Munger in 2014: "If there’s any secret to Berkshire, it’s the fact that we’re pretty good at ignorance removal. And the nice thing about that is we have a lot of ignorance left to remove."
"If it weren’t for the fact we were so good at removing our ignorance, step by step, Berkshire would be practically nothing today. What we knew originally wasn’t enough."
"[See's] main contribution to Berkshire was ignorance removal. ... We were pretty damn stupid when we bought See’s. We were just barely smart enough to buy it."
"There’s another trick, which is scrambling out of your mistakes. We’ve been quite good at both, and it’s enormously useful."
"Berkshire, a textile mill sure to go broke because power costs in New England were 2x as they were in TVA country, a sure-to-fail department store, a trading stamp sure to be forced out of business. Out of that comes Berkshire Hathaway. Talk about scrambling out of mistakes."
Buffett: "We’ve done very, very, very well in See’s. It not only has provided us with earnings that we’ve used to buy other businesses, beyond the earning power we’ve added at See’s.

It opened my eyes to the power of brands."
"You could say that we made a lot of money in Coca-Cola partly because we bought See’s. I’d understood brands to some degree, but there’s nothing like owning one and seeing the possibilities as well as the limitations."
"I wouldn’t be at all surprised, if we had not owned See’s, whether we would’ve owned Coca-Cola later on."

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More from @NeckarValue

Oct 12
Lessons from a young Seth Klarman running a nimble family partnership during the golden age of value and distressed investing (1991).

“We have historically done very well in down markets. Our general predisposition is that we ought to run our money as if it is our own.” Image
Baupost's unconventional origins as a family partnership.

“We set out to be somewhat unconventional, with our clients acting as board members and part owners. The incentive was to maximize the return on their money, not necessarily to grow a profitable business." Image
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Oct 10
Buffett, the endowment investor: “The more outrageous the act might seem for a college endowment, the we liked it. Every investment was entertaining for us and almost always profitable. Convertible debentures in a startup (Intel)... an LBO of a network TV station..."
I wrote about the big shift in endowment investing, from bonds to equities to Swensen's endowment model, and the famous investors involved along the way.
“Keynes writes of contrarian investors: “…it is in the essence of his behavior that he should be eccentric, unconventional, and rash in the eyes of average opinion.”

Who is now (wrongly) viewed as “eccentric, unconventional, and rash” by the mainstream?
neckar.substack.com/p/the-evolutio…
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Oct 7
6 Lessons from hedge fund legend Julian Robertson Image
It’s never too late to reinvent yourself.

Robertson was 48 by the time he started Tiger. He'd put in time as a broker, asset manager, and taken a sabbatical in New Zealand. Instead of early retirement he chose to build a legendary hedge fund.
A straightforward investment philosophy.

"The key to Tiger’s success over the years has been a steady commitment to buying the best stocks and shorting the worst.”

The philosophy behind Tiger was not complicated. Its success boiled down to execution.
Read 9 tweets
Oct 6
The media has long been obsessed with finding the 'next Warren Buffett'. This typically turns out to be a kiss of death for performance and has become known as the ‘Buffett curse’. But it's a question worth asking. Image
If you could find them, you could get rich without doing any of the work...

Buffett crushed the market for a long time (before getting too big). An investor in the partnership and Berkshire could have made ~167,500x their initial capital. ImageImage
But Buffett and Munger typically avoid the question: "The exact specific techniques of turning yourself into another Warren Buffett, I leave to you.” Image
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Some excellent ideas here.
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"Make decisions easy for busy people. You will rise fast in your career if busy people like working with you. Come prepared with a suggested next step. If there are multiple options, lay them out and ask them to pick one. Try to avoid expansive, open-ended questions."
"Save money on city hotels. You’re away from the room for most of the time. If you need to meet at a nice hotel for dinner, stay down the street and make a reservation. Spend the money you save on beach hotels, especially if you plan to spend entire days there."
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Oct 1
"The dominant theme of today’s macroeconomic environment is tension and contradiction."

"It’s impossible to really sit in necessary tension if you’re being constantly distracted." @tom_morganKCP
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"Harvard psychiatrist Albert Rothenberg meticulously studied the lives of Nobel laureates and world-changing scientists. He found that they had often spent considerable time “actively conceiving multiple opposites or antitheses simultaneously.”"
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