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I believe in the discipline of mastering the best that other people have ever figured out. I don’t believe in just sitting down and trying to dream it all up yourself. Nobody’s that smart.
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Charles T. Munger (Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
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Investing has the best results when you learn from nature.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (The Wealth Reference Guide: An American Classic)
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When unions get higher wages for their members by restricting entry into an occupation, those higher wages are at the expense of other workers who find their opportunities reduced. When government pays its employees higher wages, those higher wages are at the expense of the taxpayer. But when workers get higher wages and better working conditions through the free market, when they get raises by firm competing with one another for the best workers, by workers competing with one another for the best jobs, those higher wages are at nobody's expense. They can only come from higher productivity, greater capital investment, more widely diffused skills. The whole pie is bigger - there's more for the worker, but there's also more for the employer, the investor, the consumer, and even the tax collector.
That's the way the free market system distributes the fruits of economic progress among all people. That's the secret of the enormous improvements in the conditions of the working person over the past two centuries.
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Milton Friedman (Free to Choose: A Personal Statement)
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It’s not possible for investors to consistently outperform the market. Therefore you’re best served investing in a diversified portfolio of low-cost index funds [or exchange-traded funds].
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Charles T. Munger
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Large scale investing is best done by professional investors, not hobbyists.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
The Diminisher is a Micromanager who jumps in and out. The Multiplier is an Investor who gives others ownership and full accountability.
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Liz Wiseman (Multipliers, Revised and Updated: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter)
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The greatest investment you can make is in yourself. Invest in the resources and opportunities you need for you to be your best self. When you are your best self, and I am my best self, and everyone else is their best self…. Then everything else will be subsequently better. That’s some great ROI right there.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
“
This is how top investor Warren Buffett does things: “Each deal we measure against the second-best deal that is available at any given time—even if it means doing more of what we are already doing.
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Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly)
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Hold an index fund for 20 years or more, adding new money every month, and you are all but certain to outper-forms the vast majority of professional and individual investors alike. Late in his life, Graham praised index funds as the best choice for individual investors, as does Warren Buffett.6
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Predicting the stock market is really predicting how other investors will change estimates they are now making with all their best efforts. This means that, for a market forecaster to be right, the consensus of all others must be wrong and the forecaster must determine in which direction-up or down-the market will be moved by changes in the consensus of those same active investors.
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Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing)
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The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you’re beating the market but by whether you’ve put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go. In the end, what matters isn’t crossing the finish line before anybody else but just making sure that you do cross it.8
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The best entrepreneurs are not the best visionaries. The greatest entrepreneurs are incredible salespeople. They know how to tell an amazing story that will convince talent and investors to join in on the journey.
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Alejandro Cremades (The Art of Startup Fundraising)
“
As we said, even the best venture investors have a portfolio, but investors who understand the power law make as few investments as possible.
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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The ‘environment’ is not the gift of entrepreneurs, risk takers, or investors. It is the common, inherited property of humanity.
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Christopher Hitchens (The Quotable Hitchens from Alcohol to Zionism: The Very Best of Christopher Hitchens)
“
Negotiation is a fundamental skill for board members. Whether it's negotiating with management over strategic direction, with investors over funding terms, or with stakeholders over environmental impact, the ability to negotiate effectively is essential for achieving the best possible outcomes for all parties involved.
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Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr. (Board Room Blitz: Mastering the Art of Corporate Governance)
“
The best investors are visionaries—they look beyond the present.
By the same token, vision remains vision until you focus, do the work, and bring it down to earth where it will do some good.
”
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Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
“
Many amateurs believe that plants and animals reproduce on a one-way route toward perfection. Translating the idea in social terms, they believe that companies and organizations are, thanks to competition (and the discipline of the quarterly report), irreversibly heading toward betterment. The strongest will survive; the weakest will become extinct. As to investors and traders, they believe that by letting them compete, the best will prosper and the worst will go learn a new craft (like pumping gas or, sometimes, dentistry). Things are not as simple as that. We will ignore the basic misuse of Darwinian ideas in the fact that organizations do not reproduce like living members of nature—Darwinian ideas are about reproductive fitness, not about survival.
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Nassim Nicholas Taleb (Fooled by Randomness: The Hidden Role of Chance in Life and in the Markets (Incerto))
“
The key turning point in my investment management career came when I concluded that because the notion of market efficiency has relevance, I should limit my efforts to relatively inefficient markets where hard work and skill would pay off best.
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Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
“
The modern world needs more and more capital for development. The capital makers are doing their best to achieve this. They are using various ad-hocs to maintain the aura of this modernity along with the continue paddling to strive the better future for the existing as well as coming generations. Investors like Aman Mehndiratta have come forward, took the reins in their hands and have started investing in Impact Investments.
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Aman Mehndiratta (Aman Mehndiratta)
“
During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
“
You will never be allowed to buy the really good IPOs at the initial offering price. The hot IPOs are snapped up by the big institutional investors or the very best wealthy clients of the underwriting firm.
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Burton G. Malkiel (A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Time-Tested Strategy for Successful Investing)
“
The best ideas are those that create a new mind-set or sense a need before others do, and it takes an astute investor to recognize an idea that not only is ahead of its time but also has long-term prospects.
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Howard Schultz (Pour Your Heart Into It: How Starbucks Built a Company One Cup at a Time)
“
I'll put you wise. You remember the old top-liner in the copy book—"Honesty is the Best Policy"? That's it. I'm working honesty for a graft. I'm the only honest man in the republic. The government knows it; the people know it; the boodlers know it; the foreign investors know it. I make the government keep its faith. If a man is promised a job he gets it. If outside capital buys a concession it gets the goods. I run a monopoly of square dealing here. There's no competition. If Colonel Diogenes were to flash his lantern in this precinct he'd have my address inside of two minutes. There isn't big money in it, but it's a sure thing, and lets a man sleep of nights.
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O. Henry (Cabbages and Kings)
“
tiny differences matter in investing—a pursuit where small structural changes can add up to big differences in returns over time. Long-term compounding is an investor’s best friend, so why get in its way? There’s a huge benefit to getting these seemingly minor details
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Guy Spier (The Education of a Value Investor: My Transformative Quest for Wealth, Wisdom, and Enlightenment)
“
Graham taught his students and his readers that prices fluctuate more than value, because it is humans who set price, while businesses set value.
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
“
The best sponsors begin every relationship by being as interested about you as you are about them.
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Brian Burke (The Hands-Off Investor: An Insider’s Guide to Investing in Passive Real Estate Syndications)
“
You’ve gotta keep control of your time, and you can’t unless you say no. You can’t let people set your agenda in life.
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Paul (Warren Buffett: Best Quotes for Investor: Wake Up Your Inner Investor Soul)
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Money managers tend to make irrational decisions just to protect their calendar year performances, even if they believe that decision is not in the best interest of investors.
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Naved Abdali
“
Small plans at best yield small results, and big plans at worst beat small plans.
