[WEEK 19/52]: The 14 Wisest Principles of Advice from Histories Best Investors of All Time
This took me months of collecting, and years of studying. These are the best quotes according to my investment philosophy as told by iconic capital allocators. Go.
“I don’t regret that I didn’t make more money, or become more known, or any of those things. I do regret that I didn’t wise up as fast as I could have.”
Let it sink in for a second. The man who helped build one of the greatest investment empires in history is not kicking himself over missed billions or missed headlines. He is kicking himself over missed wisdom. That is the whole game in one sentence.
Get rich slow, and in a way that prevents the risk of losing principle.
The TLDR is brutally simple for making good investments:
Margin of Safety.
Look hard, and say no.
But harder to do so, as most people don’t have the patience to get rich slow.
For investing, the number one thing I want burned into my brain when the market is screaming at me is this: you know nothing. Nobody does. If you ever feel 100 percent sure you are going the right direction, you have already failed the test. That is the discipline.
G.K. Chesterton nailed the feeling better than anyone: “The real trouble with this world of ours is not that it is an unreasonable world, nor even that it is a reasonable one. The commonest kind of trouble is that it is nearly reasonable, but not quite. Life is not an illogicality; yet it is a trap for logicians. It looks just a little more mathematical and regular than it is; its exactitude is obvious, but its inexactitude is hidden; its wildness lies in wait.”
That is the market in a single paragraph. It looks orderly until it bites you.
Nobody knows anything, including me. You know nothing. Nobody does. Everything is an opportunity. Everything is a risk. Everything is both.
True professional investing is not about predicting the future. It is about not losing money while the future unfolds, often in ways that make fools of us all. You go slow. You keep taking in new information. You adjust. You treat every hour like you are driving cross-country with no GPS, no map, and no idea what is around the next bend. You pull over. You ask directions. You listen. Then you drive again until the next thoughtful voice tells you something better.
Howard Marks said it with his usual calm clarity: “We never know where we’re going. But we better know where we are. Find your comfortable speedometer number out of 100, and try to be there as much as possible.”
I am just going to do the simple thing.
Warren Buffett put it even plainer: “Everyone has ideas here and there, usually the simplest is the best.”
David Swensen summed up the entire profession in one line: “Investment success follows most reliably from pursuing value-based strategies.”
But no, THERE IS ONLY ONE thing that matters most in investing. It is non-negotiable. Without it you are not an investor. You are a gambler. That thing is margin of safety.
This game will embarrass you right when you start thinking it is easy. Do not celebrate. Ever. The moment you feel too smart, too smooth, too certain, that is the exact moment the market is warming up its biggest punch. It is the calm before the storm. It is the pre-wave before the shock. It lulls you into complacency and then it destroys you.
We’ll dive into all 14 Principles, with extensive quote reference below.
But first…
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Hey, I’m Don! I’ve been building career memories for a decade. Over the last three years I’ve been reinvesting my own capital and time back it into my business. All the while learning and growing my net worth via public markets and crypto.
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Over that same period, I also hosted 50+ virtual events with some of the world’s best VC investors and founders for our CEO group. Prior to all that, aside from my first job at Meta, I was lucky enough to raise $10 million in my twenties; doing my best to learn business, investor relations, and the startup mindset all at the same time. Maybe some of you can relate.
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This year, I set the goal to publish a thoughtful blog every Monday.. 52 of them! Don’ Daily is a recap of the entrepreneurship adventures I collect, as well as the new lessons I’m constantly learning from doing. My hope is that this entertains, inspires, and influences new creative ideas for you. Every Monday. If you enjoy the blog, please share!
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14 Principles To Keep You In The Game
Here is where the ride gets fun, because these are not dry rules. These are battle-tested, often profane, sometimes hilarious truths from the people who actually survived the market’s worst moods.
Principle 1: Epistemic Humility – You Know Nothing, Stay Nimble
Any arrogant approach of thinking you know what is best for someone else is probably not a great idea.
