Category: Notes

To me, the most important single question at a point in time with regard to strategy — I’m not talking about tactics, I’m not talking about what’s going to go up tomorrow, I’m not talking about eternity, but for the middle term, let’s say three to five years — the most important thing at a given point in time is how you’re balancing offense and defense… we want to have a lot of offense when prices are low, psychology is depressed and the outlook is bad to most people but we don’t think it’s so bad. And we want to have defense when prices are high, psychology is buoyant and everybody sees a brilliant future, and we don’t think the future may live up.

– Howard Marks

If, in some cataclysm, all of scientific knowledge were to be destroyed, and only one sentence passed on to the next generations of creatures, what statement would contain the most information in the fewest words? I believe it is the atomic hypothesis (or the atomic fact, or whatever you wish to call it) that all things are made of atoms—little particles that move around in perpetual motion, attracting each other when they are a little distance apart, but repelling upon being squeezed into one another. In that one sentence, you will see, there is an enormous amount of information about the world, if just a little imagination and thinking are applied.

– Richard Feynman

A complex adaptive system has three characteristics. The first is that the system consists of a number of heterogeneous agents, and each of those agents makes decisions about how to behave. The most important dimension here is that those decisions will evolve over time. The second characteristic is that the agents interact with one another. That interaction leads to the third—something that scientists call emergence: in a very real way, the whole becomes greater than the sum of the parts. The key issue is that you can’t really understand the whole system by simply looking at its individual parts.

– Michael Mauboussin

The difference between what the most and least learned people know is inexpressibly trivial in relation to that which is unknown.

– Albert Einstein

Everybody wants progress, nobody wants change.

– Paul Romer

A good story is life with the dull parts taken out.

– Alfred Hitchcock

Investing is kind of a game of connecting the dots. The nice thing about it is the longer you are in the business, as long as you are intellectually curious, your collection of data points of dots gets bigger and bigger…Being a successful investor you need to be hungry, intellectually curious, interested, read all the time. Read a lot of newspapers. You need a certain level of randomness in order to connect things that might give you an insight into where a business is going in five years that somebody else might not see.

– Ted Weschler

Freedom is the only worthy goal in life. It is won by disregarding things that lie beyond our control.

– Epictetus

Your title makes you a manager. Your people will decide if you’re a leader, and its up to you to live up to that.

– Bill Campbell