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Gary Keller (The Millionaire Real Estate Investor)
“
Exits are the best part of being an entrepreneur or investor. It’s when we get financially rewarded for all of the creativity, hard work, investment and risk we put into our companies.
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Basil Peters (Early Exits: Exit Strategies for Entrepreneurs and Angel Investors (But Maybe Not Venture Capitalists))
“
During this time I learned the most important rule of raising money privately: Look for a market of one. You only need one investor to say yes, so it’s best to ignore the other thirty who say “no.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
“
That's the way I look at our marriage. Yes, we're parents, uncles and aunties, friends and bosses, but at our core we're just two big kids doing our best to create a life for our kids that makes us proud.
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Scott Pape (The Barefoot Investor: The Only Money Guide You'll Ever Need)
“
Stocks are the things to own over time. Productivity will increase and stocks will increase with it. There are only a few things you can do wrong. One is to buy or sell at the wrong time. Paying high fees is the other way to get killed. The best way to avoid both of these is to buy a low-cost index fund, and buy it over time. Be greedy when others are fearful, and fearful when others are greedy, but don’t think you can outsmart the market. “If a cross-section of American industry is going to do well over time, then why try to pick the little beauties and think you can do better? Very few people should be active investors.
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Alice Schroeder (The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life)
“
The startup’s goal is to find a profitable customer acquisition strategy by spending small amounts of money in a lot of them, measuring results, and then narrowing down the best channels, while performing PDCA for continuous improvement.
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Francisco S. Homem De Mello (Hacking the Startup Investor Pitch: What Sequoia Capital’s business plan framework can teach you about building and pitching your company)
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A partner who is not subservient and who himself is extremely logical . . . is probably the best mechanism you can have.” Munger, the ideal foil, has shot down so many investment ideas that Buffett refers to him as “The Abominable No-Man.
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William P. Green (Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life)
“
Seen through the lens of human perception, cycles are often viewed as less symmetrical than they are. Negative price fluctuations are called “volatility,” while positive price fluctuations are called “profit.” Collapsing markets are called “selling panics,” while surges receive more benign descriptions (but I think they may best be seen as “buying panics”; see tech stocks in 1999, for example). Commentators talk about “investor capitulation” at the bottom of market cycles, while I also see capitulation at the top, when previously prudent investors throw in the towel and buy.
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Howard Marks (Mastering The Market Cycle: Getting the odds on your side)
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the function of the system of financial intermediation (banks and financial markets): to find the best possible uses for capital, such that each available unit of capital is invested where it is most productive (at the opposite ends of the earth, if need be) and pays the highest possible return to the investor.
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Thomas Piketty (Capital in the Twenty-First Century)
“
I believe that the key to success lies in knowing how to both strive for a lot and fail well. By failing well, I mean being able to experience painful failures that provide big learnings without failing badly enough to get knocked out of the game. This way of learning and improving has been best for me because of what I’m like and because of what I do. I’ve always had a bad rote memory and didn’t like following other people’s instructions, but I loved figuring out how things work for myself. I hated school because of my bad memory but when I was twelve I fell in love with trading the markets. To make money in the markets, one needs to be an independent thinker who bets against the consensus and is right. That’s because the consensus view is baked into the price. One is inevitably going to be painfully wrong a lot, so knowing how to do that well is critical to one’s success. To be a successful entrepreneur, the same is true: One also has to be an independent thinker who correctly bets against the consensus, which means being painfully wrong a fair amount. Since I was both an investor and an entrepreneur, I developed a healthy fear of being wrong and figured out an approach to decision making that would maximize my odds of being right.
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Ray Dalio (Principles: Life and Work)
“
To limit the time resource applied to any one company, he reminds himself of psychological research which suggests that in many contexts decisions are best made with no more than five to seven points of information. Any more information beyond that does not significantly improve decisions, and may even degrade them.
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Guy Thomas (Free Capital: How 12 private investors made millions in the stock market)
“
Investors often make the mistake of equating manager performance in a given year with manager skill. In some instances, more skilled managers will underperform because they refuse to participate in market bubbles. In fact, during market bubbles, the best performers are often the most imprudent rather than the most skilled managers.
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Jack D. Schwager (Hedge Fund Market Wizards: How Winning Traders Win)
“
When the game is no longer being played your way, it is only human to say the new approach is all wrong, bound to lead to trouble, etc. I have been scornful of such behavior by others in the past. I have also seen the penalties incurred by those who evaluate conditions as they were – not as they are. Essentially I am out of step with present conditions. On one point, however, I am clear. I will not abandon a previous approach whose logic I understand even though it may mean foregoing large, and apparently easy, profits to embrace an approach which I don't fully understand, have not practiced successfully and which, possibly, could lead to a substantial permanent loss of capital.6
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
“
When someone tells me they have a founder they want to introduce me to but they’re worried because the person is a wild card, I set that meeting up for the next day. Angel investors are looking for wild cards, because the best founders are typically inflexible and unmanageable, pursuing their visions at the expense of other people’s feelings.
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Jason Calacanis (Angel: How to Invest in Technology Startups—Timeless Advice from an Angel Investor Who Turned $100,000 into $100,000,000)
“
I like innovation. I like ideas. I like people and I like being part of winning teams. I don't gamble, I don't watch sports, I don't do any of those things. What I like to do is bet on people in the innovation business, so as soon as I had the capacity, that’s what I started doing as an individual—writing some small checks, and then some bigger checks.
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Josh Maher (Startup Wealth: How the Best Angel Investors Make Money in Startups)
“
Warren Buffett, chairman of Berkshire Hathaway and investor of legendary repute: "Most investors, both institutional and individual, will find that the best way to own common stocks is through an index fund that charges minimal fees. Those following this path are sure to beat the net results (after fees and expenses) delivered by the great majority of investment professionals.
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Taylor Larimore (The Bogleheads' Guide to Investing)
“
I do not believe in the power of brand names or in emulating
any of the brand name investors out there. It is a fact that all—if
not at least most—of the biggest names in American finance and
industry out there today have proven after the 2008 crisis to be some
of the most incompetent people there are. Starting with the untouchable
Goldman Sachs, who was bailed out by over $5 billion from
Warren Buffett, to AIG and Citibank, who were bailed out by the
hundreds of billions of dollars from the Troubled Asset Relief Program
(TARP), having a name and a history does not make you the brightest
and the best. All it takes is one nincompoop with a huge ego or a
board of directors who think they are smarter than everyone else to
destroy what has taken generations to build.
”
”
Ziad K. Abdelnour (Economic Warfare: Secrets of Wealth Creation in the Age of Welfare Politics)
“
. John Bonavia is one real estate entrepreneur who has worked hard to get a successful fortune in real estate. His plans and strategies have helped in getting the best deals to the desk along with attracting potential buyers for his properties. When we talk about the real estate market it is very important as a beginner or a previous investor to know which market you are investing in.
