flâneur

Rohan Kanti

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on the atlas — 156

highlights — 791

  • It’s far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.
    The Google Capital Company – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • If you buy a stock at a sufficiently low price, there will usually be some hiccup in the fortunes of the business that gives you a chance to unload at a decent profit, even though the long-term performance of the business may be terrible…Time is the friend of the wonderful business, the enemy of the mediocre…
    The Google Capital Company – Stratechery by Ben Thompson
  • Whereas training capex was speculative – undertaken to build AI models for which it was hoped demand would come – inference capex is taking place in response to actual demand for AI capacity. This demand is already translating into massive revenue growth, validating the capex.
    AI Hurtles Ahead
  • Their dismal performance cost me my job as director of equity research (and led to my being assigned to start funds for investment in high yield and convertible bonds – my lucky break)
    Something of Value
  • Graham went on to achieve enviable investment performance although, funnily enough, he would later admit that he earned more on one long-term investment in a growth company, GEICO, than in all his other investments combined.
    Something of Value
  • “He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.” In other words, if you’re not conversant with the arguments of those who oppose your position, you really can’t assess its validity. Thus, I can’t responsibly advance my view without giving the other side of the issue.
    The Calculus of Value
  • However, an asset’s current earning power and opinions regarding its future earning power usually don’t change much from month to month or even year to year. Thus, short-term investment performance is likely to stem mostly from changes in the price investors are willing to pay for the asset. That makes price the dominant consideration for anyone whose principal concern is the short run.
    The Calculus of Value
  • Thus, an investor’s ability to earn an attractive return on an investment will largely depend on whether he accurately appraised the investment’s fundamentals and paid an appropriate price for those fundamentals. In the long term, the success of an investment will hinge primarily on whether the buyer was right about the asset’s earning power.
    The Calculus of Value
  • what matters is the relationship between an asset’s price and its value. Investors call that relationship the asset’s “valuation.”
    The Calculus of Value
  • When the majority of investors are optimistic, they cause price to rise and potentially exceed value. And when the pessimists reign, they cause price to decline and potentially fall short of value. Thus, a preponderance of investor psychology on one side or the other – in lieu of the rationality and objectivity on which the Efficient Market Hypothesis is predicated – can create the bargains or over-pricings the hypothesis says can’t exist. Investors should be on the lookout for them.
    The Calculus of Value
  • The key part of a security analyst’s job consists of arriving at earnings projections.
    The Calculus of Value
  • The result will be dependent on the environment that unfolds, which in turn will be influenced by decisions made by company management, competitors, customers, governments, and even investors.
    The Calculus of Value
  • Montréal is one of three cities in the world that can build an aircraft from tip to tail — a sovereign industrial advantage hiding in plain sight.
    It’s Canada’s moment to lead the drone age
  • Anduril, ShieldAI — are not natural hardware manufacturers. It will take years before it reaches full-rate production. Canada, by contrast, already has one of the largest aerospace Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) in the world.
    It’s Canada’s moment to lead the drone age
  • This Canada — restless, ambitious, commercial — is too often treated as a footnote in our national narrative. It shouldn’t be.
    The Canoe and the Crown: Canada’s Past — and Its Path Forward
  • The reality is we are confronting a far more fluid, competitive, and unforgiving world — one defined by technological upheaval, geopolitical realignment, and existential tests of sovereignty in the Arctic, in cyberspace, and beyond. In such a world, caution and incrementalism will not suffice. They risk consigning us to irrelevance.
    The Canoe and the Crown: Canada’s Past — and Its Path Forward
  • He still remembers a moment from 20 years ago, when he met with a former Drexel partner of Michael Milken’s. “We were sitting at a restaurant in Santa Monica, and at one point he turned to me and put his hand on my arm and said, ‘Money’s like water, see? All you have to do is learn to turn on the faucet,’” Duncan recalls. “I thought I was in a David Mamet movie, but he’s right. Where does the water want to flow? You’re not forcing it. You’re working with what already wants to happen.”
