Balanik

Corporate Executive, Indigenous Business Leader

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

Your most important asset.

[Investment Wisdom @InvestingCanons]

Warren Buffett:

“I got an awful lot of good advice from my dad…

He taught me that it’s more important what’s on your ‘Inner Scorecard’ than your ‘Outer Scorecard.’

Some people get in a position where they’re thinking all of the time of what the world’s going to think of this or that [Outer Scorecard] instead of what they themselves think [Inner Scorecard].

If you’re comfortable with your Inner Scorecard, I think you’re going to have a pretty happy life.

I think the people that strive too much for the Outer Scorecard sometimes finds that it’s a little hollow when they get all through.”

[ⁿᵉʷˢ Barron Trump 🇺🇸 @BarronTNews_]

🚨 BOOM! Scott Jennings just said what millions of Americans are thinking.

For hours, the same people who preach “equity” and “fairness” have been obsessing over Elon Musk’s wealth instead of asking how he built it.

Think about it.

Electric vehicles.

Rocket launches.

Satellite internet.

Artificial intelligence.

Space exploration.

The man didn’t win the lottery.

He built companies that changed entire industries.

Since when did success become a crime in America?

Why are the people who claim to support innovation always attacking the innovators?

America became the greatest nation on earth because dreamers, builders, inventors, and entrepreneurs were rewarded for taking risks.

You don’t get to Mars by thinking small.

You don’t change the world by envying the people trying to build it.

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

In the mid-19th century, several of the Plains Indian nations were the tallest people on Earth.

This is the recorded observation of US Army medical officers, of naturalist explorers, of census-takers and of the anthropologist Franz Boas, whose extensive surveys of Indigenous populations in the late 19th century provide the most systematic data we have.

Bison-reliant men averaged approximately six feet in height, roughly an inch taller than bison-reliant women's male counterparts in non-bison nations, and substantially taller than European populations of the same period.

The Lakota, the Cheyenne, the Comanche, the Blackfoot: these were not small people. They were physically exceptional by the standards of any population anywhere in the world at that time. Army officers who encountered them in the Plains Wars described them repeatedly, with a combination of professional admiration and considerable personal alarm, as among the most physically impressive individuals they had ever seen.

The reason is not genetic.

The reason is bison.

A Plains Indian diet built around bison was one of the most nutritionally complete diets available to any human population on Earth in the 19th century. Fresh meat. Organ meat, liver eaten raw and warm from the kill, heart, kidney, brain, all consumed immediately.

Bone marrow, cracked and extracted, calorically the densest food available in nature. Fat, bison are not lean animals; a mature bull in peak autumn condition carries enormous fat reserves, particularly in the hump and around the organs. Pemmican, made from dried meat pounded with rendered fat and dried berries, was the shelf-stable concentrated nutrition that sustained winter and travel.

Protein. Fat. Fat-soluble vitamins A, D, E, K in the organs. Iron in the blood. Zinc in the meat. Omega-3 fatty acids from grass-fed ruminant tissue. B12. Creatine.

Everything the human body requires to reach its genetic height potential, present and bioavailable, in a package that required no processing, no supplementation, no fortification programme.

The Boas data is unambiguous. When the bison disappeared, the heights fell. The generation born after the slaughter was significantly shorter than the generation born before it. The same genetic stock, the same landscape, a different food supply: and the bodies recorded the change within a single generation.

This is not complicated.

This is protein and fat availability, written in bones, across a century.

The US government killed the food supply.

The people who had eaten it got shorter.

And then the same government's agricultural extension services arrived on the reservations with grain rations and flour and the suggestion that the former bison hunters should become wheat farmers.

The wheat farmers.

On the plains that the bison had managed for ten thousand years.

The plains that turned to dust within fifty years of the bison leaving them.

There is no version of this story that makes the people who planned it look good.

[Balanik @frankcbusch]

@Travisdhanraj @TomTSEC You spoke truth to power, I honour you.

[Balanik @frankcbusch]

@elonmusk I tell other Indigenous people, “there is no such thing as white”. There is however, Irish, Scottish, Norwegian, Slovenian, etc.

If we are not willing to take the time to discover which specific “tribe” a Caucasian person descends from, why should they learn ours?

[Balanik @frankcbusch]

@elonmusk @elonmusk Everyone is Indigenous from somewhere, but we all come from the same race: the Human race!

[Balanik @frankcbusch]

@LouBrutus @jodyvance I appreciate your comments, and good game!

[Balanik @frankcbusch]

@jamiljivani God bless you, Mr Jovani!

[Balanik @frankcbusch]

@saskatchewan_in Nailed it.

[Jaynit @jaynitx]

>be Charlie Munger
>born 1924 in Omaha, Nebraska
>dad is a lawyer
>Great Depression hits when you're 5
>learn to be cheap before you learn to read

1930s:
>work at Buffett & Son grocery store
>owned by Warren Buffett's grandfather
>Warren works there too
>you never meet

childhood:
>read constantly
>every book you can find
>dad's law books, encyclopedias, everything
>called "a book with legs"
>develop opinions on everything
>never stop

1941:
>age 17, enroll at University of Michigan
>study mathematics
>Japan bombs Pearl Harbor
>leave school to enlist

1943-1946:
>serve in U.S. Army Air Corps
>become a meteorologist
>stationed in Alaska
>spend the war predicting weather and reading books
>lots of books

1946:
>apply to Harvard Law School
>no undergraduate degree
>former dean from Omaha vouches for you
>admitted anyway
>graduate magna cum laude in 1948
>age 24, already a lawyer

1940s-50s:
>practice law in California
>hate it
>clients are mostly idiots
>you tell them so
>not great for business
>make money but feel dead inside
>"I had a considerable passion to get rich. Not because I wanted Ferraris. I wanted independence."

