Auren

real money moves in silence. i follow the footsteps everyone else is too loud to hear

[Auren @AurenPro]

@aaakr777 Swap "title plant" for "a team of analysts" and "computer" for AI and you're describing half the moats people are still paying up for today.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@Ox_Cheetah The hard part is that at 25 the $500 feels like everything and the $700k feels like fiction.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@0x_Squirrel The first question at the dealership is always "what monthly payment works for you," because once you answer it they can move the price, the rate and the term behind that number and you'll sign anything that lands under it.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@1onetouch1 And at 5:15 he says the clerks were always happy to pull the reports because they had nothing else to do, nobody else was asking, and that's still true of most footnotes in a 10-K today.

[Auren @AurenPro]

3:15. Buffett explains where the $177.5 billion machine started.

January 1951, a Saturday. He's 20 and walks into GEICO because his hero Ben Graham chairs the board. A man named Lorimer Davidson gives him four hours on how an insurer makes money.

At 3:47 he says the one insurance course he took in school "had no value to me." He can't even remember the textbook.

At 5:00 he tells you what he did instead. He sat in the Department of Insurance in Lincoln and kept asking for examination reports the clerks had to dig out from the bottom of the stacks.

Float was never a secret. The filings were public, and the math fits on a napkin. He was the one person reading them.

At 5:31 he gives the advice for anyone starting cold: read twenty years of Berkshire annual reports, insurance section only.

My piece below is about what that Saturday turned into. Free capital underneath every stock he ever bought, and why most people today spend the gap instead of letting it work.

[Auren @AurenPro]

https://t.co/FJ62YCiqf0

[Auren @AurenPro]

@Ox_Cheetah Worth knowing the dealer often makes more in the finance office than on the car itself, because they can mark up the bank's rate by up to 2 or 2.5 points and keep the spread for the whole 84 months.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@reidgrows The farm test works on way more than bitcoin, run it on half the things people online call passive income and most of them fail the same way.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@lctrnotes A flat decade from PE 22 is survivable if you never have to sell in it, and that's the part that worries me more, since people are already pulling from brokerage accounts to pay for groceries.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@Beaver_0x The part nobody screenshots is what the $1.3 billion cost him, because the same Coke bought with borrowed money at 7% compounds into a very different number than Coke bought on insurance float.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@0x_Squirrel And the $39 million started with a guy sitting in the insurance department in Lincoln reading reports the clerks had to dig out for him.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@0xLupenn This lecture has been free since 2005 and the reason it didn't make everyone a quant is the same reason most people never finish lecture 6.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@lorneseth She was selling insurance on a crash without any of the reserves her brother never let himself run without

[Auren @AurenPro]

@Allx032 Anyone who has raised money when desperate knows this one, you fight over the rate for weeks and hand over the upside in a clause you read once.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@0xCortez Funny how people argue for hours over 1% of expected return and never check the 1% they're guaranteed to lose every year.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@Beaver_0x 22-year-olds priced an unknown object at a third of its value in 90 seconds with zero information. Most retail investors do worse with a Bloomberg terminal and six months of research.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@0x_Squirrel The 1% looks small until you see it compound against you for 30 years straight.

[Auren @AurenPro]

Shannon's 28% for 30 years wasn't about the filter. He sized bets using Kelly - the formula he helped build with John Kelly at Bell Labs. Most people chasing better signals are solving the wrong problem. The edge was never in detection. It was in how much you put down when you actually had something.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@fomoliver Schwarzman measured one quarter out and the math said sell. Fink measured one decade out and the math said dilute. Same numbers, different time horizon - $240 million vs $62 billion difference. The spreadsheet doesn't tell you which window to use. That's the actual decision.

[Auren @AurenPro]

@finillin_dev The 50.75% tilt is real but the post skips the hard part - you need thousands of trades before that edge separates from noise. Most people don't quit because they lack math. They quit because 600 trades in, a 51% edge looks exactly like a coin flip and feels worse.

[Auren @AurenPro]

Cover proved something most portfolio managers still refuse to accept - the return wasn't in the stocks. It was in the rebalancing. Two mediocre names, daily trim-and-add, 70x over 20 years. The math doesn't care about your thesis on the company. It cares about variance and how you harvest it.