Month: July 2020

The excitement of learning separates youth from old age. As long as you’re learning, you’re not old.

– Rosalyn Yalow

There are many sources of pricing power—brand names, network effects, cost advantages, unique technology. One of the most volatile is when a product has limited supply elasticity, is an essential input into a product with growing demand, and is a small proportion of the total price of that product.

– Byrne Hobart

Steve used to say to me, and he used to say this a lot. Hey Jony, here’s a dopey idea. And sometimes they were. Really dopey. Sometimes they were truly dreadful. But sometimes they took the air from the room. And they left us both completely silent. Bold, crazy, magnificent ideas. Or quiet, simple ones. Which in their subtlety, their detail, they were utterly profound.

– Jony Ive

If you focus on the goal, you will overcome all obstacles. If you focus on the obstacle, you will never reach your goal.

– Mukesh Ambani

Modern man fell into the trap of believing that everything can be explained, that reality is a simple affair which has only to be organised in order to be mastered.

– Abraham Joshua Heschel

Put your best people on your biggest opportunities, not your biggest problems.

– Jim Collins

Intelligent people make decisions based on opportunity costs—in other words, it’s your alternatives that matter. That’s how we make all of our decisions.

– Charlie Munger

I tried so hard to learn the lessons of 1998 in particular, which were: Don’t be unprepared for something out of the blue that’s really bad.

To some extent, we were prepared this time. However, you can never be prepared enough. We had a lot of macro protection in terms of credit default protection on bonds where we were just betting that credit spreads would widen. That’s been incredibly helpful. But we’ve gotten really tired of buying market puts, or anything like that, because they inevitably are expensive and expire worthless.

So as an investor, you have terrible trade-offs. Do you overpay for insurance — or do you go uninsured? That’s just one of those dilemmas for which there are really no perfect answers.

– Seth Klarman

In scientific work, those who refuse to go beyond fact rarely get as far as fact.

– Thomas Huxley