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 10 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
Flatt: Investment upside takes care of itself; downside risk is what matters
“Upside will always take care of itself, and whether you shoot for 16%, 22, 29, 18, none of those matter. They're all great. What's really important is what are the risks How, what can go wrong? How bad could it get? And how do we deal with it if that happens?”
Flatt: Politics barely matter when investing in domestic backbone infrastructure
“We invest in backbone infrastructure, largely, and even our private equity businesses are backbone infrastructure type businesses. Therefore, what's important for us is to go to good countries with good people that you can operate with the standards we operate…”
Flatt: Passive investing creates wide price-to-value disparities for non-index companies
“For some companies, smaller, mid-size, don't fit indexes, they will be lost within public markets investing. Because active, ah, investors may not be investing in those sectors anymore, and if you don't fit the indexes, you have no buyers. Increasingly, though…”
Flatt: Commodity Real Estate Underperforms While Top Quartile Thrives
“If you own almost today commodity anything, it's bad. If you own commodity office, bad. If you own commodity retail, bad. You own commodity industrial, bad. In fact, if you own commodity hotels, bad. If you, what's great today is all of those things in the top…”
Flatt: Great long-term investors preserve capital and deploy during market recoveries
“Coming out of recessions or cycles, coming out of the bottom, what's most important is just have everything you have intact. Do not lose anything, do not lose too much, and keep going, because there'll be many people who will have lost stuff. What's even bette…”
Flatt: Simultaneous massive transactions amount to an unintended cycle bet
“If everybody made a massive transaction at the same point in time, what we're probably betting on is a cycle. And you may not want that. And if you do, you better knowingly do it.”
Flatt: Flawed investment decisions are far worse than mistiming the market
“The unsuccessful ones are harder to identify what happened. But often there are reasons why, and it either comes down to execution. You didn't execute properly. You had you missed time the market. Or you just made a bad, bad, flawed investment decision. And th…”
Flatt: Investment committee financial models are never entirely accurate forecasts
“The only thing I'd tell you about a model that's produced in an investment committee is it will never be exactly what happens.”