Thread by @trengriffin

1/ Charlie Munger: “We have the same problem as everyone else: It’s very hard to predict the future."

Seth Klarman: "An unresolvable contradiction exists: to perform present value analysis, you must predict the future, yet the future is not reliably predictable."

2/ Charlie Munger: “Stocks partly sell like bonds, based on expectations of future cash streams, and partly like Rembrandts, based on the fact that they’ve gone up in the past and are fashionable."

3/ "If stocks trade more like Rembrandts in the future, then stocks will rise, but they will have no anchors. In this case, it’s hard to predict how far, how high and how long it will last.”

Charlie Munger on the problems with a Keynesian Beauty Contest approach.

4/ “You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge and play within your own circle of competence. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. That’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make." CM

5/ "We are in the business of making easy predictions. If a deal looks too hard, we simply shelve it. We’re a tortoise that has outrun a hare because it choses easy predictions. Some of our success we predicted and some was fortuitous. Like most human beings, we took a bow.” CM

6/ “People have always had this craving to have someone tell them the future. There’s always been a market for people who pretend to know the future. Listening to today’s forecasters is just as crazy as when the king hired the guy to look at the sheep guts." Charlie Munger

7/ "It’s highly likely the people who confidently think they know the consequences – none of whom predicted this – now they know what’s going to happen next? Witch doctors. You ask me what’s going to happen? Hell, I don’t know what’s going to happen." CM forbes.com/sites/phildemu…

8/ "Having a significant excess of real value per share working for you means that all kinds of good things can happen to you. You have a huge margin of safety by having this big excess value going for you."

USC talk (1994)fs.blog/great-talks/a-…

9/ My friend Nick asked yesterday what Charlie Munger would be like on Twitter. We will never know, but Charlie has said: “To make teaching endurable, it has to have enough wiseassery in it." davisfunds.com/document/video…

10/ I was walking in yard today getting in my 10K daily step minimum and my neighbor yelled at me: "Nice Munger Twitter thread yesterday. You should write a book about him!"👀

Hey Bob: You can read the Introduction of my book about Charlie for free here: issuu.com/columbiaup/doc…