This is value investor, Allan Mecham.

He dropped out of college at age 22 to start his fund, Arlington Value.

From 2008-2016, they did a CAGR of 30% over 8.5 years!

And in his fund letters, he shared his best frameworks for investing in companies.

Here's a breakdown of each:

I'm 31 years old.

10 years ago when I was 21, I had less than $1,000 in my bank.

If you told me I would cross my first $1 mil at age 29, I wouldn't believe you.

But it's not all about $$.

Here's the top lessons I've learnt about habits, happiness, life and death:

1. Wake up early

I learnt this 4 years ago after listening to Jocko Willink.

I’m not a morning person. Until now I'm still not.

But I force myself to rise early most days.

Knowing you’ve accomplished more than others by the morning is a good feeling.

It sets you up right.

2. Lift weights

Everyone in a competitive field should engage in some form of intense physical activity.

For me I lift weights 5-6x a week. But it could be any sport.

It teaches you valuable lessons like:

- showing up consistently
- putting in the reps
- pushing past boredom

3. Have dreams

I recall watching Tony Robbins when I was 16 years old, and that left an impression on me.

Seeing him speak and inspire others from stage, that’s what I wanted to do.

It gave my life a new purpose beyond video games...

I told all my friends about it.

Anyone who would listen, I publicly declared it.

Probably annoyed many of them.

Looking back, I'm blessed to have found what I wanted to do at an early age.

It gave me clarity in choosing my career, and where I chose to invest my time.

2 weeks ago, I started reading "Fooled by Randomness" by Nassim Taleb.

WOW, It's been mindblowing!

Thanks to @dvassallo 's recommendation.

Inside, there's a part he talks about how to deal with volatility.

Here’s 6 big lessons that are useful in the current market crash:

Lesson #1:
Negative emotions of seeing your stocks drop > Positive emotion from seeing your stocks rise.

"A negative pang is not offset by a positive one...

Some psychologists estimate the negative effect for an average loss to be up to 2.5 the magnitude of a positive one)...

... At the end of every day the dentist will be emotionally drained.

If the unpleasurable minute is worse in reverse pleasure than the pleasurable minute is in pleasure terms, then the dentist incurs a large deficit when examining his performance at a high frequency."

Lesson #2:
When we zoom out and check the prices less frequently, we are less affected by negative emotions.

Because over a longer time horizon, the market tends to rise more than it goes down.

One thing I'm always most excited about as an investor:

Watching CEO interviews.

Over the years, I’ve watched over 100s of them.

Here’s 25 traits I’ve seen in the very best leaders.

You can swipe these into your own framework to evaluate management teams:

1. They don’t rely on external motivation

Not status or money.

Instead, they seem to be driven an inner fire.

Sometimes it’s to make the world a better place.

Other times, it’s to prove themselves right.

And that's why they can keep going even after they're already rich AF.

2. They're not human

They don't see the world like 99% of us

Whether it’s creating a culture that’s a sports team vs a family...

Or thinking of everything from first principles…

They have a different modus operandi.

This helps them see solutions that 99% of us muggles miss.

3. They enjoy founder-company fit

The great leaders are great because:

They’re in a company that plays to their unique personality.

The stars have to align for a great leader to be made.

The product + business model + personality of the leader must match.

4. They give lots of freedom and autonomy

They know how to unleash the potential in their team

They know how to paint an exciting vision…

And then give their team the space to roam free.

They understand that people flourish when you give them room to explore and experiment.

How to Get Rich (without getting lucky):

Seek wealth, not money or status. Wealth is having assets that earn while you sleep. Money is how we transfer time and wealth. Status is your place in the social hierarchy.

Understand that ethical wealth creation is possible. If you secretly despise wealth, it will elude you.

Ignore people playing status games. They gain status by attacking people playing wealth creation games.

You’re not going to get rich renting out your time. You must own equity - a piece of a business - to gain your financial freedom.

The payments wars in Japan are heating up and one of the battlegrounds is convenience store coffee.

