Intelligent Investing is Value Investing
Charlie Munger at the 2000 Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting: All intelligent investing is value investing. You have to acquire more than you really pay for, and that’s a value judgment. But you can look for more than you’re paying for in a lot of different ways. You can use filters to sift the investment universe. […]
Fleeting and Impermanent
Buddhist teacher Pema Chodron writes in The Places That Scare You: a Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (2017): When I first heard this teaching it seemed academic and remote. But when I was encouraged to pay attention – to be curious about what was happening with my body and my mind – something shifted. […]
Turn Your Marketing Funnel Upside Down
Seth Godin presents a marketing lesson from the apocalypse: Too often marketers take a product and try to invent a campaign. Much more effective is to find a tribe, find a story and make a product that resonates, one that makes the story work. That’s the whole thing. A story that resonates and a tribe […]
The Tragedy of Richard Rainwater’s Incurable Brain Illness
Peter Elkind, Patricia Sellers, and Doris Burke comment about investor and Texas billionaire Richard Rainwater’s incurable brain illness in Fortune: PSP [Progressive Supranuclear Palsy] is a fast-moving, degenerative brain disease, with no treatment and no cure. The typical life expectancy from diagnosis: 4 1/2 years. “In the world I live in,” the doctor told Rainwater’s […]
The Real Impact of High Fees in Investing
Charlie Munger at the Daily Journal Meeting 2019: If you make 5% and pay two of it to your advisors, you’re not losing 40% of your future. You’re losing 90%. Because over a long period of time, that little difference causes a 90% disadvantage to you. So it’s hugely important for somebody who’s a long […]
Ryanair’s Michael O’Leary on Lufthansa and Virgin Atlantic Seeking Government Aid
Travel blogger Ben Schlappig, of One Mile at a Time, notes comments by Michael O’Leary, the outrageously funny and candid CEO of Ryanair. On Lufthansa applying for state aid, O’Leary said: Lufthansa is like a crack cocaine junkie looking for state aid. They’re already getting huge payroll support from the Germany government. What do you […]
Companies Seeking COVID-19 Bailouts Had Piles of Cash
The New York Times notes that several companies, including Boeing and YUM! Brands, poured years of cash piles into stock buybacks and dividends: These companies had been highly profitable in recent years, yet they were seeking help from the federal government. Where had all their money gone? Like much of corporate America, the restaurant chains […]
Raising Successful Children
Madeline Levine writes about the dangers of overparenting in The New York Times: Their research confirms what I’ve seen in more than 25 years of clinical work, treating children in Marin County, an affluent suburb of San Francisco. The happiest, most successful children have parents who do not do for them what they are capable […]
The Delusion of the Consciousness
In response to a grief-stricken father who reported that he’d lost a eleven-year-old son to polio, Albert Einstein wrote, A human being is part of the whole world, called by us “Universe,” a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical […]
Famous High School Dropouts
The Futility Closet notes, Cary Grant George Carlin Groucho Marx Hank Williams Herman Melville Humphrey Bogart Joe DiMaggio John Travolta Johnny Depp Keanu Reeves Kid Rock Kiefer Sutherland Neil Young Orville and Wilbur Wright Prince Quentin Tarantino Ray Charles Roy Rogers Tom Cruise William Faulkner Woody Guthrie