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john bonavia
“
Many security analysts still believe that agencies are a poor investment. Not so Warren Buffett, one of the most successful investors in the world. He has taken substantial positions in three publicly held agencies, and is quoted as saying, ‘The best business is a royalty on the growth of others, requiring very little capital itself … such as the top international advertising agencies.’ If
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David Ogilvy (Ogilvy on Advertising)
“
The best foundation for a successful investment—or a successful investment career—is value. You must have a good idea of what the thing you’re considering buying is worth. There are many components to this and many ways to look at it. To oversimplify, there’s cash on the books and the value of the tangible assets; the ability of the company or asset to generate cash; and the potential for these things to increase.
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Howard Marks (The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
“
Getting licensed was one of the best things we ever did for our business. My wife got her license right after our third rehab -- we were getting frustrated with our real estate agents and we felt as if we had very little control over our deals; I got my license several years later and currently we’re both licensed. Given our experiences, I couldn’t imagine being a full-time real estate investor and not having someone in our business who had their license.
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Jonathan Scott (The Book on Flipping Houses: How to Buy, Rehab, and Resell Residential Properties)
“
Bridge requires a continual effort to assess probabilities in at best marginally knowable situations, and players need to make hundreds of decisions in a single session, often balancing expected gains and losses. But players must also continually make peace with good decisions that lead to bad outcomes, both one’s own decisions and those of a partner. Just this peacemaking skill is required if one is to invest wisely in an unknowable world. —RICHARD ZECKHAUSER, 2006
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Tren Griffin (Charlie Munger: The Complete Investor (Columbia Business School Publishing))
“
By the fall of 1929, Livermore built up his biggest short position ever, $450 million spread across 100 stocks. And he was about to receive the biggest payday of his entire life. From October 25 through November 13, the Dow crashed 32%. In those 11 days, the Dow fell 5% seven times. Livermore covered all of his shorts and was worth $100 million, equivalent to $1.4 billion in today's dollars. He was one of the richest people in the world. This would be the height of his powers.
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
“
After three years, if the investment is still underwater, the cause is virtually always a misjudgment on the intrinsic value of the business or its critical value drivers. It could also be because intrinsic value has indeed declined over the years. Don’t hesitate to take a realized loss once three years have passed. Such losses are your best teachers to becoming a better investor. While it is always best to learn vicariously from the mistakes of others, the lessons that really stick are ones we’ve stumbled though ourselves.
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Mohnish Pabrai (The Dhandho Investor: The Low-Risk Value Method to High Returns)
“
Thinking about what might happen if we ran completely out of money—laying off all the employees that I’d so carefully selected and hired, losing all my investors’ money, jeopardizing all the customers who trusted us with their business—made it difficult to concentrate on the possibilities. Marc Andreessen attempted to cheer me up with a not-so-funny-at-the-time joke: Marc: “Do you know the best thing about startups?” Ben: “What?” Marc: “You only ever experience two emotions: euphoria and terror. And I find that lack of sleep enhances them both.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
“
Investor Howard Marks once talked about an investor whose annual results were never ranked in the top quartile, but over a fourteen-year period he was in the top 4 percent of all investors. If he keeps those mediocre returns up for another ten years he may be in the top 1 percent of his peers—one of the greatest of his generation despite being unremarkable in any given year…If you understand the math behind compounding you realize the most important question is not ‘How can I earn the highest returns?’ It’s ‘What are the best returns I can sustain for the longest period of time?
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Morgan Housel (Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes)
“
great. This is a good description of Rovio, which was around for six years and underwent layoffs before the “instant” success of the Angry Birds video game franchise. In the case of the Five Guys restaurant chain, the founders spent fifteen years tweaking their original handful of restaurants in Virginia, finding the right bun bakery, the right number of times to shake the french fries before serving, how best to assemble a burger, and where to source their potatoes before expanding nationwide. Most businesses require a complex network of relationships to function, and these relationships take time to build. In many instances you have to be around for a few years to receive consistent recognition. It takes time to develop connections with investors, suppliers, and vendors. And it takes time for staff and founders to gain effectiveness in their roles and become a strong team.* So, yes, the bar is high when you want to start a company. You’ll have the chance to work on something you own and care about from day to day. You’ll be 100 percent engaged and motivated, and doing something you believe in. You can lead an integrated life, as opposed to a compartmentalized one in which you play a role in an office and then try to forget about it when you get home. You can define an organization, not the other way around. But even if you quit your job, hunker down for years, work hard for uncertain reward, and ask everyone you know for help, there’s still a great chance that your new business will not succeed. Over 50 percent of companies fail within their first three years.2 There’s a quote I like from an unknown source: “Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t.
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Andrew Yang (Smart People Should Build Things: How to Restore Our Culture of Achievement, Build a Path for Entrepreneurs, and Create New Jobs in America)
“
The only way attackers can process invalid transactions is if they own over half of the compute power of the network, so it’s critical that no single entity ever exceeds 50 percent ownership. If they do, then they can perform what’s referred to as a 51 percent attack, in which they process invalid transactions. This involves spending money they don’t have and would ruin confidence in the cryptoasset. The best way to prevent this attack from happening is to have so many computers supporting the blockchain in a globally decentralized topography that no single entity could hope to buy enough computers to take majority share.
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Chris Burniske (Cryptoassets: The Innovative Investor's Guide to Bitcoin and Beyond)
“
The big question about how people behave is whether they’ve got an Inner Scorecard or an Outer Scorecard. It helps if you can be satisfied with an Inner Scorecard. I always pose it this way. I say: ‘Lookit. Would you rather be the world’s greatest lover, but have everyone think you’re the world’s worst lover? Or would you rather be the world’s worst lover but have everyone think you’re the world’s greatest lover?’ Now, that’s an interesting question. “Here’s another one. If the world couldn’t see your results, would you rather be thought of as the world’s greatest investor but in reality have the world’s worst record? Or be thought of as the world’s worst investor when you were actually the best? “In teaching your kids, I think the lesson they’re learning at a very, very early age is what their parents put the emphasis on. If all the emphasis is on what the world’s going to think about you, forgetting about how you really behave, you’ll wind up with an Outer Scorecard. Now, my dad: He was a hundred percent Inner Scorecard guy. “He was really a maverick. But he wasn’t a maverick for the sake of being a maverick. He just didn’t care what other people thought. My dad taught me how life should be lived. I’ve never seen anybody quite like him.
”
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Alice Schroeder (The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life)
“
Overall, more than fifty-nine thousand factories and production facilities were shut down all across America over the last decade, and employment in the core manufacturing sector fell from 17.1 million to 11.8 million from January 2001 to December 2011, a punishing toll for what historically had been the best sector for steady, good-paying middle-class jobs. By pursuing a deliberate strategy of continual layoffs and by holding down wages, both of which yielded higher profits for investors, business leaders were not only squeezing their employees, they were slowly strangling the middle-class consumer demand that the nation needed for the next economic expansion.
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Hedrick Smith (Who Stole the American Dream?)
