VandelayCap

"If every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right"

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

https://t.co/P6xqFUscpD

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

Tolstoy’s advice to achieve a long term goal:

[taobanker @taobanker]

every stock in my portfolio is the worst stock i've ever seen in my life

[Kevin DeShazo @KevinDeShazo]

What is greatness?

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

https://t.co/jVlN2YSNTB

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

https://t.co/jVlN2YSNTB

[Polymath Investor @polymathinvest1]

We call them lucky. But could luck be a byproduct, not a gift: the result of specific behaviors compounding over years?

More shots. More visibility. Fewer catastrophic bets.

The people catching the right wave at the right time spent years increasing their luck surface area.

A few months back, I enjoyed putting together this little manual. Re-sharing here for anyone who missed it.

(1/6)

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

[Goshawk Trades @GoshawkTrades]

Dan Loeb started Third Point with $3 million. it's now $24 billion.

when asked which books shaped how he invests, he named four, each one representing a different phase of his evolution as an investor:

phase 1. event-driven deep value:
"You Can Be a Stock Market Genius" by Joel Greenblatt. "most of the people i know in that world use that as their framework." spin-offs, privatizations, post-reorganization equities. buying things cheap that nobody else was doing the work on.

....

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

https://t.co/CeASuRkKKP

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Hungarian-American psychologist spent 40 years proving that the noise in your head when you try to focus is not a failure of willpower, it is a design feature of your brain, and almost no manager on earth has implemented what he found.

His name was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.

It started when he was 10 years old, locked in an Italian prison camp during World War II. His relatives were being killed. One brother died in combat. Another was shipped to a labor camp in Siberia. The whole world he grew up in was gone.

Then he found chess.

The moment he sat down at the board, the war disappeared. For hours he forgot the camp, the fear, the hunger, all of it. He was not escaping reality. He was more inside it than ever, just pointed at one thing.

He spent the rest of his life trying to explain why.

What he found is that your brain has a hard ceiling. It can only process about 110 bits of information per second. That sounds like a lot until you learn that just following someone talking eats 60 bits. That is why you cannot listen to two people at once. Your bandwidth is full.

This noise in your head is not weakness. It’s remaining bandwidth with nothing to grab.

When a task is hard enough to require almost everything you've got, there's no room for anything else. No room to be hungry. No room to see time. No time to repeat this morning’s argument or to worry about money. The chatter stops, not because you made it stop, but because there is no power left to run it.

He called this state “Flow.” And he showed it wasn’t a fluke. It is driven by formula.

The task has to be at the edge of your ability. Too easy and you will get bored and drift off. Too hard and you get anxious and freeze up. The sweet spot is a narrow band just beyond what you can comfortably do. And that band is where your best work and your best moments actually live.

And you need a clear goal and instant feedback. A chess player always knows where the board is. A climber knows exactly where the next handhold is. Most office work feels like walking through mud. The goal is vague and the feedback is weeks away in a meeting, if you get feedback at all.

He did something no one had tried to prove all of this. He gave people electronic beepers in the 1970s and buzzed them at random times during the day. When the beeper sounded, they wrote down what they were doing and how they felt at the time. Real life, caught in the moment, thousands of times.

The data revealed something that should have changed every company on the planet.

People experience flow much more often at work than in their leisure time. TV, couch, weekend scrolling, not much flow at all. They became energised at work, with tasks that had goals and feedback.

But there was a catch that dashed his own hopes. Those same people in flow at work said they wished they were somewhere else. It was the best mental experience a human can have and they hated it every minute.

And the reason was obvious. When you pick the challenge, the flow feels incredible. When it is forced on you by someone , it feels like a trap . Same mental state. Conflicting meaning.

This is the part that has been lost for 40 years.

The science was right there. People are most happy when they are asked to do something hard, when the ask is just beyond their skill, and when they decide to rise to the occasion. Give people a clear goal, fast feedback, real control and a challenge matched to their ability and you don’t get drained employees. You get people doing their best work and feeling most alive.

