Bruno Corrêa

Individual Investor | Value Investor

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Warren Buffett: "I do not regard this as some unique period [of political division] in history. I've been reading about unique periods in history ever since I was old enough to read."

"During the Vietnam period, people were just as [politically] inflamed on both sides [as right now]."

"We're a democracy. We'll have strong opinions on both sides — and sometimes they rev up more than others."

[Dailyscienceinfo @NatureScienceA1]

The Devil Horns Solar Eclipse
Is one of the rarest sunrise ever photographed and was stunning.

[Peter Mallouk @PeterMallouk]

Warren Buffett said it best:
At the end of your life, true success won’t be measured by money - it will be measured by who loves you.

[Bruno Corrêa @correa_bru]

The Grim Truth About the “Good Old Days” https://t.co/iqleMLjqQy via @HumanProgress

[Giuliano @Giuliano_Mana]

40. If your personality is prone to addictions, redirect the addiction.

I was addicted to videogames as a teenager. College was a wake up call. One day I just said, That's it, I don't play videogames anymore.

Fascinating fast forward, it worked.

And it worked because I realized what I was addicted to wasn't videogames themselves. It was the mental stimulation they provided. A good videogame fully absorbs you. You have to do dozens of calculations every single second and there's a great feedback loop embedded into the system.

Once recognized, I was able to change the object of my 'addiction''. My logic was simple, if this is what my mind wants, let's find a healthier and more productive way to supply it.

That's how I stumbled into reading.

I despised reading in school; thought it was boring. But a few books in college helped me better understand why they were so powerful.
I got a glimpse of how much a book can stimulate the mind and, wanting to redirect my attention, I started reading.

Reading worked in much smaller doses than videogames did. When that's the case, a bit of discipline is required. I knew I wouldn't find a perfect substitute, so I settled for something that was good enough.

You have to be honest with yourself upfront. You can fool yourself in many ways, but not in this one. You can't tell yourself something will be an absolute joy, because then you have to go do the thing. And the moment you realize it's not as fun as your earlier self promised, you'll drop it.

Somewhere in this process I started thinking about addictions as obsessions instead. This was a very useful reframe.

To some extent, there's some truth in the idea of your inner speech. What you tell yourself defines how you see things. If you think you're addicted, that's that. If you think you're obsessed, you know it's temporary and you can redirect it toward something else. A subtle change in wording works wonders psychologically.

I'm not sure personality traits such as this can be changed, so you might as well use them to your advantage. Over 5-6 years, I read 200-250 books, letters, essays, watched many interviews and listened to podcasts.

My new obsession became knowledge acquisition.

Left at that, it means nothing, but it's way better than the alternative and has had some positive side effects:
- Started writing (thousands of pages in 3-4 years)
- Improved thinking
- Understood a couple of things, which is fun
- Led to an obsession over investing
- More interesting conversations and higher quality people
- Landed jobs out of writing and thinking, essentially
- Failed a couple of times at entrepreneurship

If you think you can't do something, you're right.
If you think you can, you're also right.

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Charlie Munger: "There will never be any shortage of good people in the world. All you've got to do is seek them out and get as many of them as possible into your life — and keep the rest the hell out."

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Charlie Munger: "Envy, resentment, revenge, and self-pity are disastrous modes of thought. Self-pity gets pretty close to paranoia."

"When you avoid it, you get a great advantage over almost everybody else — because self-pity is a standard condition."

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Charlie Munger: "Extremely intense ideology cabbages up one's mind."

"When you announce that you're a loyal member and you start shouting the orthodox ideology out, what you're [really] doing is pounding it in — and you're gradually ruining your mind."

[Charlie Munger Fans @CharlieMunger00]

“Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire.” — Charlie Munger

#ValueInvesting #Investing

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Charlie Munger: "If you're a pure socialist, you're a nutcase. An absolute nutcase. And not a modest nutcase — a real nutcase."

"You can be a perfect nut with a high IQ."

"If we want a productive society, we can't help but have these personal incentives to handle your own affairs — and if you do that, you get unequal wealth outcomes. The price of plenty is that you can't have socialism."

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Charlie Munger: "News outlets that we all follow [are] good at marshaling hatreds. Now, some hatred may have some constructive use, but they're overdoing it."

"The hatred is too intense. It's already cabbaged up the minds of the broadcasters — and, now, it's cabbaging up the people who watch."

[Tarcísio Gomes de Freitas @tarcisiogdf]

Aos amigos, tudo.
Aos inimigos, a lei.

Acorda, Brasil.

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Charlie Munger: "Imagine politicians who never understood Adam Smith [and capitalism]. It would be like hiring an engineer to design your airplane when he didn't believe in gravity."

[Steven Pinker @sapinker]

I spoke with @LaulPatricia about Marxism:

One is: What’s remarkable is that Marxism has been tried. Now, of course, defenders of Marxism say it hasn’t really been tried anywhere, but certainly the people who implemented it claimed they were implementing Marxism.

And this is a massive experiment—a global experiment—with a very clear outcome. Namely, the Soviet Union was a disaster. The imposition of communism on Eastern Europe was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Venezuela was a disaster. The imposition of communism in Maoist China was a disaster. Disaster in terms of both poverty and oppression and genocide and stupid wars. So the world has told us what happens under communism, and it’s a sign of how out of touch intellectuals can be that there are still people who defend it despite the entire world giving a very clear-cut answer.