Shit happens. You are not perfect. Roger Federer only won 54 percent of his points but 80 percent of his matches. The best just show up enough times to put themselves in position for the game-winners. Michael Jordan missed over 9,000 shots but made more than 25 game-winners. You have to get back up, keep grinding. Every 0.1 percent is an edge. You only need a tiny edge over 50/50 odds across a long enough period to become iconic.
Howard Marks was blunt: “Recognize that mistakes are inevitable. The important thing is that the investor recognizes a mistake quickly, accurately diagnoses its cause and does not repeat it.”
Don was even blunter: “Doing more of what works. Doing less of what didn’t work. Don’t sweat it, you fucked up, just start doing more of what works day by day. Write out a schedule of a week, each day doing more of what works. Just force yourself to do it. This is up to you. Nobody can save you.”
Howard Marks broke it down into three classic mistakes investors make. First, thinking you understand what the future holds. Second, assuming the world will stay exactly the way it is right now. Third, letting your emotions drive the bus instead of your checklist.
Peter Bernstein said it like a philosopher: “Essentially, risk says we don’t know what’s going to happen. We walk every moment into the unknown. There’s a range of outcomes, and we don’t know where the actual outcome is going to fall within that range. Often we don’t know what the range is. Aka. We know nothing. Stay nimble.”
Howard Marks again: “Forecasting is not valuable. We don’t know what’s gonna happen, and randomness will play a role.”
Keynes warned about the “dark forces of time and ignorance” that cloud the future and make even the most thoughtful estimates unreliable.
In markets you need two things, Marks said: “a view of what you think is going to happen, and a view on the probability that you are right.”
Charlie Munger’s famous line still stings: “If something is too hard, we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?”
Stay hyper-aware, but only of things that live in the easy bucket. If it is too hard, hyper-awareness will eat your entire life. Find the things that are not too hard and stay on top of those.
Principle 2: Get Rich SLOW – Do Not Lose Money, Leave Some on the Table
Make money equals raise money.
Jeff Bezos knew the math: long-term wealth always beats fast money.
Warren Buffett was crystal clear: “The philosophy requires patience. Which a lot of people don’t have. People would rather be promised they’ll win a lottery ticket next week than they’re going to get rich slowly. Be long term greedy, not short term greedy.”
Charlie Munger warned: “The desire to get rich fast is pretty dangerous.”
Buffett again: “You only have to do a very few things right in your life so long as you don’t do too many things wrong.”
Munger loved this one: “It is remarkable how much long-term advantage people like us have gotten by trying to be consistently not stupid, instead of trying to be intelligent.”
If all you ever did was buy high-quality stocks on the 200-week moving average, you would beat the S&P 500 by a large margin over time, Munger said. The problem is almost nobody has that discipline.
This deliberate slowness keeps you from spinning out around the corner you never saw coming.
Charlie Munger called the whole process: “Extreme patience combined with extreme decisiveness. You may call that our investment process. Yes, it’s that simple.”
Warren Buffett: “You have to make very, very few right investing decisions in your life.”
Munger again: “If you’re just not crazy, you have a big advantage over 95 percent of people. If you’re just consistently not crazy, you get a big advantage in life. It’s so simple. Why don’t more people do it?”
Buffett’s punch-card thought experiment is legendary: “Don’t risk what you have and need to get what you don’t have and don’t need. If everyone has a punch card with 20 punches. Each one was a major financial decision in your life. Everyone would be rich because they’d make damn sure those are good bets.”
Munger loved watching Buffett do nothing when there was nothing to do.
At Berkshire they tried to do less, not more. They never thought they could know everything. They just worked hard enough to find a few things where they were right, and that was enough.
Gradualism is a virtue in itself. Substantial uncertainty surrounds the asset allocation process, Graham reminded us.