Instead we built open offices with interruptions. We buried goals in vague slogans. We put feedback in the annual review. We robbed people of their agency and then wondered why no one could pay attention.

Before the age of 12, a scared boy in a prison camp found the cure for a distracted mind.

The rest of us are still building lives and workplaces that make it impossible.

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

@burby_geek @memeticsisyphus Killing your enemies at the school prom… which one is that?

[Dennis Hong @dennisihong]

Berkshire isn’t exactly just a passive shareholder. Through BHE they’re also one of the largest energy providers Google depends on to run its data centers. So they’re getting equity upside on Google’s AI growth and regulated utility returns on the power Google needs to actually do it. It’s like Berkshire is vendor financing Google’s energy demand.

The valuation pushback is fair. But this investment isn’t just a stock pick. It’s putting Berkshire’s energy assets right in the heart of the nation’s AI infrastructure build.

[Aakash Gupta @aakashgupta]

The same World Cup seat is $700 on FIFA's official site and $200 on SeatGeek right now. That gap is not a glitch.

Dynamic pricing solved the upside for FIFA. Demand climbs, the price climbs, $60 group seats turn into $700 matchups, the US opener hit $1,940 at face. The downside is where the system breaks. The second FIFA cuts an official price below what someone already paid, it invites refund demands, chargebacks, and a consumer-protection fight across three host countries.

So the official number cannot fall. It is a published price attached to thousands of fans who bought higher, which turns every markdown into a liability.

Read it as economics instead of conspiracy and it sharpens. FIFA overpriced, then built a channel where lowering the real price is legally radioactive. The secondary market is the only place left to discover what the seats actually clear at.

Those contiguous blocks landing on SeatGeek at $198, $228, $230 are FIFA's true demand curve leaking out where the official site can keep pretending it doesn't exist.

The elegant part: FIFA's own resale marketplace takes 15% from the buyer and 15% from the seller. So even as inventory clears below face, FIFA collects a toll on the way down. They earn on the markdown they can't announce.

Saudi Arabia vs Cape Verde settling near $200 while the official page holds the line tells you the market-clearing price was set months ago. FIFA just can't be the one to say it out loud.

[Daniel @growing_daniel]

You'll never be this alive

[Eric Balchunas @EricBalchunas]

Real map of NYC... h/t @psarofagis

[TIFF @TIFF_NET]

What is a “liminal space”? 🚪

BACKROOMS director Kane Parsons stopped by the TIFF Melissa Chung studio to break it down for us.

[The Cinéprism @TheCineprism]

A24 when it comes to horror>>

[Rodger Sherman @rodger]

Today is for everybody who remembers this inexplicable Doug E. Fresh cover of “Country Roads” that subbed in “New York City” for “West Virginia” and played at least once during every Knicks game from 2004 to 2008

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

Charlie Munger on what makes a good business:

“What really makes it work is, the business school term is durable competitive advantage, which is a pretty good term.

You really want an advantage that, nourished without overwhelming skill, will keep working for you for a long, long time.”

And on what to avoid:

“You want to avoid a business which is just so brutally competitive that nobody does well over the long pull.”

[Barney Jopson @barneyjopson]

Exclusive @FT interview with Real Madrid boss:

Florentino Pérez on his peculiar pitch to investors, a trophy drought, watching games via VR, the Pope coming to the Bernabéu - and his re-election bid.

@ArashMassoudi & I sat down with him

https://t.co/IEdCxzmxvZ

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

@barneyjopson @FT @ArashMassoudi He’s not wrong owning a piece of Real Madrid is more about the brand than just winning now, there’s like two big clubs in the world which you couldn’t buy and that’s Real Madrid and Barcelona

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

https://t.co/CeASuRkKKP

[VandelayCap @VandelayCap]

https://t.co/SMdsOTTwYj