1953:
>first marriage falls apart
>divorce
>wife takes everything
>you're broke again

1955:
>son Teddy diagnosed with leukemia
>he's 9 years old
>no cure
>watch him die slowly in the hospital
>marriage already over, so you walk the streets alone and weep

late 1950s:
>remarry: Nancy Barry Borthwick
>8 children total between you
>stability returns
>start making real money in real estate law and development

1959:
>a mutual friend sets up dinner
>"Charlie, you need to meet this guy Warren Buffett"
>you're 35, Buffett is 29
>dinner lasts hours
>you both realize immediately
>found your intellectual equal

1960s:
>start your own investment partnership
>Wheeler, Munger & Company
>same model as Buffett's partnership
>concentrated bets, long-term holds
>you're more aggressive than Warren
>higher highs, lower lows
>compound at 19.8% annually (vs. 5% for Dow)

1973-1974:
>market collapses
>your partnership down 31.9% in '73
>down another 31.5% in '74
>two brutal years back to back
>investors flee
>you hold
>shut down the partnership in 1975
>not because you failed because you're done managing other people's emotions

meanwhile:
>real estate development
>make millions building condos and apartments
>design some yourself
>architecture becomes a lifelong obsession
>no formal training

1978:
>become Vice Chairman of Berkshire Hathaway
>Warren: "Charlie is my partner"
>you own way less stock than him
>don't care about that either
>the work is what matters

your contribution:
>Warren used to buy "cigar butts": cheap, dying businesses with one puff left
>you teach him different
>"It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price"
>this becomes Berkshire's philosophy
>See's Candies, Coca-Cola, Apple all because of this shift
>you rewired the Oracle

1980:
>botched cataract surgery
>lose your left eye completely
>blind on one side forever
>doctors offer sympathy
>you: "it's fine, I didn't have that much use for it anyway"
>learn Braille just in case you lose the other one

mental models:
>borrow from every field: physics, biology, psychology, economics
>call it "worldly wisdom"
>invert problems: instead of asking how to succeed, ask how to fail, then avoid that
>"All I want to know is where I'm going to die, so I'll never go there"
>preach multidisciplinary thinking decades
>read 500+ pages a day until the day you die
>Buffett: "Charlie has the best 30-second mind in the world"

Daily Journal Corporation:
>buy a tiny legal newspaper company
>turn it into a software business
>worth $500M+ by the end
>your side project

2000s-2010s:
>crypto emerges
>you hate it immediately
>"rat poison"
>"venereal disease"
>"disgusting"
>never budge
>SBF collapses
>you feel vindicated

Costco:
>board member for decades
>obsessed with the company
>talk about it constantly
>own the stock forever
>"it's a damn miracle what they've built"
>Buffett buys it too eventually

partnership:
>60+ years working with Buffett
>never a contract
>never a fight
>never a betrayal
>speak daily
>maybe the greatest partnership in business history

2023:
>turn 99
>still show up to shareholder meetings
>still cracking jokes
>still reading
>body failing, mind sharp as ever

November 28, 2023:
>die peacefully in California
>5 weeks before your 100th birthday
>Buffett releases a statement:
>"Berkshire could not have been built to its present status without Charlie's inspiration, wisdom, and participation"

your legacy:
>taught Warren Buffett how to think bigger
>taught millions how to think better
>wrote "Poor Charlie's Almanack", a cult classic
>never cared about fame
>never cared about credit
>just wanted to be useful
>died with billions
>gave most of it away

"The best armor of old age is a well-spent life preceding it."

99 years of compounding wisdom.
and you made it look easy.

[Balanik @frankcbusch]

@VoyceReason Cool bruh, now do China.

[Balanik @frankcbusch]

@TroyWestwood A province wants to secede, so your solution is to change the rules so they can’t?
Why not just build a wall around Alberta to keep the warmth of collectivism in?
I think the Russians did that in Germany once, worked out great…

[James Bezan @jamesbezan]

Every drop of Crown Royal is made in Gimli, Manitoba using Manitoba grains and pure Interlake water. Our farmers and Crown Royal employees in Gimli are proud of their award winning whiskey, Canada’s number one spirits export.

Premier Ford, instead of attacking an iconic Canadian whiskey, let’s tear down interprovincial trade barriers and put Canada First.

If you go ahead with your threats, don’t be surprised if Manitoba pulls Ontario wine from our liquor markets.

[Markets & Mayhem @Mayhem4Markets]

a true legend

[Dividendology @dividendology]

How Peter Lynch selects stocks:

[Brew Markets @brewmarkets]

"If you are not aggressive, you are not going to make money, and if you are not defensive, you are not going to keep money."

— Ray Dalio

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

"Nobody buys a farm based on whether they think it’s going to rain next year. They buy because they think it’s a good investment over 10 or 20 years. It's the same with stocks. Think of stocks as a part ownership of a business. It's not that complicated." - Warren Buffett

[Compounding Quality @QCompounding]

“The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.” - Benjamin Graham