Mike's notes.
Patrick O’Shaughnessy asks Gaurav Kapadia what makes a great business. It’s all the basic stuff, “but really when you go down to it, if you look at a lot of the great businesses, they’ve created niche monopoly things. No one likes to say it because you’re not allowed to say it.” Kapadia lists at least … Continue reading Words hiding value
Kris surfaced this work and had some excellent notes. “Impossible things happen fairly often. That doesn’t mean things are actually impossible just that we thought they were impossible. There’s a corollary to this: enough people relying on something being impossible makes that thing more likely in a perverse feedback kind of way.” Agustin Lebron We’ve … Continue reading “It’s impossible”
What I watched, listened, and read this week. Another experiment on note taking. Business Breakdowns, Basic Fit. Through controlling costs (no pool, economies of scale for equipment, low payroll thanks to technology), Basic Fit serves the fitness JTBD. The company also has psychological advantages: not going to the gym is different than cancelling and some … Continue reading WLR 001
Considering the recency effect of inevitability, practicing with base rates, and reducing the solution space. In early 2022, the men’s career grand slam standing were tied at twenty wins each between Roger Federer (age 40), Rafael Nadal (35), and Novak Djokovic (34). For tennis fans, the big question is: Who will end their career with … Continue reading Will Novak win the most?
It’s important to highlight base rates in the wild as a way to keep them top-of-mind. What’s available is what we think about. Nowhere is this better than sports. We tend to overreact rather than “short the narrative” and base rates are a useful thinking tool to practice. Talking about the last week of the … Continue reading Underdog or tie game?
Sometimes we just need the right word to explain an idea which leads to action. Having a name for a thing changes the way we think about it. These are some of my favorites from the Wharton Moneyball podcast. Let’s be precise. For instance, what does herd immunity mean? Often we are not precise. What’s … Continue reading Words from Wharton
In the first post we jumped off with the idea that the S&P500 is an unbalanced collection of stocks. The top five companies, noted Carl Kawaja, generate 22% of the earnings, so why not only ‘bet on’ the best? This led to thinking about predictability. Chess is easier to predict than my morning pickleball game. … Continue reading Favorites or the field? (part two)
“There’s a great point in your book,” host Adi Wyner says, “where your coach tells you you’re coming in too high in the tournaments.” “This realization happens pretty early on. It’s six months into my poker playing and I’m very happy I’ve been cashing in poker tournaments. Say you buy in for $100, but the … Continue reading Creativity through randomness
It’s time to update two of our ongoing projects. First, to revisit the idea of Aaron Rodgers throwing less than 38.5 touchdowns. The point in parts one and two were to not think specifically about what might happen but think about the states of what could happen. We reasoned there were a lot more things … Continue reading Tailing Aaron Rodgers (part three)
Maxim Five: low probability events When a low probability event occurs (say an underdog wins a sports championship), we tend to come up with reasons why we might have expected it. This phenomenon is often referred to as hindsight bias, a tendency to perceive past events as having been more predictable than they actually were. … Continue reading Daters, scammers, and Zeckhauser
The Waiter's Pad 