“Coffee? What does that have to do with payments?” I’m glad you asked.

Convenience stores are low net margin businesses, which sell some high gross margin goods/services but a lot of low ones, and have high fixed costs and a low ticket size. The typical transaction is under 500 yen ($5) and many are about $1.

They need repeat custom.

A few years ago, all of the chains had a good idea for increasing frequency of use: make a minor capital investment in automatic coffee machines. Sell access to them for the price of a cup / ice; customers self-serve with the machine.

The price point is $1 to about $2.

Coffee quickly became one of the most frequently repurchased items at convenience stores, in no small part because it’s the one thing they can sell which is phameceutically habit forming but totally unregulated. (Just telling it like it is.)

But the coffee is not very defensible

The problem, such that it is, is that competing chains are everywhere and *all* of them serve Thoroughly Adequate Coffee at similar prices, so you’re back into the brutal economics of “Who is 3 meters closer to 40 customers at 1 office?”

Enter payment apps.

1/x Since I promised a few investors outside Sweden/Nordics to look deeper into $CDON, with my negative customer biases aside, here's a short thread;

Let's first go through the negatives

2/x I really understand the excitement when you put on the "local dominant marketplace"-glasses and start comparing CDON multiples to the likes of $AMZN, $MELI, $SE or whatever. But with boots on the ground I can assure you, that they are *nothing* of the sort. At least yet.

3/x Just looking at GMV/revenue, after >20y in business, an "everything store", CDON doesn't even come near other local niche players like $BHG (8bSEK) or $BOOZT (4bSEK) and other private companies. They are closer to $LYKO in size, who are only selling hair & beauty..

4/x Unfortunately the brand is very much on decline (especially among young ppl) since the website has been mistreated for years and years, so I think they have to work extremely hard on building trust + enhance customer experience to even have a change long term.

5/x Like I wrote yesterday we have a very divided (in a good way) eCommerce market in the Nordics, with lots of amazing niche players with top notch customer experience. To put it in words you understand, we are a more $SHOP like region with independent businesses.

India’s largest lender SBI is gradually capturing the very lucrative unsecured personal loan(PL) market.

A thread 🧵

As per credit bureau CRIF Highmark Unsecured PL market has seen significant growth in recent years. This has been driven a lot by liquidity crunch due to lockdown and emergency medical needs.

Total unsecured PL portfolio as per CRIF was estimated to be at 4.1 lakh crore as on March 19. This increased to 6.5 lakh crore by March 21.

Interestingly, in spite of fintech and NBFC penetration, public sector banks still had majority share – they originated 50% of incremental unsecured PL loans in FY 21 by value.

SBI’s PL portfolio during the period also increased from 1 lakh crore in March 19 to 2.4 lakh crore. This growth was driven by their Xpress credit product which uses credit bureau and other data to sanction loans within just eight minutes!

Newbie traders after learning F&O, look for paper trading platforms to practise. It's like the itch to swim after you learn swimming but end up in a baby pool. Experience of an adult pool vs a baby pool is different, likewise with the real markets & paper trading 🧵 (1/11)

Agreed, without experience, loading your trading account to the tilt and trading can be disastrous 🌋, but that does not mean you will have to paper trade forever. No matter how much you paper trade, you will never get the experience of trading (2/11)

When I talk about trading, I’m not just talking about experiencing the P&L rush. IMHO, experiencing the P&L and how it can vary in real-time is the last thing. There are multiple other things that you need to get comfortable with before diving into full-fledged trading 🏊‍♂️(3/11)

Stuff like placing limit/market order, GTT, AMO. Practising how SL-L for long & short positions works, trailing stops, figuring how margins work, M2M, T+1, T+2 settlements - the list is endless😩 with several moving parts. No paper trading platform gives you the real deal (4/11)

Here is a hack, though - instead of paper trading, try and place an actual trade on a low-value futures contract. My favourite is USD INR 💱, it costs just under 2K per contract, but gives you the whole trading experience (5/11)