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • “I’m obsessed with helping friends hire nannies. It’s one of the most fraught, high-potential, high-leverage, variances out there,” he marvels
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • He considers Sundheim a prime example of another important concept, optimal grip, that Duncan’s rowing background has no doubt helped to drive home for him. In rowing, you’ve got to hold the oar with some firmness in order to get a solid pull; hold it too tightly, though, and you can blow the race (or even get thrown overboard) if the blade catches in the water on the recovery stroke. Elite rowers are less likely to ‘catch a crab’, as they say, but they’re also trained to release the oar quickly when it happens, enabling them to reset and get back in the game quickly. “The ideal grip is tight …
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • “There are people whose primary goal is to be right. That works a high percentage of the time, but it can be disastrous because your ego and portfolio get caught up in that goal instead of just making money,” Duncan says.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • “Graham wants good things for people, but he also cares about whether they’re going to make money. He holds both these things in his head better than anyone I’ve ever met,” Songhurst says.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • When it comes to seeding, though, winged creatures cannot be rushed in. Graham’s unusual ability to wait out the moment is one of his defining characteristics as an investor.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • “At any one time, there are only 100 people in the world whose map of reality on a complex subject—AI, global politics, interest-rate policy—is extremely accurate,” Duncan says. These individuals see the field clearly because of where they sit, but also because the field itself fascinates and absorbs them. This passion, Duncan explains, causes them to compete with the “joy of the tennis player who wins because he likes hitting the ball more than the other guy.”
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • East Rock invested in 15 to 20 hedge funds at any given time, most of which had assets under management (AUM) well below $1 billion.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • They began by investing in new hedge funds, using a strategy based on several theses.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • Duncan, who had begun to prove himself as a seeder of hedge funds by this point, sold Miller on a disarmingly simple pitch to identify the best investors in the world and make great investments with them. “I didn’t feel like I had a comparative advantage in picking stocks or doing any number of other styles of investment. Instead, we built around what I happen to be good at—picking people,” Duncan recalls.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • but also very interested in people.”
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • One piece of his method that can raise eyebrows is the Enneagram, a nine-faceted model of the human psyche that originates in ancient wisdom traditions. Duncan (who usually tests as an Enneagram 3, ‘The Achiever’) finds it more useful than most of his investing peers do, an occasional point of friendly contention. He cautions that it took him three years to warm up to the Enneagram, and that he sees it “more a tool for personal and spiritual growth than a personality framework per se”. Still, it obviously factors into his thinking. He’s written about the fact that he tends to back Fives, Seven…
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • Of course what Graham does is analytical to some extent, but he is not into spreadsheets,” he says. “He sees the combination of unique ability and authenticity in a person better than anyone I know, and if it’s one degree off, he’ll wait to see perfect alignment. He doesn’t back 9/10s.”
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • I feel like someone’s self-selected LinkedIn photo is so crazily high-signal,” he says. “Matching it up with my impression of what they’ve done in life and what life has done to them, finding patterns—I can literally do that for hours.” Most people, he admits, would find this “very boring”. But reading into people is at the center of Duncan’s personal investing style and the name of the game at East Rock. Spending long hours on LinkedIn is just one of the ways that he has done it.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • “In most meetings, two people vie for control and find the slim overlap in their frequencies. Graham fully tunes into the other person. He puts his own ego away. He receives emotion, rather than pushing his emotions onto you. His empathy is off the charts.”
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • Duncan’s proven ability to assess people and their mutual compatibility has made him a trusted builder of teams, and years of accurate assessments and smart bets have brought him to the top of the leverage ladder: he’s the guy who picks the guy who picks the guy.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • He has mastered a distinctively talent-focused investing style since launching East Rock
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • A talent search this thorough would have been exhausting for others but is standard practice for Duncan.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • He looked at a few good options, backed away when he realized he was forcing them to feel right, and waited, he says, until “a spot came up that has such good feng shui that your car kind of wants to go there”.
    Graham Duncan: Talent Whisperer - Colossus
  • “We basically look for the same kind of things. Things that are out of favor, unloved and off-beaten track,” said Smith. “You take the things where everybody just throws out everything and says, ‘we hate it and we are all chasing some other fad.’ And you’re just like, `wow, there’s plenty of things that the market is ignoring.’”
    Spain’s Warren Buffett Followers Score a Rare Win for Value Investing - Bloomberg
  • “When I discovered Peter Lynch and later Warren Buffett, I found a solid intellectual framework for investing: buying assets below their intrinsic value and being patient,” Paramés said by email. “We are not trying to predict the future or make macroeconomic bets.”
    Spain’s Warren Buffett Followers Score a Rare Win for Value Investing - Bloomberg
  • Paramés, 62, describes his strategy as buying cheap assets and being patient, saying that many of his best picks have been medium-sized, European companies that have less analyst coverage. He made his name during a more than two-decade run at Bestinver, where he delivered 16% annual returns. In 2014, he left the firm and launched Cobas in 2017.
