1. “Between my horrible poker play and the ’29 stock market crash, it took many years to gain the smarts to keep my investing simple.” Groucho learned some hard lessons in 1929. The author of the book New World Coming: The 1920s and the Making of Modern America points out that prior to the crash, the investing world seemed quite easy to Groucho. He was very involved in selecting […]
Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger have they call a “too hard pile.” Here’s Munger on that point: “If something is too hard we move on to something else. What could be simpler than that?” “We have three baskets: in, out, and too tough. We have to have a special insight, or we’ll put it in the ‘too tough’ basket.” For example, Munger makes quite clear that he does not have […]
I have written about the challenges associated with being short a stock before. It has been my expedience that shorting is something lots of people like to talk about, but few people actually do. Here is Jim Chanos describing what his firm does (“fundamental shorting”) with some of the best quotes coming from an excellent interview with Barry Ritholtz: “We select a portfolio of securities – mostly stocks – that […]
“What these [Wu-Tang clan] guys have done — without taking a single business school course — is to go right to the head of the class in terms of strategy development.” James Cash, Harvard Business School (New York Times, 1996) Rza (Robert Fitzgerald Diggs) grew up in Brooklyn and Staten Island. He learned about business by actually being in business on the street from an early age. As Warren Buffett […]