“
HANDLE WITH CARE Expectations On 31 January 2006, Google announced its financial results for the final quarter of 2005. Revenue: up 97%. Net profit: up 82%. A record-breaking quarter. How did the stock market react to these phenomenal figures? In a matter of seconds, shares tumbled 16%. Trading had to be interrupted. When it resumed, the stock plunged another 15%. Absolute panic. One particularly desperate trader inquired on his blog: ‘What’s the best skyscraper to throw myself off?’ What had gone wrong? Wall Street analysts had anticipated even better results, and when those failed to materialise, $20 billion was slashed from the value of the media giant. Every investor
”
”
Rolf Dobelli (The Art of Thinking Clearly: The Secrets of Perfect Decision-Making)
“
People were indeed comfortable with sharing, Zuckerberg told him. A third of his users, he said, share their cell-phone numbers on their profile page. “That’s evidence that they trust us.” Graham was startled at how emotionless and hesitant this kid was. At times, before he’d answer a question—even something that he must have been asked thousands of times, like what percentage of Harvard kids were on Thefacebook—he would fall silent, staring into the ether for thirty seconds or so. Does he not understand the question? Graham wondered. Did I offend him? Nonetheless, before the meeting was over, Graham became convinced that Thefacebook was the best business idea he’d heard in years, and told Zuckerberg and Parker that if they wanted an investor who was not a VC, the Post would be interested.
”
”
Steven Levy (Facebook: The Inside Story)
“
After all, no big business idea makes sense at first. I mean, just imagine proposing the following ideas to a group of sceptical investors: ‘What people want is a really cool vacuum cleaner.’ (Dyson) ‘. . . and the best part of all this is that people will write the entire thing for free!’ (Wikipedia) ‘. . . and so I confidently predict that the great enduring fashion of the next century will be a coarse, uncomfortable fabric which fades unpleasantly and which takes ages to dry. To date, it has been largely popular with indigent labourers.’ (Jeans) ‘. . . and people will be forced to choose between three or four items.’ (McDonald’s) ‘And, best of all, the drink has a taste which consumers say they hate.’ (Red Bull) ‘. . . and just watch as perfectly sane people pay $5 for a drink they can make at home for a few pence.’ (Starbucks)*
”
”
Rory Sutherland (Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life)
“
If you listen to financial TV, or read most market columnists, you’d think that investing is some kind of sport, or a war, or a struggle for survival in a hostile wilderness. But investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game. The challenge for the intelligent investor is not to find the stocks that will go up the most and down the least, but rather to prevent yourself from being your own worst enemy—from buying high just because Mr. Market says “Buy!” and from selling low just because Mr. Market says “Sell!” If your investment horizon is long—at least 25 or 30 years—there is only one sensible approach: Buy every month, automatically, and whenever else you can spare some money. The single best choice for this lifelong holding is a total stock-market index fund. Sell only when you need the cash
”
”
Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
“
The first concerns how an investor should choose among different types of broad-based index funds. The best-known of the broad stock market mutual funds and ETFs in the United States track the S&P 500 index of the largest stocks. We prefer using a broader index that includes more smaller-company stocks, such as the Russell 3000 index or the Dow-Wilshire 5000 index. Funds that track these broader indexes are often referred to as “total stock market” index funds. More than 80 years of stock market history confirm that portfolios of smaller stocks have produced a higher rate of return than the return of the S&P 500 large-company index. While smaller companies are undoubtedly less stable and riskier than large firms, they are likely—on average—to produce somewhat higher future returns. Total stock market index funds are the better way for investors to benefit from the long-run growth of economic activity.
”
”
Burton G. Malkiel (The Elements of Investing: Easy Lessons for Every Investor)
“
The Art of Subtraction If there is one habit that all of the investors in this chapter have in common, it’s this: They focus almost exclusively on what they’re best at and what matters most to them. Their success derives from this fierce insistence on concentrating deeply in a relatively narrow area while disregarding countless distractions that could interfere with their pursuit of excellence. Jason Zweig, an old friend who is a personal finance columnist at the Wall Street Journal and the editor of a revised edition of The Intelligent Investor, once wrote to me, “Think of Munger and Miller and Buffett: guys who just won’t spend a minute of time or an iota of mental energy doing or thinking about anything that doesn’t make them better. . . . Their skill is self-honesty. They don’t lie to themselves about what they are and aren’t good at. Being honest with yourself like that has to be part of the secret. It’s so hard and so painful to do, but so important.
”
”
William P. Green (Richer, Wiser, Happier: How the World's Greatest Investors Win in Markets and Life)
“
even. By the time things were done, I was exhausted and depressed and just really, really unhappy. We all were. But it didn’t have to be that way. That experience taught me to take agency in my own professional narratives, and that endings don’t have to be failures, especially when you choose to end a project or shut down a business. Shortly after the restaurant closed, I started a food market as a small side project, and it ended up being wildly successful. I had more press and customers than I could handle. I had investors clamoring to get in on the action. But all I wanted to do was write. I didn’t want to run a food market, and since my name was all over it, I didn’t want to hand it off to anyone else, either. So I chose to close the market on my own terms, and I made sure that everyone knew it. It was such a positive contrast to the harsh experience of closing the restaurant. I’ve learned to envision the ideal end to any project before I begin it now—even the best gigs don’t last forever. Nor should they.
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Timothy Ferriss (Tribe Of Mentors: Short Life Advice from the Best in the World)
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You often find this difference between different types of investors. Some will tell you that all the value is in driving down the price you pay as low as possible. These investors revel in the transaction itself, in playing with the deal terms, in beating up their opponent at the negotiating table. That has always seemed short term to me. What that thinking ignores is all the value you can realize once you own an asset: the improvements you can make, the refinancing you can do to improve your returns, the timing of your sale to make the most of a rising market. If you waste all your energy and goodwill in pursuit of the lowest possible purchase price and end up losing the asset to a higher bidder, all that future value goes away. Sometimes it’s best to pay what you have to pay and focus on what you can then do as an owner. The returns to successful ownership will often be much higher than the returns on winning a one-off battle over price. At the price I suggested, I calculated that we would lock in a 16 percent annual yield.
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Stephen A. Schwarzman (What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence)
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The Keynesian world is a world in which there are two distinct classes of actors: the skilled investor, ‘who, unperturbed by the prevailing pastime, continues to purchase investments on the best genuine long-term expectations he can frame’, and, on the other hand, the ignorant ‘game-player’. It does not seem to have occurred to Keynes that either of these two may learn from the other, and that, in particular, company directors and even the managers of investment trusts may be the wiser for learning from the market what it thinks about their actions. In this Keynesian world the managers and directors already know all about the future and have little to gain by devoting their attention to the misera plebs of the market. In fact, Keynes strongly feels that they should not! This pseudo-Platonic view of the world of high finance forms, we feel, an essential part of what Schumpeter called the ‘Keynesian vision’. This view ignores progress through exchange of knowledge because the ones know all there is to be known whilst the others never learn anything.
