Charlie Munger on Delayed Gratification:

I've also got the money-sense gene. The first 13 years I practiced law, my income from practicing law was $300,000 total.

At the end of that 13 years, what did I have?

1/

@JDP223 @ekmokaya "The Snowball"

@dmuthuk In the words of the wise Charlie Munger:

"Envy is a really stupid sin because it's the only one you could never possibly have any fun at"

Ben Graham managed to compound money at 20%/year for 20 years at his partnership following a value investing strategy

In 1948 he acquired 50% stake in GEICO. It had to be distributed to his investors

They almost didn't make the investment due to some accounting questions 1/

Ben Graham paid $712,500 for 50% of GEICO in 1948. He put 25% of his investment assets in GEICO.

This investment did so well that the price of its shares advanced to two hundred times or more than the price of the half-interest by 1971/1972 2/

Ironically, the aggregate of profits accruing from this single investment decision far exceeded the sum of all the others realized through 20 years of operations in the partners specialized fields, involving much investigation, endless pondering&countless individual decisions 3/

Are there morals to this story of value to the intelligent investor?

An obvious one is that there are several different ways to make and keep money on Wall Street 4/

Another, not so obvious, is that one lucky break, or one supremely shrewd decision may count for more than a lifetime of journeyman efforts.

But behind the luck, or the crucial decision, there must usually exist a background of preparation and disciplines capacity. 5/

Smart-sounding reasons to sell as the market rose:

h/t @morganhousel

I couldn’t tweet a better description than the headline for this piece: After SolarWinds breach, lawmakers ask NSA for help in cracking Juniper cold case.

For those who haven’t heard this story, the context here is back in 2015 hackers broke into the source code repository of Juniper’s NetScreen firewalls and introduced serious vulnerabilities. 1/

Everyone has heard of the SolarWinds supply chain attack, but almost nobody outside our little community remembers Juniper. We don’t even know who the ultimate victim was. And there’s a reason for that. 2/

The reason is simple: following the Juniper hack, the FBI and Juniper put a tight lid on everything. Nobody, including members of Congress, were able to get straight answers about who did it or what the target was. So it vanished from our collective memory. 3/

This has real consequences. To some extent our lack of preparedness for SolarWinds is a direct result of our government’s decision to pretend that the previous major supply-chain attacks didn’t happen. 4/

I’ve often said that nothing is normal about Julian Assange’s case. Here’s my list of the top 10 least normal aspects, strictly on the logistical side of monitoring the extradition proceedings (this is not to mention the many substantive issues that are also far from normal).

1. The judge’s stubbornly persistent refusal to acknowledge that NGO observers are professionals and have an important role to play (separate to that of the general public) in ensuring open justice, and refusal to grant us access to be able to do our jobs properly.

2. The constantly shifting goal posts in gaining access to the public gallery, and arbitrary restrictions on numbers in all 3 courts where proceedings have been held. On any given day, it’s impossible to predict how many will be let in and when, necessitating very early queuing.

3. Receiving conflicting information from the court about remote access, including being accredited to the Cloud Video Platform and then having that access revoked in September. The same thing seems to have happened to us again for 4th January.

4. After unbelievable difficulty getting in, what we actually observed was a small screen on the other side of a large room. It was often impossible to tell who was who, and I could only follow properly as I had the lawyers’ voices memorised from February (when I could see them).