I recently read Lee Freeman Shor’s “The Art of Execution” and thought I would publish a brief review/overview as it resonated with me. This is more of a Cliff Notes summary than anything thoughtful btw. Shor was an allocator at Old Mutual Global Investors. While he was there, he created…

George Vanderheiden is one of the best investors I’ve ever known. He chose to retire in early 2000, massively underweight technology and massively overweight home builders, tobacco and other value oriented stocks. …

Business travel is coming back for the same reason that suits always come back. Suits are cyclical. Almost all offices go casual late in the cycle. Then the economy rolls over and a few months into the recession, someone shows up at the office wearing a suit because they are worried about their job. The next day everyone is wearing a suit. Business travel will be the same. Every business will try to avoid travel and stay on Zoom. But then one company, struggling with sales, will send their sales representatives on the road and conversions will increase. The next quarter all of their competitors will be on the road. The same will go for conferences, for diligence, for deals, for executive retreats, for everything.

I believe the biggest long term beneficiaries of Covid will prove to be category leading brick and mortar retailers. By this I simply mean brick and mortar retailers who have dominant share in a category — whether it be home improvement, general merchandise, electronics or any other retail category. Their…

Investing is a difficult, humbling pursuit. I am often asked about mistakes I have made. While the list of my mistakes is quite long, I thought I would write up my most recent mistake of commission, i.e. a mistake based on an action I took that resulted in a loss…

The “Three-Body Problem” is a reference to Poincare’s 1889 work showing that there was no closed form solution for modeling three point masses (planets or moons) according to Newton’s laws of motion and universal gravitation as the resulting dynamic system is chaotic for most initial conditions. It is also a…

Scale and loyalty are generally the most important metrics to me as an investor as they are the most sustainable — and measurable — competitive advantages. They are *much* more important online than offline, which is why the internet economy has such pronounced “winner take most” dynamics relative to the…

I recently had the pleasure of giving a talk to CSIMA, which is the Columbia Student Investment Management Association. Afterwards, they asked for a list of investing book recommendations. I thought I would post it here on Medium for the benefit of anyone who was interested. …

Robert Smith, CEO and founder of Vista Equity Partners famously said: “Software contracts are better than first-lien debt. You realize a company will not pay the interest payment on their first lien until after they pay their software maintenance or subscription fee. We get paid our money first. Who has…