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Ludwig Lachmann (Capital and Its Structure (Studies in economic theory))
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Chang came in five minutes later, in the same jeans but a fresh T-shirt, her hair still inky with water from the shower. Her own jacket was pulled down on one side, by her own Smith. Like any ex-cop she looked around, the full 360, seven or eight separate snapshots, and then she moved through the room with plenty of energy, powered by what looked like enthusiasm, or maybe some kind of shared euphoria at their mutual survival through the night. She slid in alongside him. He said, “Did you sleep?” She said, “I must have. I didn’t think I was going to.” “You didn’t go meet the train.” “He’s a prisoner, according to you. And that’s the best-case scenario.” “I’m only guessing.” “It’s a reasonable assumption.” “Did you see the woman in 203?” “I thought she was hard to explain. Dressed in black, she could have been an investor or a fund manager or something else deserving of the junior executive routine. Her face and hair were right. And she has a key to the company gym. That’s for sure. But dressed in white? She looked like she was going to a garden party in Monte Carlo. At seven o’clock in the morning. Who does that?” “Is it a fashion thing? Someone’s idea of summer clothes?” “I sincerely hope not.
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Lee Child (Make Me (Jack Reacher, #20))
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When Joe and I went to meet Goldman’s real estate team, though, we found they had a different view of the risks of this deal. Goldman wanted to bid as low as possible to avoid overpaying. For me, the biggest risk was not offering enough and missing out on a tremendous opportunity. I wanted to make sure we beat Bankers Trust’s expected bid. You often find this difference between different types of investors. Some will tell you that all the value is in driving down the price you pay as low as possible. These investors revel in the transaction itself, in playing with the deal terms, in beating up their opponent at the negotiating table. That has always seemed short term to me. What that thinking ignores is all the value you can realize once you own an asset: the improvements you can make, the refinancing you can do to improve your returns, the timing of your sale to make the most of a rising market. If you waste all your energy and goodwill in pursuit of the lowest possible purchase price and end up losing the asset to a higher bidder, all that future value goes away. Sometimes it’s best to pay what you have to pay and focus on what you can then do as an owner. The returns to successful ownership will often be much higher than the returns on winning a one-off battle over price.
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Stephen A. Schwarzman (What It Takes: Lessons in the Pursuit of Excellence)
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The VCs were prolific. They talked like nobody I knew. Sometimes they talked their own book, but most days, they talked Ideas: how to foment enlightenment, how to apply microeconomic theories to complex social problems. The future of media and the decline of higher ed; cultural stagnation and the builder’s mind-set. They talked about how to find a good heuristic for generating more ideas, presumably to have more things to talk about. Despite their feverish advocacy of open markets, deregulation, and continuous innovation, the venture class could not be relied upon for nuanced defenses of capitalism. They sniped about the structural hypocrisy of criticizing capitalism from a smartphone, as if defending capitalism from a smartphone were not grotesque. They saw the world through a kaleidoscope of startups: If you want to eliminate economic inequality, the most effective way to do it would be to outlaw starting your own company, wrote the founder of the seed accelerator. Every vocal anti-capitalist person I’ve met is a failed entrepreneur, opined an angel investor. The SF Bay Area is like Rome or Athens in antiquity, posted a VC. Send your best scholars, learn from the masters and meet the other most eminent people in your generation, and then return home with the knowledge and networks you need. Did they know people could see them?
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Anna Wiener (Uncanny Valley)
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What’s an IPO, exactly? A company decides it wants to “float” part of its equity on the public markets, allowing employees and founders to sell private shares to pay them off for years of service, as well as sell shares out of the corporate treasury to have some money in the bank. Large investment banks (such as my former employer Goldman Sachs) form what’s called a “syndicate” (“mafia” might be a better term) wherein they offer to effectively buy those shares from Facebook, and then sell them into the capital markets, usually by pushing it via their sales force onto wealthy clients or institutional investors. That syndicate either guarantees a price (“firm commitment”) or promises to get the best price it can (“best effort”). In the former case, the bank is taking real execution risk, and stands to lose money if it doesn’t engineer a “pop” in the stock on opening day. To mitigate the risk, the bank convinces the offering company to expect a lower price, while simultaneously jacking up what real price the market will bear with a zealous sales pitch to the market’s deepest pockets. Thus, it is absolutely jejune to think that a stock’s rise on opening day is due to clamoring and unexpected interest. Similar to Captain Renault in Casablanca, Wall Street bankers are shocked—shocked!—that there should be such a large and positive price dislocation in the market they just rigged.
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Antonio García Martínez (Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley)
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Buffett declared the best inflation hedge is a company with a wonderful product that requires little capital to grow. As a test, he invited each of us to look at our own earning ability. In inflation, your compensation can go up without any additional investment. As a business example, Buffett noted that when See’s Candy was purchased in 1971, it had the revenues of $25 million and sold 16 million pounds of candy annually with $9 million in tangible assets. Today, See’s sells $300 million of candy with $40 million of tangible assets. Berkshire needed to invest only $31 million to generate a more than 10-fold increase in revenues. In aggregate, Buffett noted that Berkshire has earned $1.5 billion in profits at See’s over the years. See’s inventory turns fast, has no receivables and has little fixed investment – a perfect inflation hedge. Buffett allowed that if you have tons of receivables and inventory, that’s a lousy business in inflation. The railroad and MidAmerican Energy both have these undesirable characteristics, but that is offset by their utility to the economy and subsequent allowable returns. Buffett rued that there simply aren’t enough “See’s Candys” to buy. Buffett added that being an investor has made him a better businessman and that being a businessman has made him a better investor.(125) Munger noted that they didn’t always know this inflation-business element, which shows how continuous learning is so important.
