"A lesson I wish I’d learned much earlier in life is that people are not always believable in the same domains that they think they are.
... some influential, very high-IQ people often have limited awareness of exactly where their circle of competence ends." by @tom_morganKCP
"Whenever someone offers you their opinion, a superb initial question paraphrases Morgan Housel: “what have you experienced that makes you believe what you do?”"
"there are probably no universal “tells” for lying, but the ideal approach is to observe closely enough to get a baseline of behavior, then you can notice deviations. Across thousands of interactions this translates to an intuitive recognition of an articulate incompetent."
"we can’t always articulate why we made a decision in retrospect.
George Soros couldn’t explain why he changed his portfolio when his back hurt. In fact, intuition is often actively impeded by a conscious attempt to control and explain it."
"There’s a practical insight I’ve seen recur across multiple fields about the effective use of intuition:
Increase your vocabulary of granular words to describe emotions and sensations."
“In business, only intuition can protect you against the most dangerous individual of all - the articulate incompetent.”
"We read a fair number of trucking message
boards, usually to see what truckers think of their
equipment or what they think about the economy"
"I’ve toured countless factories on five continents ... Usually I get to talk to line operators and learn about
products, production schedules, and culture.
Employee engagement is a key metric of a well-run
company. ... In modern production, quality is critical"
"I arrived in Peoria, Illinois, for a factory visit that showed just how disorganized production can get
when a sharp rise in demand meets a poorly running
system.
most memorably, there were bins filled with components labeled “re-work.” ...bins were stacked more than head high"
"I am attracted to ugly ducklings because I view myself as one. ... I gravitate toward investments that remind me of important aspects of my self-image, and can sometimes see something special in them before it is clear to the stock market."
"watering the flowers and cutting the weeds" vs “cut your losers and let your winners run”
"They are both tapping into the same fundamental feature of the universe – inertia, momentum, Newton’s First Law"
"with winners/losers, the buck stops with price. vs flowers/weeds with operating results.
The difference comes when your assessment of results differs from the stock price. Then you sell the weed that is still a “winner” and buy the flower whose stock price is dropping."
"Over-reliance on the written word removes the groundedness of lived experience... Our contemporary internet world produces a further level of abstraction. If text is a ‘reminder’ of reality, the cyber world is a reminder of a reminder, a facsimile of a facsimile" @thomasjb3van
1984 & Brave New World:
"those societies are all simply examples of different manipulative strategies and technologies utilised to achieve the same end. Which is to have their citizen live in a perpetual memoryless present, in order to maintain a power devoid of responsibility"
"each and every dystopia features the suppression and the destruction of texts."
"You've got an index, which is heavily weighted to China. When that one country is going down, people say: ‘Oh, God, emerging markets are over.’ But they fail to recognize that the Indian market is going through the roof, for example."
"The tax reform in India has done a tremendous job of making it easier to transport goods from one state to another. ... As soon as you free up these countries, the growth rate tends to accelerate. India is just at the beginning of this process. I have great hopes for India. "
"I always tell my analysts to keep your head in the clouds and your feet on the ground.
You can be very creative and ambitious to find new companies, but we want companies that have a good return on assets, growth in earnings per share, and a low debt to equity ratio."
"I was reminded of my childhood: I grew up in a predominantly Sicilian neighbourhood, with a mafia maintaining order. No disorganised crime allowed. Putin did seem to have the instincts of a Sicilian mafia boss"
“In Russia, disputes are resolved by common sense. In a dispute about significant money or property, the sides would send representatives to a dinner. Everyone attending would be armed. Facing the possibility of a bloody outcome both sides find a mutually agreeable solution...
Fear provides the catalyst for common sense.”
"He used his argument in the context of disputes between sovereign nations. Solutions often require an element of fear of disproportionate responses ... forcing adversaries to face horrific alternatives seemed to excite him."
"About 61 per cent of non-US stocks underperformed Treasury bills in the 1990-2018 period, and less than 1 per cent accounted for the entire $16tn of net wealth creation over the period."
"The degree to which stock market wealth creation is concentrated in a few top-performing firms has increased over time, and was particularly strong during the most recent three years, when five firms accounted for 22% of net wealth creation."
"Technology firms accounted for the largest share, $9.0 trillion, of the total, but Telecommunications, Energy, and Healthcare/ Pharmaceutical stocks created wealth disproportionate to the numbers of firms in the industries."