Charlie Munger in 2018: “In America they call it long attention span. They can keep their mind on a game for a long time until they’ve solved it. The world is full of foolish gamblers and they will not do as well as the patient investor.”
Deciding to make radical changes based on shaky data is just putting too much weight on a shaky foundation.
Buffett again: “If you’ve got 150 IQ and you’re in my business, go sell 20 or 30 points to somebody else because you really don’t need it. You need emotional stability.”
“I’d rather be 100 times cautious than 1 percent too incautious.”
“Don’t swing at every pitch. Wait for yours.”
You should feel like you are moving so slowly that your own mind thinks you are moving too slow.
One of the hardest things in life is for a man to sit in a room and do nothing.
Larry’s version was shorter: Survive and advance.
Principle 3: Value Investing Discipline – Buy Below Fair Value, Then Be Patient
Warren Buffett: “Stocks sell at silly prices from time to time, that’s how I got rich.”
“People behave in extreme ways in markets. Over time, that’s very good for people who keep their heads.”
His greatest lesson: NEVER CHASE. If an exceptional company trades at insane prices, do not buy it. Wait for an exceptional company at a reasonable price. Then go all in. If you cannot find it, wait.
Howard Marks explained the real secret: “How do you make money as an investor? The people who don’t know think the way you do it is by buying good assets. Good building, stock in a good company. Something like that. That is not the secret for success. The secret for success in investing is buying things for less than they’re worth.”
I want to get paid MORE for my risk. Not less.
Buffett on the ideal business: “The ideal business is one that earns very high returns on capital and that keeps using lots of capital at those high returns. That becomes a compounding machine.”
“The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you’ve got a very good business. And if you have to have a prayer session before raising the price by 10 percent, then you’ve got a terrible business.”
“You can turn a good business into a bad investment if you pay too much for it.”
Common sense is the guiding light. Howard Marks again: “When you buy the S&P 500 at a 23x P/E, your 10-yr annualized return has always fallen between +2 percent and –2 percent, IN EVERY CASE, EVERY CASE!”
Principle 4: Anti-Momentum, Contrarian Behavior – Fish Where the Fish Are
Charlie Munger: “Fish where the fish are. You want to fish where the bargains are. It’s that simple. If the fishing is really lousy where you are, you should probably look for another place to fish. We all do better hunting when we hunt where the hunting is easy.”
Markets move to extremes. High prices for the popular. Low prices for the out-of-favor. That is where the money lives.
Pabrai: “Wall Street gets confused between risk and uncertainty. In fact, when Wall Street gets confused between the two is where the greatest opportunities arise.”
Jeremy Grantham: “Reversion to mean constitutes the most powerful force in financial markets.”
Buffett: “Innovator, then imitator, then idiot.”
Howard Marks: “The wise man does at the start what the fool does at the end.”
Scott Bessent: “The crowd is right 80-85 percent of the time. And that’s the momentum. But it’s when things turn, or you can imagine a different outcome, is when you can really make a lot of money. Most of my big successes have been taking the other side of a weak opinion.”
Larry Ellison: “You have to find errors in unconventional wisdom.”
Ben Horowitz: “Any fact anyone knows has a half life.”
Note to self: You are naturally contrarian, which means you are usually right at the opposite end of the cycle, but you are typically early. So move slowly in action, fast in thought. Maintain a long attention span. Write things down. Believe your gut and hold it.
Charlie Munger on formulas: “If you want a formula, you should go back to graduate school. They will give you lots of formulas that won’t work.”
Warren Buffett: “The stock market is the most obliging, money-making place in the world. Because you don’t have to trade. You can wait for a good deal. It’s a marvelous game. The rules are stacked in your favor.”
The Little Blue Book that Beats the Market described Mr. Market perfectly: On some days he is in a great mood and offers you way too much for your shares. Sell to him. On other days he is depressed and offers to sell you shares for far less than they are worth. Buy from him.
Contrarian behavior is at the heart of success, but human nature craves the safety of the crowd.