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Daniel Pecaut (University of Berkshire Hathaway: 30 Years of Lessons Learned from Warren Buffett & Charlie Munger at the Annual Shareholders Meeting)
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Cohen continued to struggle with his own well-being. Even though he had achieved his life’s dream of running his own firm, he was still unhappy, and he had become dependent on a psychiatrist named Ari Kiev to help him manage his moods. In addition to treating depression, Kiev’s other area of expertise was success and how to achieve it. He had worked as a psychiatrist and coach with Olympic basketball players and rowers trying to improve their performance and overcome their fear of failure. His background building athletic champions appealed to Cohen’s unrelenting need to dominate in every transaction he entered into, and he started asking Kiev to spend entire days at SAC’s offices, tending to his staff. Kiev was tall, with a bushy mustache and a portly midsection, and he would often appear silently at a trader’s side and ask him how he was feeling. Sometimes the trader would be so startled to see Kiev there he’d practically jump out of his seat. Cohen asked Kiev to give motivational speeches to his employees, to help them get over their anxieties about losing money. Basically, Kiev was there to teach them to be ruthless. Once a week, after the market closed, Cohen’s traders would gather in a conference room and Kiev would lead them through group therapy sessions focused on how to make them more comfortable with risk. Kiev had them talk about their trades and try to understand why some had gone well and others hadn’t. “Are you really motivated to make as much money as you can? This guy’s going to help you become a real killer at it,” was how one skeptical staff member remembered Kiev being pitched to them. Kiev’s work with Olympians had led him to believe that the thing that blocked most people was fear. You might have two investors with the same amount of money: One was prepared to buy 250,000 shares of a stock they liked, while the other wasn’t. Why? Kiev believed that the reluctance was a form of anxiety—and that it could be overcome with proper treatment. Kiev would ask the traders to close their eyes and visualize themselves making trades and generating profits. “Surrendering to the moment” and “speaking the truth” were some of his favorite phrases. “Why weren’t you bigger in the trades that worked? What did you do right?” he’d ask. “Being preoccupied with not losing interferes with winning,” he would say. “Trading not to lose is not a good strategy. You need to trade to win.” Many of the traders hated the group therapy sessions. Some considered Kiev a fraud. “Ari was very aggressive,” said one. “He liked money.” Patricia, Cohen’s first wife, was suspicious of Kiev’s motives and believed that he was using his sessions with Cohen to find stock tips. From Kiev’s perspective, he found the perfect client in Cohen, a patient with unlimited resources who could pay enormous fees and whose reputation as one of the best traders on Wall Street could help Kiev realize his own goal of becoming a bestselling author. Being able to say that you were the
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Sheelah Kolhatkar (Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street)
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There is no reason at all for thinking that the average intelligent investor, even with much devoted effort, can derive better results over the years from the purchase of growth stocks than the investment companies specializing in this area. Surely these organizations have more brains and better research facilities at their disposal than you do. Consequently we should advise against the usual type of growth-stock commitment for the enterprising investor.* This is one in which the excellent prospects are fully recognized in the market and already reflected in a current price-earnings ratio of, say, higher than 20. (For the defensive investor we suggested an upper limit of purchase price at 25 times average earnings of the past seven years. The two criteria would be about equivalent in most cases.)† The striking thing about growth stocks as a class is their tendency toward wide swings in market price. This is true of the largest and longest-established companies—such as General Electric and International Business Machines—and even more so of newer and smaller successful companies. They illustrate our thesis that the main characteristic of the stock market since 1949 has been the injection of a highly speculative element into the shares of companies which have scored the most brilliant successes, and which themselves would be entitled to a high investment rating. (Their credit standing is of the best, and they pay the lowest interest rates on their borrowings.) The investment caliber of such a company may not change over a long span of years, but the risk characteristics of its stock will depend on what happens to it in the stock market. The more enthusiastic the public grows about it, and the faster its advance as compared with the actual growth in its earnings, the riskier a proposition it becomes.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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In an ideal world, the intelligent investor would hold stocks only when they are cheap and sell them when they become overpriced, then duck into the bunker of bonds and cash until stocks again become cheap enough to buy. From 1966 through late 2001, one study claimed, $1 held continuously in stocks would have grown to $11.71. But if you had gotten out of stocks right before the five worst days of each year, your original $1 would have grown to $987.12.1 Like most magical market ideas, this one is based on sleight of hand. How, exactly, would you (or anyone) figure out which days will be the worst days—before they arrive? On January 7, 1973, the New York Times featured an interview with one of the nation’s top financial forecasters, who urged investors to buy stocks without hesitation: “It’s very rare that you can be as unqualifiedly bullish as you can now.” That forecaster was named Alan Greenspan, and it’s very rare that anyone has ever been so unqualifiedly wrong as the future Federal Reserve chairman was that day: 1973 and 1974 turned out to be the worst years for economic growth and the stock market since the Great Depression.2 Can professionals time the market any better than Alan Green-span? “I see no reason not to think the majority of the decline is behind us,” declared Kate Leary Lee, president of the market-timing firm of R. M. Leary & Co., on December 3, 2001. “This is when you want to be in the market,” she added, predicting that stocks “look good” for the first quarter of 2002.3 Over the next three months, stocks earned a measly 0.28% return, underperforming cash by 1.5 percentage points. Leary is not alone. A study by two finance professors at Duke University found that if you had followed the recommendations of the best 10% of all market-timing newsletters, you would have earned a 12.6% annualized return from 1991 through 1995. But if you had ignored them and kept your money in a stock index fund, you would have earned 16.4%.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The Princeton economist and wine lover Orley Ashenfelter has offered a compelling demonstration of the power of simple statistics to outdo world-renowned experts. Ashenfelter wanted to predict the future value of fine Bordeaux wines from information available in the year they are made. The question is important because fine wines take years to reach their peak quality, and the prices of mature wines from the same vineyard vary dramatically across different vintages; bottles filled only twelve months apart can differ in value by a factor of 10 or more. An ability to forecast future prices is of substantial value, because investors buy wine, like art, in the anticipation that its value will appreciate. It is generally agreed that the effect of vintage can be due only to variations in the weather during the grape-growing season. The best wines are produced when the summer is warm and dry, which makes the Bordeaux wine industry a likely beneficiary of global warming. The industry is also helped by wet springs, which increase quantity without much effect on quality. Ashenfelter converted that conventional knowledge into a statistical formula that predicts the price of a wine—for a particular property and at a particular age—by three features of the weather: the average temperature over the summer growing season, the amount of rain at harvest-time, and the total rainfall during the previous winter. His formula provides accurate price forecasts years and even decades into the future. Indeed, his formula forecasts future prices much more accurately than the current prices of young wines do. This new example of a “Meehl pattern” challenges the abilities of the experts whose opinions help shape the early price. It also challenges economic theory, according to which prices should reflect all the available information, including the weather. Ashenfelter’s formula is extremely accurate—the correlation between his predictions and actual prices is above .90.
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Daniel Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow)
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”
Asa Yoneda
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WHY DIVERSIFY? During the bull market of the 1990s, one of the most common criticisms of diversification was that it lowers your potential for high returns. After all, if you could identify the next Microsoft, wouldn’t it make sense for you to put all your eggs into that one basket? Well, sure. As the humorist Will Rogers once said, “Don’t gamble. Take all your savings and buy some good stock and hold it till it goes up, then sell it. If it don’t go up, don’t buy it.” However, as Rogers knew, 20/20 foresight is not a gift granted to most investors. No matter how confident we feel, there’s no way to find out whether a stock will go up until after we buy it. Therefore, the stock you think is “the next Microsoft” may well turn out to be the next MicroStrategy instead. (That former market star went from $3,130 per share in March 2000 to $15.10 at year-end 2002, an apocalyptic loss of 99.5%).1 Keeping your money spread across many stocks and industries is the only reliable insurance against the risk of being wrong. But diversification doesn’t just minimize your odds of being wrong. It also maximizes your chances of being right. Over long periods of time, a handful of stocks turn into “superstocks” that go up 10,000% or more. Money Magazine identified the 30 best-performing stocks over the 30 years ending in 2002—and, even with 20/20 hindsight, the list is startlingly unpredictable. Rather than lots of technology or health-care stocks, it includes Southwest Airlines, Worthington Steel, Dollar General discount stores, and snuff-tobacco maker UST Inc.2 If you think you would have been willing to bet big on any of those stocks back in 1972, you are kidding yourself. Think of it this way: In the huge market haystack, only a few needles ever go on to generate truly gigantic gains. The more of the haystack you own, the higher the odds go that you will end up finding at least one of those needles. By owning the entire haystack (ideally through an index fund that tracks the total U.S. stock market) you can be sure to find every needle, thus capturing the returns of all the superstocks. Especially if you are a defensive investor, why look for the needles when you can own the whole haystack?