One more is: would you rather live in North Korea or South Korea? Would you rather live in the old East Germany or West Germany? We have an experimental group and a matched control group in terms of culture, language, and geography, and the answer is crystal clear. So this is a sign of, I think, the pathology of intellectual life—that Marxism can persist.

The other is, you did call attention to one of the appeals of Marxism, though, and more generally of heavy, strong influence of government guided by intellectuals, which is that there are certain kinds of reforms that you can state as principles. You can articulate them verbally as propositions—like equality, human rights, democracy—but there’s other kinds of progress that take place in massive distributed networks of millions of people, none of whom implements some policy. But collectively, there is an order, an organization that’s beneficial.

So that can happen organically through, for example, the development of a language. No one designed the English language. It’s just hundreds of millions of English speakers. They coin new words. They forget old words. They try to make themselves clear. And we get the English language and the other 5,000 languages spoken on earth.

Likewise, a market economy is something where knowledge is distributed. You don’t have a central planner deciding how many shoes of size 8 will be needed in a particular city, but rather information is conveyed by prices, which are adjusted according to supply and demand. And you’ve got a distributed network of exchange of information that can result in an emergent benefit.

Now, intellectuals tend to hate that. They like rules of language—of correct grammar. They like top-down economic planning. They like cultural change that satisfies particular ideals described by intellectuals. And so rival sources of organization, like commerce, like culture—traditional culture—tend to be downplayed by intellectuals.

And this can be magnified by the fact that many dictatorships give a privileged role to intellectuals, which may be why, over the course of the 20th century, and probably continuing to the present, there has not been a dictator that has not had fans among intellectuals—including the mullahs and ayatollahs of Iran, but also the communist dictators: Mao and Castro, even Stalin in his day. And every other dictator has had, actually, often fawning praise from Western intellectuals.

[Konstantin Kisin @KonstantinKisin]

All the bleating about "international law" shows just how completely deluded some of our elites have become.

International law was a pleasant fiction that lasted for a few decades. It was never real and now the world has reverted to its default setting: Great Power politics.

This is why, as a strong Ukraine supporter, I have never talked about international law or called Putin's attack an "illegal invasion".

Laws are based on submission to an overarching authority backed by force. There is no such international authority and even if you view the UN as one, it does not have the ability to use force against those who violate "international law" other than against small countries with weak militaries.

When the US attacked Iraq, the UN did nothing.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, the UN did nothing.
If China invades Taiwan tomorrow, the UN will do nothing.

If you cannot enforce a law, it's not a law.

I do not support Ukraine because naughty Vlad broke the rules. I support Ukraine because it's not in OUR interest in the West to have Russia marauding its way through friendly countries on the borders of Europe. It's in our interest for us to be as strong as possible and for our adversaries to be as weak as possible.

President Trump is a realist and a pragmatist. He sees through the fictions other "leaders" cling to.

A good leader advances the national interests of his country. If more Western leaders did this, our civilisation would be in a much better place.

[Kevin Carpenter @kejca]

Warren Buffett: "I have mainly learned by reading. I don't think I have any original ideas."

"If you learn reasonably well from other people, you don't have to get any new ideas or do much on your own. You can just apply the best of what you see."

[Bruno Corrêa @correa_bru]

https://t.co/aAfIesdZVu

[Bruno Corrêa @correa_bru]

A Century-Old Classic Buffett Would Love https://t.co/RAPKoxIp4t

[Bruno Corrêa @correa_bru]

Iniciando mais uma leitura. @brettgardner_10

[X @XaviercMiller]

Here’s what I think will happen in NYC under Mahdami.

The free buses and government grocery stores won’t happen, they never do. They sound good during campaigns, but collapse under basic math. You can’t run a city on ideas that cost billions and produce no revenue.

The only way to make housing affordable is to build more housing. The free market lowers prices, not regulation. Every time politicians try to control rent or force affordability by decree, developers stop building and landlords stop maintaining. Supply dries up, the quality collapses, and the few properties that remain skyrocket in price.

Once landlords can’t make a profit, they sell, lose properties, or walk away. Eventually, the government takes over.

Taxes will rise to pay for the promises, and the middle class will be the ones shouldering the burden. The rich will relocate, the poor will depend on subsidies, and the productive class will be squeezed from both sides.

Thriving businesses are the foundation of any thriving city. When they leave, everything else follows, jobs, schools, grocery stores, stability. Chicago already proved this. Boeing, McDonald’s, Caterpillar, Citadel, nearly 70k jobs, all gone. Now they’re facing billion-dollar deficits, half empty schools and neighborhoods without grocery stores.

I saw someone who lived in a rent-controlled apartment in California put it perfectly, he said his landlord could no longer afford maintenance so the pool was filled with dirt, the floors had soft spots, and the foundation ended up cracking. That’s what overregulation does, it destroys quality.

People who voted for this will eventually feel the pain but they won’t blame the policies or the politicians, they’ll blame the rich for leaving.

This conversation is always difficult because most people simply don’t understand market dynamics or incentives. In a free society, people act in their own self-interest. If you remove profit and reward dependency, productivity dies and the city with it.

If you think things are expensive now, just wait until they’re “free.”