Phil Fisher: “Have the moral courage to act against the crowd when your judgment tells you that you are right.”
Declines sow the seeds of future purchases.
Buffett again: “When the price of a stock can be influenced by a herd on Wall Street with prices set at the margins by the most emotional persons, or the greediest, or the most depressed, it is hard to argue that the market always prices rationally. In fact, market prices are frequently nonsensical.”
The attractively priced, out-of-favor strategy beats the highly valued alternative every time.
Most investors feel safe in the mainstream. Only a rare few operate outside it consistently.
Charlie Munger: “A few, rare opportunities will come. You got to learn how to recognize them. Opportunity doesn’t come often, so seize it when it comes.”
In the face of overwhelming consensus, successful contrarians turn a deaf ear.
Establishing the position is only half the battle. The other half is not losing your nerve.
Travis Kalanack: “What separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
Principle 5: Simplicity – Keep It Simple, Never Sell Quality, Most Things Go in the Too-Hard Pile
Charlie Munger: “The big money is not in the buying and the selling, but in the waiting.”
Time does what timing cannot.
Warren Buffett: “The main thing to do is buy into a wonderful business and just sit there with it.”
Warren Buffett and Munger: “We leaned very much towards things where we felt certain to get a decent result, rather than where we were hopeful to get a brilliant result.”
Howard Marks on amateur tennis: “It’s like amateur tennis. It’s about not hitting losers, the winners don’t need to be hit. They just happen if you don’t hit losers. In tennis, if you’re pro you win by hitting winners. If you’re amateur you win by not hitting losers.”
There will always be more to learn than you can truly understand. Do your best turning over every stone you can.
Jensen on Musk: “The first is deletion.” Huang added: “He has the ability to question everything to the point where everything’s down to its minimal amount. Most engineers solve problems by adding. Musk solves them by subtracting. Every part. Every process. Every assumption that survived because no one had the nerve to kill it. He picks it up. Asks if it’s load-bearing. If the answer is anything less than absolutely, it is gone.”
Principle 6: Conviction and Sizing – Stick to Policy, Do Not Sell Quality
A thoughtful portfolio management process ensures funds only accept risks that match the targets and promise enough reward.
KNOW what you own. This becomes critical in downturns. And there will be downturns.
Peter Lynch: “If you can’t explain to an 11-year-old in a minute or less why you own a particular stock, you shouldn’t own it and should just buy a fund instead.”
You did all that work, so trust your gut.
Warren Buffett: “Big opportunities in life have to be seized. You won’t get many of them in your lifetime.”
Stanley Druckenmiller: “It’s not whether you’re right or wrong, it’s how much you make when you’re right and how much you lose when you’re wrong.”
MSFT CEO: “Be bold. But be right.”
David Swensen: “Most portfolios work well with around a half a dozen asset classes, but careful investors define asset classes in terms of risk function.”
“My advantage is not IQ. It’s ‘trigger pulling,’” said Stanley Druckenmiller.
Buffett: “The most extreme mistakes we’ve made are mistakes of omission. It’s the things I knew enough to do; they were within my circle of competence, and I was sucking my thumb.”
Brandon: “Be thoughtful that the things you know aren’t mainstream, and EACH person has a unique cocktail mix of information that stirs their drink. Your information is unique when combined with other unique info, hard earned, and generates an individual perspective. To what degree is the real question? And for how long until it becomes mainstream reality is the second.”
Charlie Munger: “I never allow myself to hold an opinion on anything that I don’t know the other side’s argument better than they do.”
CNBC Guest: “He who knows only his side, his side of the case, knows little of that.”
Charlie Munger: “The goal of investment is to find situations where it is safe not to diversify.”
Recognize that the investment universe contains very few truly outstanding companies, and opportunities to buy them occur very infrequently. Concentrate your attention and funds in the most desirable opportunities.