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The captain?
Sophia stood staring numbly after him. Had he just said he’d introduce her to the captain? Of someone else was the captain, then who on earth was this man?
One thing was clear. Whoever he was, he had her trunks.
And he was walking away.
Cursing under her breath, Sophia picked up her skirts and trotted after him, dodging boatmen and barrels and coils of tarred rope as she pursued him down the quay. A forest of tall masts loomed overhead, striping the dock with shadow.
Breathless, she regained his side just as he neared the dock’s edge. “But…aren’t you Captain Grayson?”
“I,” he said, pitching her smaller trunk into a waiting rowboat, “am Mr. Grayson, owner of the Aphrodite and principle investor in her cargo.”
The owner. Well, that was some relief. The tavern-keeper must have been confused.
The porter deposited her larger truck alongside the first, and Mr. Grayson dismissed him with a word and a coin. He plunked one polished Hessian on the rowboat’s seat and shifted his weight to it, straddling the gap between boat and dock. Hand outstretched, he beckoned her with an impatient twitch of his fingers. “Miss Turner?”
Sophia inched closer to the dock’s edge and reached one gloved hand toward his, considering how best to board the bobbing craft without losing her dignity overboard.
The moment her fingers grazed his palm, his grin tightened over her hand. He pulled swiftly, wrenching her feet from the dock and a gasp from her throat. A moment of weightlessness-and then she was aboard. Somehow his arm had whipped around her waist, binding her to his solid chest. He released her just as quickly, but a lilt of the rowboat pitched Sophia back into his arms.
“Steady there,” he murmured through a small smile. “I have you.”
A sudden gust of wind absconded with his hat. He took no notice, but Sophia did. She noticed everything. Never in her life had she felt so acutely aware. Her nerves were draw taut as harp strings, and her senses hummed.
The man radiated heat. From exertion, most likely. Or perhaps from a sheer surplus of simmering male vigor. The air around them was cold, but he was hot. And as he held her tight against his chest, Sophia felt that delicious, enticing heat burn through every layer of her clothing-cloak, gown, stays, chemise, petticoat, stockings, drawers-igniting desire in her belly.
And sparking a flare of alarm. This was a precarious position indeed. The further her torso melted into his, the more certainly he would detect her secret: the cold, hard bundle of notes and coin lashed beneath her stays.
She pushed away from him, dropping onto the seat and crossing her arms over her chest. Behind him, the breeze dropped his hat into a foamy eddy. He still hadn’t noticed its loss.
What he noticed was her gesture of modesty, and he gave her a patronizing smile. “Don’t concern yourself, Miss Turner. You’ve nothing in there I haven’t seen before.”
Just for that, she would not tell him. Farewell, hat.
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Tessa Dare (Surrender of a Siren (The Wanton Dairymaid Trilogy, #2))
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A master piece with a use of fullness !!! Artist & writer / designer .Best Selling rated book selected at worldwide publisher.inc (www.xlibris.com), art buyer ,book readers, investors , exhibitionest & interior homes must read / faboulse comments today..
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Andre Pace
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Today I address professionals, business leaders and researchers on how they can contribute with innovative ideas to achieve these ten pillars. These are as follows: 1) A nation where the rural and urban divide has reduced to a thin line. 2) A nation where there is equitable distribution and adequate access to energy and quality water. 3) A nation where agriculture, industry and the service sector work together in symphony. 4) A nation where education with value systems is not denied to any meritorious candidates because of societal or economic discrimination. 5) A nation which is the best destination for the most talented scholars, scientists and investors. 6) A nation where the best of healthcare is available to all. 7) A nation where the governance is responsive, transparent and corruption free. 8) A nation where poverty has been totally eradicated, illiteracy removed and crimes against women and children are absent and no one in the society feels alienated. 9) A nation that is prosperous, healthy, secure, peaceful and happy and follows a sustainable growth path. 10) A nation that is one of the best places to live in and is proud of its leadership.
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A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
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As we thought about what would make us both better and different, two core ideas greatly influenced our thinking: First, technical founders are the best people to run technology companies. All of the long-lasting technology companies that we admired—Hewlett-Packard, Intel, Amazon, Apple, Google, Facebook—had been run by their founders. More specifically, the innovator was running the company. Second, it was incredibly difficult for technical founders to learn to become CEOs while building their companies. I was a testament to that. But, most venture capital firms were better designed to replace the founder than to help the founder grow and succeed. Marc and I thought that if we created a firm specifically designed to help technical founders run their own companies, we could develop a reputation and a brand that might vault us into the top tier of venture capital firms despite having no track record. We identified two key deficits that a founder CEO had when compared with a professional CEO: 1. The CEO skill set Managing executives, organizational design, running sales organizations and the like were all important skills that technical founders lacked. 2. The CEO network Professional CEOs knew lots of executives, potential customers and partners, people in the press, investors, and other important business connections. Technical founders, on the other hand, knew some good engineers and how to program.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Dimon was in his best Warren Buffett–inspired investor communication style: full, open disclosure, underscoring the risks involved, but also articulating the philosophy and reasons behind his decisions.
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Patricia Crisafulli (The House of Dimon: How JPMorgan's Jamie Dimon Rose to the Top of the Financial World)
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Recently, a large company offered to buy one of our portfolio companies. The deal was lucrative and compelling given the portfolio company’s progress to date and revenue level. The founder/CEO (I’ll call him Hamlet—not his real name) thought that selling did not make sense due to the giant market opportunity that he was pursuing, but he still wanted to make sure that he made the best possible choice for investors and employees. Hamlet wanted to reject the offer, but only marginally. To complicate matters, most of the management team and the board thought the opposite. It did not help that the board and the management team were far more experienced than Hamlet. As a result, Hamlet spent many sleepless nights worrying about whether he was right. He realized that it was impossible to know. This did not help him sleep. In the end, Hamlet made the best and most courageous decision he could and did not sell the company. I believe that will prove to be the defining moment of his career.
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Ben Horowitz (The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers)
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Sometimes you can help people make better decisions by not answering their questions. At a certain point, they need to be told to set aside their need for certainty and focus on a strategy that, while it can’t provide any guarantees, will give them the best odds of achieving their goals. Our clients needed leadership and direction, but we’d been letting them take the lead.
