I previously wrote about the 7 types of moats of quality companies. Another way to look at moats is from a capital allocation perspective. A few years ago, Connor Leonard from IMC made a wonderful presentation on 3 types of capital allocation moats: Legacy moat Reinvestment moat Capital-light compounder Legacy…

Investing for Growth is a compilation of Fundsmith’s annual letters and articles Terry Smith wrote for the Financial Times. Just a bit of background, Fundsmith is a UK-based fund that was founded by Terry Smith with a strategy focused on investing only in high quality businesses. Fundsmith has a track…

Imagine you want a car. What car should you pick? First, you have to know why you want a car right. You probably also have a few criteria like: What’s my budget? What type of car? i.e sedan, SUV, etc. What’s my preference for make and model? Should I get…

The mistake we often make when valuing a stock is overestimating the business growth potential, how much free cash flow it can generate, and so on. We extrapolate a spurt of excellent performance caused by temporary changes such as a brief supply and demand tailwind into the distant future. …

When Genius Failed: The Rise and Collapse of Long-Term Capital Management by Roger Lowenstein — Long-Term Capital Management’s demise comes from a mix of how their perfect models quantify risks in an uncertain world, a sense of infallibility, 30 to 1 leverage, illiquid trades, and basic greed. It is like betting on the outcome of a coin flip and if you lose, keep doubling down…

I think it is easier to figure out what not to buy than what to buy. If we can weed out the stocks to avoid, we’ll be a step closer to figure out what to buy. What are some stocks you should avoid? Generally, hot stocks that everyone is talking…

How do we attain wisdom? It starts with knowledge. What kind of knowledge should we acquire? Peter Kaufman’s three buckets of knowledge can guide us. “ Every statistician knows that a large, relevant sample size is their best friend. What are the three largest, most relevant sample sizes for identifying…

What is value investing? It is to buy a business for less than what it’s worth. We can break this into three parts. Buy a business Buying a stock is the same as owning a fraction of the underlying business. If you buy a share of Apple (AAPL), you own…

Overshoot Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital described the market as a pendulum that rarely stays in the middle “The mood swings of the securities markets resemble the movement of a pendulum. Although the midpoint of its arc best describes the location of the pendulum “on average,” it actually spends very little…