Ivor Cummins has been wrong (or lying) almost entirely throughout this pandemic and got paid handsomly for it.

He has been wrong (or lying) so often that it will be nearly impossible for me to track every grift, lie, deceit, manipulation he has pulled. I will use...

1/ My most popular tweets of 2020 by month (thread)

January:

A reminder of @morganhousel cash strategy.

For every $1,000 in cash:

More: ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️

2/ February

If you've truly found the next $AMZN, $AAPL, or $NFLX and can hold for years, it's nearly impossible to overpay.

But finding them is hard.

3/ March

Millennials have seen tech crash, 2008, and now #COVID19

I'm worried that many of them will swear off the stock market -- the greatest wealth-building device ever -- for life.

4/ April

Want to see the checklists used by

Buffet
Dalio
Fischer
Graham
Greenblatt
Klarman
Marks
Munger

and

5/ May

When the P/E ratio is:

Useless (Stage 1, 4) - $MDB, $SHOP, $PINS, $GME, $JCP

Semi-useful (Stage 2) - $TTD, $NFLX

Useful! (Stage 3) - $MSFT, $AAPL, $V

In determining valuation

🤔 Thread: More of the wrong thing is less
(or, how I stepped off the hamster wheel)

I’m going to share a personal story with hope that it inspires at least one person to re-examine their definition of success 👇

Through hard work and an unfair share of luck, I’ve done some cool “bucket list” things in my career:

✅Raised VC from the worlds’ top firms
✅Helped build 100’s of millions in revenue from nothing
✅Rang the bell at the NYSE
✅Met & did deals with billionaires & business icons

These are things I dreamed about when I was young and I treasure some of the memories. But when they finally happened I felt surprisingly unfulfilled. I was scoring lots of points but didn’t feel like I was winning.

Then a few years ago during a board meeting I had a moment of clarity. I looked around the table at 10 people, all absurdly successful by financial measures. There wasn’t a single person I wanted to emulate. Most were unhealthy and several had told me that they were unhappy.

Within months I walked away from from a 7-figure salary, moved my family to Boulder, & haven’t looked back. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a capitalist & like money as much as anyone. But for me it's not the thing, and *more of the wrong thing is less*.

1/ Peter Bevelin, who has written books like “Seeking Wisdom: From Darwin to Munger,” provided me with a rough transcript of the Charlie Munger talk from yesterday. I did some clean up and editing and focus on points I didn’t make in my tweets yesterday.

2/ “All successful investment involves trying to get into something where it's worth more than you're paying. That's what successful investment is. There are a lot of different ways to find something worth more than you're paying. You can do what Sequoia does [e.g, in VC]."

3/ “Good investing requires a weird combination of patience and aggression and not many people have it. It also requires a big amount of self-awareness about how much you know and how much you don't know. You have to know the edge of your own competency."

4/ "A lot of brilliant people are no good knowing the edge of their own competency. They think they're way smarter than they are. Of course, that's dangerous and causes trouble.” Charlie Munger

5/ “When I was young, there was practically nobody involved in investing and they weren't very smart. Now almost everybody's smart. A good proportion of the people in investing are sucked into finance by the money. That's an important development. I don't welcome it at all."

1/16
Was reading upon #Biases & learnt a lot. Thought of sharing a few pointers .
Simply put Bias is a disproportionate weight in favour of or against any idea/thing in all aspects of life.
Few types of Biases ( out of the many) with not so random images. :)
+

2/16
The #DunningKruger effect now is fairly well known , wherein people with limited knowledge overestimate their competence, whilst the actually knowledgeable question themselves often .
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge".
+

3/16
*#SelfServingBias*
A very interesting bias wherein we credit our successes to purely ourselves, but when things go awry we cite luck & external forces .
Rings any bells?
Basically a defence mechanism to protect our self esteem & eventually from personal responsibility.

4/16
* #ConfirmationBias *
We all favour ideas & beliefs that affirm to our existing ones' , rarely being open to contradictory opinions .
(Especially in markets !! 😬) Why?

Laziness? Mental block? Ego ?
No wonder, Birds of a feather flock together ... 😉

5/16
* #SunkCostBias *
As we know, sunk costs are irrecoverable , regardless of outcomes. (Eg Money expended towards R&D for a molecule which doesn't work out)
But this actually extends in any investment we make - Time,Money, Effort, Relationships ...😏
Interesting right?

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:

1. Adopt a mindset for longevity

He focuses on variables that affect a business' durability.

Stuff like valuation doesn't matter if the business quality is misjudged.

Since a company's value is determined by its future cash flows...

Hence evaluating its future is key

2. Stay within your circle of competence

Allan is aware that his CoC is tiny!

Thus, he rarely buys companies that he:

• Hasn't researched
• Hasn't followed for at least a few years.

Because the best way to study a business is to observe its execution overtime.

3. Embrace volatility as a gift

Public markets offer you amazing deals you will never get in the private markets!

It's all about being patient.

The underlying value of a business is much more stable than the stock.

So you can buy great businesses that are mispriced!

4. Avoid noise and news

More information can give you a false sense of confidence.

It can create an illusion of "knowledge", and make you think many things are important.

The key is to know what are the 3-5 main variables in the company, and focus on those.

Ignore the rest.