Mirel

investors, economists, central bankers, on camera and off script. pause where i tell you

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Jeff Bezos once asked Warren Buffett why almost nobody copies his investing strategy, since it is simple enough for a child to follow.

Buffett's answer was one sentence, and it quietly explains why most people never get rich.

this was two of the richest men who have ever lived, on a stage in Miami. Bezos was genuinely puzzled. the strategy is public, it is free, and it is not hard to understand. so why does almost no one actually run it?

Buffett did not hesitate.

"my approach is a get-rich-slowly scheme. people don't like those"

that is the whole answer. the best strategy in the world is not locked behind a paywall. it is just boring. it works, but slowly, and slow does not sell.

the proof is Buffett himself. he built more than 90 percent of his fortune after his 60th birthday. the money was always coming. almost no one is willing to sit still long enough to collect it.

then Bezos added the number that makes it usable. think in seven years instead of three, he said, and you get a head start on nearly everyone, because most people cannot wait that long for a reward.

the edge was never a secret. it is public, free, and impossible to patent. the only thing standing between people and it is the patience to let time finish the job

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Charlie Munger once sat down and worked out the easiest ways to kill American fighter pilots. it is one of the reasons he ended up worth billions.

he was not a villain. he was running the single mental trick that made him Warren Buffett's partner for sixty years.

in World War II, Munger was a meteorologist. his job was to clear pilots to fly, and lives rode on every call.

instead of asking how to keep them alive, he flipped the question. "suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots. what is the easy way to do it?"

the answer came fast. send a plane into icing it cannot handle, or route a pilot somewhere he runs out of fuel before he can land. two clean ways to guarantee a dead pilot.

so he built his whole job around staying miles away from those two things. he never solved it forwards. he solved it backwards, and the pilots lived.

he called it inversion. the idea was not even his. he took it from a dead Prussian mathematician named Carl Jacobi, whose entire rule was two words: invert, always invert.

Munger ran it on everything after that. hand him a country to fix and he would first map every way to wreck it, then quietly avoid all of them.

"it is the same thing, just in reverse, and it works better"

most people spend their lives chasing how to win. Munger spent 99 of them asking how to lose, and then refusing to.

you do not need to be brilliant to come out ahead. you need to know exactly how you would fail, and then never do that ↓

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Tim Cook runs the most valuable company on earth, worth over 3 trillion dollars, and he says the two things everyone chases to get hired there barely matter.

no degree required. no coding required. what he actually screens for is whether you believe a piece of broken math.

this was on Dua Lipa's BBC podcast in 2023, and the answer surprised the room. Cook will tell you to learn to code, he calls it "the only global language we all share." then he happily hires people who never write a line of it.

what he cannot hire without is one strange conviction.

"do they deeply believe that one plus one equals 30?"

it sounds like nonsense. that is the entire test. he is checking whether you think a team can produce something far larger than the people inside it, or whether you quietly believe one plus one is just two.

the other traits are the same shape. curiosity, people who ask why and how about everything. creativity, people who can see around the corner before the corner arrives.

because Apple's job, in his words, is to build products people "can't live without, but didn't know they needed." more than a billion people now carry one in a pocket. you do not get there hiring someone who only adds.

the most valuable company on earth does not hire for what you already know. it hires for whether you believe your work can multiply, or only add ↓

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@r_ric000 the base isn't fixed though. 1,000 dollars at 15 percent for 40 years is about 267,000, not 1,500. your 50 percent is one single year. compounding is the small base quietly becoming the big one. and yes, the timing is cruel, which is exactly why almost no one waits.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Jeff Bezos once asked Warren Buffett why almost nobody copies his investing strategy, since it is simple enough for a child to follow.

Buffett's answer was one sentence, and it quietly explains why most people never get rich.

this was two of the richest men who have ever lived, on a stage in Miami. Bezos was genuinely puzzled. the strategy is public, it is free, and it is not hard to understand. so why does almost no one actually run it?

Buffett did not hesitate.