    Spain’s Warren Buffett Followers Score a Rare Win for Value Investing - Bloomberg
  • In conversations, his loyalists speak about value investing as a mindset as much as a way of picking stocks. They see it as a discipline of rejecting herd mentality and embracing the delayed gratification of bets that take a long time to pay off.
    Spain’s Warren Buffett Followers Score a Rare Win for Value Investing - Bloomberg
  • For technologists, that means pursuing goals that are difficult but possible: cures for cancer and ­Alzheimer’s; compact nuclear ­reactors and fusion power. For statesmen, that means deconstructing the ­corrupt institutions that have falsely claimed to pursue those goals on our behalf.
    Back to the Future - First Things
  • A renaissance will require motivational goals. To be motivational, a goal must be both ambitious and achievable. For this reason, I suspect that we should hesitate to put our faith in distant star systems. The fountain of youth and the Tree of Life are not waiting for us in Tau Ceti or on Planet Vulcan in 40 Eridani.
    Back to the Future - First Things
  • He maintains that more of the same is not enough, and stagnation is not a fate imposed by the universe. Choosing agency over boomer complacency, The Decadent Society sets the stakes for the most urgent public debate of the 2020s: How do we get back to the future?
    Back to the Future - First Things
  • Douthat goes beyond economistic abstractions to point out that missing kids weaken a society’s connection to the future
    Back to the Future - First Things
  • “Over the last two generations,” Douthat writes, “the only truly radical change has taken place in the devices we use for communication and entertainment, so that a single one of the nineteenth century’s great inventions [running water] still looms larger in our every­day existence than most of what we think of as technological breakthroughs nowadays.”
    Back to the Future - First Things
  • Since the databases and screens that everyone uses gloss over these business opportunities, you have to look deeper, for outliers in the data, or look outside the consensus data sources entirely. Looking deeper means finding the niche opportunities that disappear in the broader data, for industries that don’t seem to be in the data at all, or for companies geographically isolated from the investor class. This requires broadening who you talk to and being alert to chance comments. People pay attention to large companies but never see the cloud of small suppliers around them. If you look a layer…
    Invisible Companies: Why Overlooked Businesses Win- Colossus
  • There’s a paradox here: if they are invisible, then by definition you can’t find them. To do so, you have to reverse the rules that keep them invisible and look where there is, suspiciously, nothing to see.
    Invisible Companies: Why Overlooked Businesses Win- Colossus
  • Dramatic changes in market conditions, demography, or consumer preference can make a market interesting enough that it starts to surface. COVID brought attention to makers of N95 masks. Aging baby boomers made it obvious the hearing aid market was going to be big. Digital music pushed audiophile equipment upscale, and made makers of vacuum tubes (JJ Electronic) and high-end amps (McIntosh) more visible. This resulted in mainstream media coverage and new entrants after decades of neglect. In these cases, it was an improving market that drew scrutiny, so the impact was mixed.
    Invisible Companies: Why Overlooked Businesses Win- Colossus
  • HEICO, for instance, managed to stay under the radar while building a multibillion-dollar business in aftermarket aircraft replacement parts. This opportunity never surfaced for others because it involved obscure components, mature use cases, and line items too small to notice (relative to a whole airplane). But the parts were critical to keep old aircraft flying. Most businesspeople looked at the airplane business, but HEICO looked one layer deeper and found an opportunity sitting in plain sight.
    Invisible Companies: Why Overlooked Businesses Win- Colossus
  • That’s because the individual with a following is now a structural element in our society. So it’s not just that these public intellectuals are people individual Americans or leaders can trust, but they are supplying important support columns that disappeared with the decline of institutions in America
    The Public Intellectuals America Needs - by Aaron M. Renn
  • It’s probably worth noting how strange all this is. A first century text imagines two post-industrial cities with striking resemblance to today and derives the correct sequence of their collapse, that speech one day would be manufactured and that manufactured speech would create a crisis of personhood. And that crisis would be resolved by enrollment in rosters run by men and that that enrollment would govern buying or selling. It is not incidental that the cosmology given to us in the Bible has predicted the shape of history with staggering resemblance to the world we are living through right …
    Post-Scarcity Is the Beast Of Revelation - by Will Manidis