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28 Feb, 4 tweets, 1 min read
1/ "Most reporters have steadily been building escape hatches from their employers. They are called Twitter accounts, and their arrival gave journalists an asset that would have been unthinkable in a world before the internet: truly portable audiences." platformer.news/p/twitter-pull…
2/ That the creators have stronger bargaining power now that they have their own transportable brands is not a development that makes media companies happy. The media companies now have an incentive to treat creators well to keep them from moving to a new platform. This is good.
3/ Media companies nervously claim Substack-enabled writers "are not independent."

How exactly are large media companies independent any more given their primary activity is feeding the confirmation bias of their subscribers and viewers?

Everyone is a "content marketer" now.
4/ Media companies will try to convince writers who are contemplating doing a substack that they would be "abandoning journalism" by running their own business. The only real difference is that the creator owns the business. A substack is still journalism if they want it to be.

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More from @trengriffin

Tren Griffin Profile picture
27 Feb
Charlie Munger: "I don't like being too much of an example for people. I never consider it enough of a life to merely be shrewd at picking stocks. If you're good at just investing your own money, I hope you'll be good at something more."
Charlie Munger: "To make teaching endurable, it has to have enough wiseassery in it. And we do. We’ve done a lot of preaching [about investing] to not much effect. To the extent you’re working on it, you’re on the side of angels, but lots of luck.”
“I don’t think I’m a good example to the young.  I don’t want to encourage people to follow my particular path. I do not want a proctologist who knows Schopenhauer, or astrophysics. On the other hand, I don’t think you’d have much of a life if all you did was proctology.” CM
Read 4 tweets
Tren Griffin Profile picture
27 Feb
This quote brings up Mauboussin's definition of gambling: a net present value negative activity after fees and expenses.

This calculation is challenging since a business is not an annuity.

"Unfortunately, future cash flows are usually uncertain, often highly so." Seth Klarman
A trader can claim their stock purchase is NPV positive and while another person's stock is NPV negative.

"To perform present value analysis, you must predict the future, yet the future is not reliably predictable.” Real businesses are unfortunately not annuities.” Seth Klarman
One study of Brazilian day traders concluded that only 3% were successful traders.

Charlie Munger points out that one very big source of trouble is created by the fact most investors believe that they will be in that successful 3%.

Overconfidence bias is a powerful drug.
Read 4 tweets
Tren Griffin Profile picture
25 Feb
An issue for any creator selecting a platform or platforms like Substack or Twitter is: who owns the customer? Can the creator move to another platform or decide to roll their own platform?

You may recognize this as "wholesale transfer pricing" from blogs such as mine (25iQ).
Competition will create options for creators who want to own their customers. The scarce good isn't the platform but instead compelling offerings from creators. What will attract creators? Great tools for sure, but more importantly lower customer acquisition cost for creators.
How many creators exist? One estimate is 50 million, but as always, that's a guess and depends upon the definition used. The revenues of creators will follow a power law, because 1)people don't make decisions independently 2) talent and work ethic are not evenly distributed, etc.
Read 5 tweets
Tren Griffin Profile picture
25 Feb
13/ Charlie Munger: "Harvard Business School early on started out with a history of business and they'd take you through the building of the canals and railroads and so on and you saw the ebb and flow of industry and the creative destruction of economic changes."
14/ Charlie Munger: "If you stop to think about it, business success long-term is a lot like biology and in biology what happens is the individuals all die and eventually so do all the species and capitalism is almost as brutal as that. Think of what's died in my lifetime."
15/ Charlie Munger: "Just think of the things that were once prosperous that are now in failure or gone. Whoever dreamed when I was young that Kodak would go bankrupt? It's incredible what's happened in terms of the destruction. Of course, that history is useful to know."
Read 20 tweets
Tren Griffin Profile picture
24 Feb
1/ No peanut brittle is in sight at the Daily Journal Meeting. One Diet Coke. Question period has started.

"The stock market frenzy is fed by people who are getting fees from a new generation of gamblers who have the mindset of race track gamblers."

finance.yahoo.com/videos
2/ "Don't invest in a parking lot by a courthouse. More and more of the business of the Daily Journal will move on line." Charlie Munger
3/ "Crazy speculation must end badly, but I don't know when."

"The investment banking profession will sell shit as long as shit can be sold."

"Behavior by market participants is most egregious when novice momentum traders are lured in."

Charlie Munger
Read 11 tweets
Tren Griffin Profile picture
20 Feb
1/ Assume you don't have an information technology circle of competence. How much of a handicap do you have in beating a investing benchmark?

"The best performing Sector in the last 10 years is S&P Information Technology- a +19.28% annualized return." lazyportfolioetf.com/sp-500-sector-…
2/ Munger: "If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge.  You've got to play within your own Circle of Competence.”
3/ The new stocks that Berkshire bought as revealed in the 13-F filing are definitely not stocks I would buy.

I use the Charlie Munger investing system, but I buy very different stocks because I do have a technology circle of competence. google.com/amp/s/finance.…
Read 7 tweets

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