Charlie Munger: “We tend to go in heavily when a great investment opportunity presents itself. For many, many months, we were buying as much Coca-Cola as we could buy — roughly one-third of the volume trading every day for months. We were very aggressive.”
Buy with gusto when conditions are unfavorable or others misperceive true worth.
Charlie Munger: “Opportunities in life are going to be rare because that’s the nature of the human condition. The best and wisest are only going to get a few big opportunities — and you really have to step up to the pie counter and take a big helping when you get the chance.”
I buy when I know I should but I don’t want to. Much better than buying when I know I shouldn’t but I want to. That is value versus momentum.
“I’m only interested in investing if I have some sort of advantage. Which means I can’t do the conventional things. And if I have an advantage of 3 different things, that’s enough for any family,” Munger said.
Principle 7: Process Over Emotion – Checklists, Memos, Measured Iteration
Fast shortcuts create biases. Sloppy management follows.
Warren Buffett said that in 60 years at Berkshire, only 12 decisions moved the needle. That is one good idea every five years.
Checklists are not optional. They are how you survive.
“Act only after you have collected sufficient information and have thoroughly evaluated a situation,” Phil Fisher said.
Stanley Druckenmiller: “I’ve always loved to play games, and face it, investing is one big game. You need to be decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive.”
“Don’t be afraid to give up the good to go for the great,” John D. Rockefeller said.
Peter Lynch: “You look dumb in this business. You are terrific in this business if you are right 6.5 times out of 10. That’s a great score. Even if you are right 5 times out of 10, if you own Costco or Walmart or Nvidia that offsets your mistakes.”
Time is the friend of a wonderful business and the enemy of a lousy one.
Pabrai: “Quality over quantity in decision-making. Great investment opportunities are rare. Have your capital working in a reliable compounder like Berkshire, which combines reasonable returns and safety. Meanwhile, scan for more asymmetric opportunities for smaller investors.”
“The best time to buy stocks is when you don’t feel like buying,” Parag Parikh said.
Warren Buffett: “I would still be buying stocks even if World War III broke out.”
Buffett’s checklist is simple: businesses he understands, consistent profits, strong competitive advantages, trustworthy management, fair valuation. Avoid speculation. Focus on long-term value and patience.
Carter’s car story is the perfect framework. A good investment is one where you said no to a lot of offers and looked really hard. A bad investment is one where you did not look hard and said yes in the moment.
Principle 8: Independence and Freedom – Money for Free Time, Not Things
The ultimate success in investing is being able to sleep peacefully, do what you want, and feel relaxed. You need to know why you own something, both at the individual level and the portfolio level.
Warren Buffett: “You really want to go along with the idea that if you’re going to take a trip for 20 years, you wouldn’t feel bad leaving no orders with your broker, and you know when you come back it’s going to be a strong company. If it’s only going to be a great company for 3 years, it ain’t a great company. I think it’s better just to own them. They’re too hard to find. We could attempt to buy and sell, but they’re too hard to find. So to sit there and hope you buy them in the throes of some panic, I’m not sure that will be a great technique. You never get the full benefit of those extremes anyways. I think the main thing to do is find wonderful businesses.”
Waking up with no alarm is a real luxury.
“Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich, not because I wanted Ferraris. I wanted independence. I desperately wanted it,” Charlie Munger said.
Don was honest: “I made money not because I wanted to make money, but because I did not want to work. That’s why I wanted money, freedom from working. Freedom from my weekly community tasks. 100 percent full control over my time. So wanting money didn’t stem from wanting money, it stemmed from a pain in my life that I needed to solve. Wanting 100 percent of MY time to be MY time.”
At the bottom of a bear market you have to drag people to the altar to buy stocks. They will be cheap. That is where they make the most money. Ted Oakley said it best: at those moments you say this company will make X over the next five years, and if you had all the money in the world you would buy the whole company right now.
You have to pick winners and losers. Once you pick the winner you are okay.