"my approach is a get-rich-slowly scheme. people don't like those"

that is the whole answer. the best strategy in the world is not locked behind a paywall. it is just boring. it works, but slowly, and slow does not sell.

the proof is Buffett himself. he built more than 90 percent of his fortune after his 60th birthday. the money was always coming. almost no one is willing to sit still long enough to collect it.

then Bezos added the number that makes it usable. think in seven years instead of three, he said, and you get a head start on nearly everyone, because most people cannot wait that long for a reward.

the edge was never a secret. it is public, free, and impossible to patent. the only thing standing between people and it is the patience to let time finish the job

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@adelin02t exactly. and it's the one edge that pays more the more people skip it. their impatience is literally where your returns come from. you're not out-smarting the crowd, you're out-waiting it.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@ottowallace hiciste del Duque, así que literalmente presidiste el juicio por contrato más famoso de la literatura. con razón se te quedó.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@cryp_cryp right every single time. and that's the catch: knowing the panic passes is the easy part. staying in your seat while everyone else runs is the part almost no one can actually do.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

In 2020, at 89 years old, Warren Buffett was asked whether America was living through the most dangerous political split in its history. he calmly said it was not.

the way he waved it off is the same instinct that made him one of the richest men alive.

everyone was sure the country had never been this divided. Buffett had heard that exact sentence his whole life.

he took them back to the Vietnam years. he was in New York, watched the crowds fill Wall Street, and said both sides were every bit as inflamed as they are now. the anger ran so hot it drove a sitting president, Lyndon Johnson, out of the 1968 race.

and long before that, he reminded them, the country had fought an actual civil war against itself.

"I do not regard this as some unique period in history"

then the tell. he said he has been reading about "unique periods in history" since he was a boy. every generation is certain its own moment is the exception.

that certainty has a price. "this time is different" is the most expensive sentence in markets. it talks people out of the long bet at the exact moment the long bet pays.

Buffett heard "unprecedented" for eighty years and kept buying America the whole way through.

the feeling that your era is uniquely doomed is not information. it is the oldest illusion there is, and it has quietly moved money from frightened people to patient ones in every single generation

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@Jsul11235 agreed. and the lecture makes your point sharper: the real divide in the play isn't Jew vs Christian, it's who keeps their word. Shylock is the one character who never breaks a promise, while everyone around him does.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

In 2009 a Yale professor opened The Merchant of Venice in front of his finance class and said the whole world had been reading Shakespeare wrong for 400 years.

it is taught as a love story about anti-Semitism. he called that the least interesting thing in it.

the play is a finance textbook. Shakespeare understood interest, risk and collateral 300 years before economists gave them names.

the plot is a loan. Bassanio is broke and needs 3,000 ducats to court a rich heiress. he is the impatient borrower.

Shylock is the patient lender. that gap, one man who cannot wait and one who can, is the whole theory of what sets an interest rate. Yale's own Irving Fisher would later call interest "crystallized impatience." the play got there first.

then the part everyone misses. the rate they finally agree on is zero. not a single coin.

the entire deal is the collateral, a pound of Antonio's flesh. it is Shakespeare answering the oldest question in finance: why would anyone keep a promise? because something they cannot bear to lose is on the line.

even the romance is priced. Portia's dead father makes each suitor choose one of three caskets, gold, silver or lead, and swear off marriage forever if he picks wrong. higher risk, higher reward, staged as a parlor game.

the professor's proof is Antonio's opening line. not a word about love. he is calm about his fortune only because his ships sail on different oceans at different times, so no single storm can sink him.

Shakespeare wrote diversification into the opening sentence.

he hid a course on money inside a love story. that is how it survived 400 years, while almost everyone missed what it was teaching ↓

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Milton Friedman held up an ordinary pencil in 1980 and said nobody alive could make it

pause at 1:03, that is where one cheap object turns into a map of thousands of strangers

“There is not a single person in the world who could make this pencil.”

“Literally thousands of people cooperated to make this pencil.”

different languages, different religions, people who might hate one another if they met. no central office gave them orders. prices coordinated the work

the cheapest objects often contain the largest networks of human cooperation

[Mirel @mireltrace]

NYU charges $2,200 for an Advanced Valuation certificate while the professor teaching it publishes complete courses on valuation and investing for free.

The paid program adds live meetups, a hands-on project, and a certificate. His public library offers something narrower but more fundamental: the classroom logic behind the numbers.

His name is Aswath Damodaran. He holds NYU Stern's Kerschner Family Chair in Finance Education.

His free Investment Philosophies course contains 38 short webcasts, with slides and tests beside them. Session 12 takes about 15 minutes and dismantles one of investing's most persistent labels.

A low P/E stock is not automatically a value investment. Damodaran calls that the lazy definition.

His definition is stricter. A value investor buys only when the value of assets already in place exceeds the price paid. Future growth is the icing, not the thesis.

That separates a bargain from a value trap.

A low multiple can mean the market missed something. It can also mean the business is deteriorating faster than the spreadsheet admits.

