Excited to share my conversation with @scmallaby who shared his research process and insights on legendary investors.
“The key was to do an unreasonable amount of preparation work. It shows that you're serious and not wasting people's time by asking obvious questions.”
“What you really want to know is their thought process around an important or interesting trade. How did they make the call? How did they develop conviction? How did they hold on during the inevitable hiccups and adversity? It's that reconstruction of the case study.”
“I often show up with very detailed notes and a timeline. I'm able to say that, ‘I know from your letter that in this month you made a profit on dollar/yen. Dollar/yen had a big move on the 15th and 16th of that month. I really tried to kind of prompt them as much as possible.”
We all accumulate stuff, ideas, positions. Clutter accumulates on our bookshelves and calendars, in our portfolios and minds.
To be open for the new, we have to create empty space. Or risk being forced into a clean slate by an increasing disconnect from reality.
“If Berkshire has made modest progress, a good deal of it is because Warren and I are very good at destroying our own best-loved ideas. Any year that you don’t destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year.” -Charlie Munger
.@cdixon wrote about the hill climbing problem: to reach the highest peak without visibility requires some randomness in order to avoid getting stuck on a lower hill.
Getting to better ideas requires slack and time for exploration, lest we settle for 'good enough.'
"I sometimes will say, not facetiously, that people think I write books about trading, but they’re really books about psychology."
"I often say if I was asked, you can give advice to traders, but you could only use ten words. I know what those 10 words would be. It’s a sentence that Bruce Kovner said, and he said, “I know where I’m getting out before I get in.” Or know when you get out before you get in."
More Money Than God by @scmallaby is the best book to understand history of hedge funds - and therefore a lot of the participants and styles in public markets today.
The footnotes alone are worth the price.
“Rarely do portfolio managers articulate why they are successful. Sometimes they try to do so but are wrong. I have worked with hundreds of PMs and found that articulating why they are successful is quite difficult for them—although often they are not aware that it is.”
“Trading can be intuitive. We are looking at so many factors in the markets [that] a lot of our analysis operates on a subconscious level. All of a sudden you just know this is the right trade. If somebody really quizzed you, you probably couldn’t clearly articulate your views...
"As people are educated in a more and more homogeneous way, the gains to specificity and accuracy that you enjoy, and the gains to certainty, are offset in a way because everybody shares the same blind spots."
"this role of jester, the one person allowed to insult the king as a necessary corrective. There seems also to be an evolutionary mechanism, where we accept that you can say things in a funny way and the social response to that has to be different to if they are said seriously."
“If you want to tell people the truth, you’d better make them laugh or they’ll kill you”
Finally got around to reading the letters of Nick Sleep and Zak Zakaria's Nomad Partnership. These guys crushed the market and left behind a legacy of insights and worldly wisdom.
Going to share some favorite lessons and quotes:
Sleep was an analyst at Marathon Asset Management and Zakaria at Deutsche Bank. The two connected over finding cheap stocks after the Asian financial crisis. In 2001, they set up their own investment partnership.
They closed it after 13 years. Such a mic drop..
Intrinsic motivation.
They ran their partnership because they loved the intellectual challenge and craft, not just for money (but yes, they did earn enough to retire from performance fees). They closed the fund repeatedly and kept management fees low.
As you gain experience it gets harder to change how you invest. How do you know whether you're adapting to a changing world or just chasing the latest fad?
Rather than looking for a eureka moment, build a mosaic of incremental insights that connect and get you to the next level.
I wrote a little case study about @B3_MillerValue, who was criticized for investing in Amazon, and his early integration of value investing and technology/internet companies.
It was a learning journey connecting different disciplines and the deep study of new business models.
He grasped that accounting failed to capture value creation for a new crop of companies: “we are interested in the underlying economic reality of the business and not how they report what is going on."
But what may seem obvious today required a departure from dogma and tribe.