Principle 9: FOMO versus FOME – Fear of Moving Early, Patience Over Impulsiveness
Have to be okay with missing things and sticking to policy. Dad said: “If you never own a CRM, then you never own a CRM, what can I tell ya. Like in real estate, don’t fall in love with your work. Don’t say to yourself ‘I did all this work on CRM, blah blah, but it isn’t hitting my price, I’ve got to make things happen.’ You can’t get sucked in. If you don’t buy it, or buy a little, and it goes up then oh well. There are 5K stocks, you’re looking at them every day, you’re finding them.”
Are we leaning risk on or risk off right now?
Warren Buffett: “I did miss the boat on tech stocks, but I don’t mind missing boats that I don’t know enough to captain. I don’t have to understand everything. I just have to be right about the things that I do.”
FOMO disappears when you remove time as a factor and make it infinite. There is plenty of time. Warren Buffett missed tech and still made 100 billion on Apple.
Have to be okay missing stuff and sticking to policy.
Principle 10: Momentum is a Feature – Be Prepared for Sudden Endings
Richard Bookstaber: “The general rule of thumb is that every financial market experiences one or more daily price moves of four standard deviations or more each year. And in any year, there is usually at least one market that has a daily move that is greater than ten standard deviations.”
Howard Marks: “96 percent of financial history has occurred over 2 standard deviations. But everything interesting has happened outside of 2 standard deviations.”
Since 1950 the average drawdown in the S&P 500 has been 14 percent in a calendar year. Drawdowns of at least 10 percent happened in 37 of the past 75 years. 20 percent plus corrections happened in 11 of those years. 30 percent plus in 4. You get one or two big opportunities per decade. You never know when they are coming. That is when the big money is made. The greatest opportunity is always at the depths of uncertainty.
Becky said the markets just had a significant decline. Buffett replied: “Not significant. I’m not in this to make 5 percent.”
Peter Lynch: “What you learn from history is that the market goes down. The market has had 50 declines of 10 percent or more, about once every two years, the market falls 10 percent. We call that a correction. Of those 50 declines, 15 have been 20 percent or more, a bear market. So every 6 years the markets are going to have a 20 percent decline. If you’re not ready for that, you shouldn’t own stocks. It’s good when that happens. And, no one knows when they’re going to happen. Take advantage of the volatility if you understand what you own. You have plenty of time. People are in an unbelievable rush to buy a stock.”
“We can’t always buy the stocks that go up. I wish we could. But obviously we can’t know. And the stocks that go up also go down. And they can go down ferociously, violently. And that’s a feature of stocks. Not a bug,” Chris Mayer said.
If an investor avoids the flavor of the month over and over but eventually gives in, it is usually at the exact peak of hype. That is when returns are minimal.
“Stocks are SAFE for the long run and very unsafe for tomorrow,” Warren Buffett said.
“The stock market will do whatever it has to do to embarrass the greatest number of people to the great extent possible,” Walter Deemer said. That is Deemer’s Law of Perversity.
Why did I lose? I sold too late. Or I sold quality and bought hype. You should be holding quality and selling hype on tight stop losses.
Principle 11: Circle of Competence – Only Act When You Have a Confirmed Edge
All intelligent people think primarily in terms of opportunity costs. Compare what you are doing with the best opportunity you have.
Since investing is fucking hard, look for the simple opportunities where you have a unique advantage.
Warren Buffett: “Peter Lynch has always said, ‘Buy a business that’s so good that any idiot can run it—because, sooner or later, one will.’ Well, we would like to buy a business like that and then we’d like a terrific guy running it.”
“The four most dangerous words in investing are: ‘This time it’s different,’” Sir John Templeton said.
Warren Buffett: “The goal is to own the best businesses in the world, and I want to own them for a very long time.”
Principle 12: Rebalancing and Portfolio Construction – Lean Against the Wind, Sell Winners to Buy Losers
Rebalancing is supremely rational. It forces you to sell what has done well to buy what has done poorly.
