Charlie Munger once read a single magazine article, spent ninety minutes thinking about it, and made $80 million investing in the idea. The company looked like a disaster. It had a ton of debt after five spinoffs in six years, and its revenues shrunk because of the 2001 recession. Principal payments on its debt were coming due that the company couldn't make. I spent weeks reconstructing what Munger actually saw, down to finding the exact article he likely read in 2001. New series at The Owner's Memo. open.substack.com/pub/theown…

This is such a good interview of @sidecarcap by @majgeoinvesting. I’m only halfway through it and I couldn’t resist sharing it. I’m going to print it out and read it (which is a kind of indication in my world that the thing deserves more attention). "I also noticed that many legendary investors put more weight on management as they gained experience, so I implemented that immediately, before really appreciating its power. How fantastic is it that with the push of a button, you can hire an exceptional CEO to work for you? And stock prices fluctuate wildly, creating the opportunity to do it at prices that would never be available in private markets. My goal is to do a few simple things very well. It’s hard to overstate the advantage individual investors have by just playing a simpler game. It is absurd that one person at a desk can outperform billion-dollar funds but it happens all the time." skullsessions.video/p/sideca…

I'm convinced someone could make a lot of money with a very simple website: just a simple, fast chart of stock prices. That's all. No bloat. One elegant, non-resource hogging advertisement for revenue. There's a huge amount of people who just want to see the price of ticker ABC and a little history. They don't have a Bloomberg, don't want to load up TradingView or Koyfin or any other (good) free services, and would rather gouge their eyes out than go to any of the top Google hits.

Joel Greenblatt's returns at Gotham Capital were off the charts. You Can Be A Stock Market Genius is easily one of my favorite investing books.

I happened to write this week about the very thing Zuck and Capex are mentioning here, that talent is a myth… theownersmemo.com/p/theres-n…

Complaining also subtly reinforces the notion to your brain that you are powerless to make changes.

Home Depot has had the best annualized returns of any stock that's been around over 40+ years. $10,000 became almost $200 million (Inspired by the recent @AcquiredFM episode, data from the HD website)

Home Depot went public on September 2, 1981. The stock took off almost immediately and split 3 times in 1982. By the end of that 1982, it had returned 9 times its price in September 1981.

I didn’t realize Steven Schwarzman, while working at Lehman, was the banker who came up with and executed Lehman’s sale to American Express. A poignant passage about it from his book…

We often use the word "talent" to describe extraordinary performances, but it is not really an explanation at all. No one is called talented before they succeed. Daniel Chambliss spent many years of his life inside competitive swimming, through the 1984 Olympic Trials, looking for whatever separated the best swimmers from the merely good, and what he found were dozens of small differences in technique, habit, and attitude, many of them learnable. Chambliss thought many more people could be in the Olympic class than commonly expected. But we don't examine how, and instead rely on "talent" as a descriptor. Why? As Sartre put it, what people would like is that "a coward or a hero be born that way." The word flatters the people it describes, places them safely beyond comparison, and quietly relieves the rest of us of responsibility for our own condition. Investors do this as much as anyone. We hear Buffett tell amateurs to buy a low-cost index fund and conclude that investing well requires a gift. We skip past the condition he actually names, which is understanding business economics well enough to find five or ten sensibly priced companies with durable competitive advantages. That means reading, thinking, and patience, which require work and which is harder to excuse ourselves from. open.substack.com/pub/theown…

Phil Stutz on taking action...

The letter Bill Ackman received from David Rockefeller after Ackman's restructuring plan was voted down by the Board of Rockefeller Center Properties. Ackman was gracious in accepting the decision, and Rockefeller was appreciative. He still made great returns owning the stock, and the deal was the first high-profile one of his career. cc:@BillAckman

David Tepper started Appaloosa in 1993 after working at Goldman for 8 years and then raising $57 million with some help from Michael Price.

For those interested in more, I heard about Cloud Atlas after watching an interview of Kazuo Ishiguro, easily one of my favorite authors. Almost any book by Ishiguro is fantastic, and they’re all different, kind of like the stories in Cloud Atlas.

We almost always hear about how Lynch achieved a 29% annual return over 13 years, but almost never about how that performance was bifurcated - incredible in the first half when AUM was low and more modest in the second half when it was high. To outperform dramatically, you need to concentrate the portfolio. It’s hard to outperform when you are managing 1,000 stocks.

Nik Sleep and Qais Zakaria's performance over 12+ years managing Nomad, 20.8% per year.

Share buybacks Too many management teams see buybacks as a waste of capital that could otherwise go toward reinvesting in the business. (Ignorant politicians don't help either.) When prices become *so low* that the buyback is screamingly attractive, it can be a fully better use of capital. It effectively removes the shareholders who would accept the lowest price for their shares, and it pressures the share price upward (depending on its size), which can have a reflexive effect, causing employees, customers, and shareholders to feel like the company is doing well again.

I would love for someone to ask the CEO of Wise if he has ever read Nick Sleep's letters. I don't believe he's mentioned Sleep before, but the similarities between his business and Sleep's descriptions of "scale economies shared" is too similar.

"Envy represents a total net loss. There is always someone doing better than you." - Munger

I write The Owner’s Memo, a weekly letter about what it takes to be a great long-term investor and generate the highest returns. Each issue focuses on a great investment case study from the past or examines the lessons a great investor needs to remember. Start with “Tenneco Automotive: Charlie Munger’s $80 Million Bargain”. theownersmemo.com/p/tenneco-…