The Weekend Bulletin] #110: Baupost Letter, Selling, Maintenance Research,...
...Mississippi Company, Lessons from World Class Performers, and more.
A digest of some interesting reading material from around the world-wide-web. Your weekly dose of multi-disciplinary reading.
Hi,
Keeping it short and brief this week - blame it on a crowded fag-end of the result season.
Positive that we'll return to normalcy next week onwards. Thank you for bearing with me.
Section 1: Investing Wisdom
Baupost Investment Partners (Seth Klarman) 2021 Investor Letter
Three investors get together to discuss Selling - too soon, and too late (overstaying your welcome). Everyone that has managed a portfolio - personally or professionally - will find this conversation very relatable. They also also further discuss reading for purpose and the importance of journalism.
Quality investors love to quote Charlie Munger on how the return on a stock will mimic the return that the underlying business generates on its own capital. They use this to justify Buy At Any Price investing. Debunking this myth, Jigar Mistry (a very gifted writer) claims that A good business and a good investment are two different things.
The following tweet has two important lessons:
Reposting this cause I like the simplicity. Idea cadence shouldn’t be: dig, think, act, act, act, act, act, act …. Should be more like: dig, think, act, dig, dig, think, dig, think, think, think, dig, think, act.You can never research enough before buying - don't wait to tick all the boxes.
You cannot afford to stop researching after buying - don't buy and forget. Maintenance research is as important as the research done before purchase. This thread explains further.
Section 2: Mental Models & Behavioral Biases
Some of the best investing lessons come from studying history. Here is one such lessons: how the Mississippi Company bubble came to be (that nearly privatised the French economy).
Section 3: Personal Development
Principles distilled from interviewing world-class performers by Sean DeLaney. This should be one of your top listens this weekend. (Thanks for doing this Sean, really enjoyed it 🙏🏼.)
Section 4: Blast From The Past
Revisiting articles from a past issue for the benefits of refreshing memory and spaced repetition, as well as for a fresh perspective. Below are articles from #36:
Chris Begg of East Coast Asset Management is a great thinker and writer. I used to really enjoy reading this investor letters, until they stopped coming after 2015. And like his letters, this one was so really worth the time spent (and worth re-reading once in a while). In this interview, Chris outlines his investment philosophy, provides a glimpse into his investment process, along with some checks that he has built to overcome behavioural biases, and how he tackles reading for himself and his team. He ends the interview with how reading philosophy has made him a better investor - not something you hear often. Lots of wisdom in this one.
Section 5: Readworthy Passage
Let's read together a random, but read-worthy, passage from a randomly picked book.
IS PROGRESS REAL?
Against this panorama of nations, morals, and religions rising and falling, the idea of progress finds itself in dubious shape. Is it only the vain and traditional boast of each “modern” generation? Since we have admitted no substantial change in man’s nature during historic times, all technological advances will have to be written off as merely new means of achieving old ends—the acquisition of goods, the pursuit of one sex by the other (or by the same), the overcoming of competition, the fighting of wars. One of the discouraging discoveries of our disillusioning century is that science is neutral: it will kill for us as readily as it will heal, and will destroy for us more readily than it can build. How inadequate now seems the proud motto of Francis Bacon, “Knowledge is power”! Sometimes we feel that the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which stressed mythology and art rather than science and power, may have been wiser than we, who repeatedly enlarge our instrumentalities without improving our purposes.
- From THE LESSONS OF HISTORY by Will and Ariel Durant.
Quotable Quotes
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That's it for this weekend folks.
Have a wonderful week ahead!!
- Tejas Gutka
[Feb 12, 2022]