investing
“The danger I think we're having of the index investing, passive investing, is that in essence, all that is, is momentum investing, because it's a, you're buying an index, which is market cap weighted, So the money that you're investing is going to the largest …”
Scilipoti: Stock buybacks signal a lack of high-return business investments
“So to me, it's a point that says I have no other investments in my business that That would generate a return higher than my cost of capital, and so I'm going out and buying my stock, and I think that is very risky.”
Scilipoti: If markets had superior information, earnings news would not move stock prices
“If we had better information, then you know what? Stock prices on news would hardly move. Everybody would already have known.”
Scilipoti: AI information is useless without prior domain expertise and direction
“The AI makes me get to the answer perhaps more quickly, but it's my, if I don't already know where I want to go, then AI just gives me information. But that information doesn't help my decision if I didn't start with where I want to get to.”
Scilipoti: Audits face structural conflicts due to client-paid compensation models
“And the challenge is time, because you have to do this quickly. Pressures on costs. And essentially, think about it this way. It's like, I tell you, look, I just prepared my report card. I got an A. I now hand it to you and say, look, it's an A. And if you say…”
Scilipoti: Investors Must Master Financial Fundamentals Before Relying on AI
“You need to learn it without the calculator, and then you can use the calculator, which is the same with AI. You need to understand how the financial statements are prepared, understand the linkages, developmental models, so that when the AI gives you informat…”
Scilipoti: AI Cannot Link Historical Patterns Without Directed Human Mental Models
“And I think that's something that the AI can't quite do, unless you tell it where to look, because it doesn't know the link to it that I'm thinking about. But if I can make the initial stage, it can help me get there quicker. And more accurately, but if I don'…”
Scilipoti: Financial market risk is highest when the cost of risk is priced low
“And I think right now, the reason why I think we're in a very high risk situation is because the cost of the risk is priced very low. And that's when the risk is highest.”
Scilipoti: Operating cash flow must include vendor-financed long-term customer receivables
“The ratio needs to be adapted to the company, the life cycle, the industry, the business model. If the company's selling things at a long-term receivable for over a period of extending beyond one operating cycle, but it's part of its normal operations, that sh…”
Scilipoti: The primary investing rule is avoiding catastrophic, embarrassing losses
“My number one rule is avoid embarrassing loss. You want to avoid the loss of a company potentially blowing up. If the company might, you know, if it looks like it's a little bit expensive and it might potentially go down five percent or something or 10% or 20,…”
Scilipoti: Investors should adopt a "verify then trust" posture toward management
“Another rule is don't trust management. I'm sure there's many management teams and I run my, you know, we're a operating business private company. And it's not that they, that, you know, you shouldn't trust anything they say, but again, it's a mindset. Everyth…”
Scilipoti: Read financial statement footnotes before looking at the statements themselves
“You have to read the notes to the financial statements first before you actually read the statements. The notes to the financial statements tell you how the company modified the accounting because it made accounting choices. We decided to account for this, the…”
Scilipoti: Corporate fraud begins gradually under stakeholder pressure to meet targets
“Companies don't start out as being crooked. They have to convince someone to buy a product, ok, or a service. So money comes in to the company in some fashion or time, and then gets converted into something that adds value. The problem becomes outside stakehol…”
Scilipoti: Compensation rewarding acquisitions over organic growth is problematic
“If the company's incentives aren't linked to that, so if they're not tied to, you know, cost control, if they're not tied to driving revenues from an organic standpoint, not just from acquisitions if they're not, you know, if they're tied, if they're driven by…”
Scilipoti: Lowering bonus targets when management misses goals undermines governance
“Did a company say, you know, we're going to pay management on X performance metric. If they hit it, they get a hundred percent. If they don't, they get some graduated scale. Well, then management doesn't hit it and they change the metric and management still g…”
Scilipoti: Buffett's operating cash flow frees him from fund manager benchmark constraints
“Buffett has built a business that generates cash. So he has operating businesses, Geico, Prudalum, etc. These generate cash. He takes that cash and invests it when he wants to invest it. In the way that he wants to invest it. You know, the average portfolio ma…”