Once it goes in the portfolio, it goes in. You can put most of your assets in the fund and check back in 5 to 10 years. 50 to 60 names. Average name only 2 percent. Start new names at 1 percent. Add as confidence grows. Stop adding around 3 percent. Market appreciation does the rest. That was Bill Nygren.
You HAVE to be willing to leave money on the table. Leaving money on the table is a safely leveraged way to manage risk.
Disciplined investors use rebalancing to maintain targets, selling strength to buy weakness. David Swensen.
Beyond about 30 well-chosen stocks, diversification benefits plateau. Warren Buffett: “Diversification is protection against ignorance. It makes little sense if you know what you are doing.”
“Buy a stock the way you would buy a house. Understand and like it such that you’d be content to own it in the absence of any market,” Buffett said.
Your portfolio should have an appropriate number of assets. Small enough that commitments matter. Large enough that no single commitment matters too much.
What is rebalancing? It is the mechanism that keeps your risk level where you want it.
What is my rebalancing strategy? Equities versus cash. Warren Buffett in 1999: “You know that valuations are high by historic standards, you know that the level of speculation is high by any historic standard, and you know that that doesn’t go on forever. But you don’t know when it ends.”
Gosh I would love a 15 percent pullback. If there is ever a time when that statement is not true, you are probably over-invested or over-indexed.
Principle 13: Attention, Curiosity and Learning – Reading Is an Edge, Always Be Studying
Warren Buffett and Jamie Dimon read all day every morning. Being passionate enough to study, research, and read is a gift. Lean into curiosity.
Phil Fisher: “Read everything you can.”
Warren Buffett: “I have mainly learned by reading. I don’t think I have any original ideas. If you learn reasonably well from other people, you don’t have to get any new ideas or do much on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see.”
Buffett again: “I knew all the details of all these little companies that Charlie thought I’d never have heard of. I would find the equivalent of Moody’s manual, and I’d try to know everything about everything small. I would find something, and with $1M you could earn 50 percent per year. You need to be in love with the subject, not just in love with the money. People are successful in stocks because they just love looking for them. There’s certain people who just find it exciting to expand their knowledge in a given area. The human brain is complicated, but it does its best when you find out what your brain is really suited for.”
Carl Icahn: “But for people that make a lot of money, at least in business, or in any area, I think, the common denominator is an obsession, that they really are obsessed.”
Phil Knight: “Oneness – in some way, shape or form, it’s what every person I’ve ever met has been seeking.”
Brandon: “What might I have learned from paper trading? The feeling of missing out comes not from selling and losing money, but from not seeing an investment thesis or methodology through to the end, and then not knowing if it would’ve been bad or good, or apparently great.”
Principle 14: Art and Science, Subjective and Objective – Align Deep Research with Gut, Mind, and Vision
At the essence of investing is measured iteration. If you cannot analyze, you cannot understand.
If you can overthink the worst, why can’t you overthink the best?
Listen to the universe, not the markets. Before your two most frustrating down days, the red bird flew to you. You didn’t listen either time.
Big brain times little money times lot of time times exceptional insights.
Don: “IT CAN NEVER HURT TO REFLECT!”
A Thoughtful Ending
Benjamin Graham: “The ideal investment is one in which the future earnings are reasonably assured by established competitive position.”
When you are becoming a Buffett, you invest like Buffett. When you invest like Buffett, you are becoming Buffett.
Compound: 15 percent annualized is closer to 1/20th of a percent, 0.05 percent, each market day. Not half a percent. Half a percent daily would be enormous.
Enjoy life. And do not stop compounding once you start winning.
That is the whole ride. Uncomfortable. Unpredictable. Unapologetically slow. But if you can stay on it, the view at the end is worth every single awkward moment along the way.
I have to say Don, I don't miss a moment of Don's weekly 🔥