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Matt Hall (Odds On: The Making of an Evidence-Based Investor)
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Some viewed Chinese investors as the latest “dumb money” to hit Hollywood. It is no doubt true that financing movies is not the smartest way for any investor, from anywhere in the world, to earn the best returns. Others had a different theory—that some wealthy Chinese individuals and businesses were seeking to get their money out of China, where an autocratic government could still steal anyone’s wealth at any time, for any reason. Certainly Hollywood had long been a destination for legal money laundering. But those who worked most closely with the Chinese knew that the biggest reason for these investments was a form of reverse-colonialism. After more than a decade as a place for Hollywood to make money, China wanted to turn the tables. The United States had already proved the power of pop culture to help establish a nation’s global dominance. Now China wanted to do the same. The Beijing government considered art and culture to be a form of “soft power,” whereby it could extend influence around the world without the use of weapons. Over the past few years, locally produced Chinese films had become more successful at the box office there. But most were culturally specific comedies and love stories that didn’t translate anywhere else. China had yet to produce a global blockbuster. And with box-office growth in that country slowing in 2016 and early 2017, hits that resonated internationally would be critical if the Communist nation was to grow its movie business and use it to become the kind of global power it wanted to be. So Chinese companies, with the backing of the government, started investing in Hollywood, with a mission to learn how experienced hands there made blockbusters that thrived worldwide. Within a few years, they figured, China would learn how to do that without anyone’s help. “Working with a company like Universal will help us elevate our skill set in moviemaking,” the head of the Chinese entertainment company Perfect World Pictures said, while investing $250 million in a slate of upcoming films from the American studio. Getting there wouldn’t be easy. One of the highest-profile efforts to produce a worldwide hit out of China was The Great Wall, starring Matt Damon and made by Wanda’s Legendary Pictures. The $150 million film, about a war against monsters set on the Chinese historic landmark, grossed an underwhelming $171 million and a disastrous $45 million in the United States. Then, to create another obstacle, Chinese government currency controls established in early 2017 slowed, at least temporarily, the flow of money from China into Hollywood. But by then it was too late to turn back. As seemed to always be true when it came to Hollywood’s relationship with China, the Americans had no choice but to keep playing along. Nobody else was willing to pour billions of dollars into the struggling movie business in the mid-2010s, particularly for original or lower-budget productions.
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Ben Fritz (The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies)
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The lesson us mere mortals can learn from this seminal blowup is obvious: Intelligence combined with overconfidence is a dangerous recipe when it comes to the markets.
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
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From peak to trough (June 1998 through March 2000), Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway fell 51% in value! During this time, I estimated that Buffett's net worth fell by more than $10 billion. How much Berkshire did Buffett sell? How much Cisco did he buy? Zero point zero. Not tempted by tech stocks, Buffett remained committed to value investing, and it paid off.1 One of the keys to successfully managing your money is to accept, like Buffett did, that there will be times when your style is out of favor or when your portfolio hits a rough patch. It's when you start to reach for opportunities that you can do serious damage to your financial well‐being.
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
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Genius is a rising market. —John Kenneth Galbraith
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
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Amazon is up a whopping 38,600% since its 1997 IPO, compounding at 35.5% annually. This would have grown a $1,000 investment into $387,000 today. But the degree of difficulty of actually turning that $1,000 into $387,000 20 years later cannot be overstated. See, Amazon got cut in half three separate times. On one of those occasions, from December 1999 through October 2001, it lost 95% of its value! Over that time, the hypothetical $1,000 investment would have shrunk from a high of $54,433 down to $3,045, a $51,388 loss. So you see why looking at a long‐term winner and wishing you had bought in is a fool's errand. “Man I should have known Amazon was going to change the world.” Fine, perhaps you should have. But even if you had that information, it would not have made it any easier to hang on for the ride.
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
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We frequently hear “stocks typically return between eight and ten percent a year.” Well, over multiple decades, you could say they'll compound at between 8 and 10%, but the last time the Dow returned between 8 and 10% was 1952. There is a lot of space between what you expect the market to do and what it actually does, and this is where unforced errors lurk. Stocks tend to swing in a wide range, spending a lot of time at the fringe and little time near the average, delivering maximum frustration. This sort of erratic behavior transfers money from the amateur's pocket and into the professional's.
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Michael Batnick (Big Mistakes: The Best Investors and Their Worst Investments (Bloomberg))
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Eighty years ago, John Maynard Keynes put it best: I do not feel that selling at very low prices is a remedy for having failed to sell at high ones. . . . I would say that it is from time to time the duty of the serious investor to accept the depreciation of his holdings with equanimity and without reproaching himself.
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William J. Bernstein (The Investor's Manifesto: Preparing for Prosperity, Armageddon, and Everything in Between)
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Sophisticated investors subscribed to newsletters such as Fred Hickey’s Hi-Tech Strategy letter, Richard Russell’s Dow Theory Letter, Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, Marc Faber’s Gloom, Boom and Doom Report, or welling@weeden, a newsletter that began circulating in 1999, featuring interviews with some of the best minds in the financial community.
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Maggie Mahar (Bull!: A History of the Boom and Bust, 1982–2004)
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Dollar cost averaging naturally provides steady employment for fund managers and most everyone else associated with the stock market. Regular contributions are therefore sold to the public as something that is beneficial. In reality, dollar cost averaging is a double-edged sword. Proponents usually imagine a scenario of an initial market decline that recovers. In this case, even though the starting and ending price are the same, the average cost is lower, thus resulting in an overall investment gain. Now consider the scenario of a rising market that subsequently declines. In this case, the average cost is higher than the start and ending price, and the investor will have lost money. In fact, given that markets rise much more slowly than they drop, a dollar cost averaging investor is more likely to make an entry and invest larger amounts while the market is rising than during its decline. At its best, dollar cost averaging provides no benefit, but regardless, dollar cost averaging is an excellent way of providing steady work for Wall Street, which collects fees and commissions to invest the steady stream of money from workers.
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Jacob Lund Fisker (Early Retirement Extreme: A philosophical and practical guide to financial independence)
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Kruger Invest
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5. INSTILL OWNERSHIP AND ACCOUNTABILITY. Multipliers deliver and sustain superior results by inculcating high expectations across the organization. By serving as Investors, Multipliers provide necessary resources for success. In addition, they hold people accountable for their commitments.
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Liz Wiseman (Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter)
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Whether you’re a tiny start-up seeking angel money, a growing company going for a B round, or an IPO candidate, a POV will be the best investor relations tool you’ll ever have.
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Al Ramadan (Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets)
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Stock investors should expect periods of time when equities do not make money after inflation. It is the nature of investment risk. This is also why time in the market is critical to stock investors. In the long run, equities have outpaced inflation by a wide margin, and they are expected to remain one of the best real return investments in the future. You have to stay invested during all market conditions to benefit from the gains. U.S.
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Richard A. Ferri (All About Asset Allocation)
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Mixing a broad index fund with small-cap value has produced the best results. U.S. equities are a core position in almost every growth investor’s portfolio.
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Richard A. Ferri (All About Asset Allocation)
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I would add that I am not persuaded that international funds are a necessary component of an investor’s portfolio. Foreign funds may reduce a portfolio’s volatility, but their economic and currency risks may reduce returns by a still larger amount. The idea that a theoretically optimal portfolio must hold each geographical component at its market weight simply pushes me further than I would dream of being pushed. (I explore the pros and cons of global investing in Chapter 8.) My best judgment is that international holdings should comprise 20 percent of equities at a maximum, and that a zero weight is fully acceptable in most portfolios.
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John C. Bogle (Common Sense on Mutual Funds)