Put his definition to work. Value the cash flows already in place. Separate them from growth that has not happened. Compare that value with the price. Treat future growth as upside, not as the reason the stock looks cheap.

Investors can screen thousands of companies in seconds and still skip the one calculation that makes the word “value” mean anything.

The lecture, slides, tests, and the rest of the course remain free on Damodaran's NYU page.

The videos cost nothing. Refusing to call a stock cheap until its assets in place are worth more than its price is the part no course can do for you.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@cryp_cryp nice post, Tema

[Mirel @mireltrace]

right. and the layer under it is worse. they cannot fully read the model, but they can predict how much stronger the next one will be before they even build it. Altman said it on the tape, they knew the demo would work before training it. we now forecast the power of things we cannot explain.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Bill Gates and Sam Altman spent an hour talking about AI. the line that matters most was not a prediction.

it was the moment Altman calmly admitted what OpenAI still cannot do.

Gates, a lifelong skeptic, told him he did not expect ChatGPT to get this good, then asked a strange question. where inside the model does something like Shakespeare actually live.

Altman did not dodge it. he said they can take the network apart and read every number in it, and still cannot answer.

"we can perfectly X-ray it"

"and we don't really know"

the most powerful software ever built, and the people who built it cannot fully read their own creation. he goes further. ask GPT-4 the same question ten thousand times and one answer is excellent, but the model does not know which one.

then, in the same hour, the two of them quietly describe the next breakthrough before it exists.

Gates sketches it first, that hard problems will need more steps and more control, not just one pass. Altman names the fix.

"right now we spend the same compute on a dumb word or a complicated math problem"

months later that exact idea shipped as reasoning models.

the frontier is not built by the people who understand what they made. it is built by the people who can see where it goes next, while admitting they cannot fully explain what it already is ↓

[Superior @andreysuperior]

https://t.co/rUN1cPDY65

[Mirel @mireltrace]

a Harvard Business School professor spent his career explaining why unstoppable companies suddenly collapse. then he turned the same theory on his own graduating class, and it predicted their divorces.

this is Clayton Christensen, the man who coined disruption. he gave this talk in 2012 and was gone by 2020. it lands less like a lecture than a warning.

his whole theory was that great companies die not from stupidity, but from doing everything right. Lucent and Nortel had the best circuit switching in the world. a small company called Cisco showed up at the bottom with a worse product, the router, and buried them.

"I wonder who decided at Lucent that they should go out and get killed"

nobody decided. every person made a rational call, and the calls added up to a catastrophe.

then he aims it at the room. he graduated Harvard Business School in 1979. at the five year reunion everyone was thriving. by the twenty fifth, a huge share were divorced, estranged, their kids being raised on the other side of the country.

"none of my classmates ever planned to go out and get divorced and have children who hate their guts"

same mechanism. a spare hour goes wherever achievement shows up fastest. the deal closes, the product ships, you get promoted, you get paid. family only pays off in twenty years, so the most driven people quietly starve the one thing they call their deepest source of happiness.

near the end he names his own measure of a life.

"he's not going to ask how high I went in anybody's org chart, or how much money I left behind in the bank when I died"

nobody schedules the day their life goes wrong. it is just the sum of a hundred reasonable choices to do the urgent thing first ↓

[Mirage @dontstopmirage]

https://t.co/pSo9zNwHeW

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@cryp_cryp well said. the wild part is in 2008 that exact "never gives up" looked reckless, not inspiring. we only get to call it conviction because it worked. back then he was just a man refusing to fold with no proof he was right yet.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Elon Musk stood in a Los Angeles living room in December 2008, twelve days from bankruptcy, and spent the whole time joking about someone else's bailout.

Tesla was almost out of cash. so was he.

on camera he is loose, funny, working the room. he ribs the Big Three for grabbing most of a 25 billion clean-car loan fund to keep building gas guzzlers, and notes Tesla asked Washington for the opposite, money to build a cheaper car.

he points out his own Roadster parked outside. they are about to hand over the 100th one.

then the line that ages the whole clip.

"my salary's minimum wage, so I'm a volunteer, basically"

the man calmly laying out the long game was borrowing money just to get by, and his company had days of cash left.

"you can't get to the low cost cars unless you start with the expensive cars"

the money that saved Tesla did not clear until six in the evening on Christmas Eve. it was the last hour it still could have.

the founder who looks most in control is usually the one standing closest to the edge. calm is not proof that nothing is wrong. sometimes it is just the last thing you still own ↓

[Mirage @dontstopmirage]

https://t.co/pSo9zNwHeW

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@0xwerden this is the cleanest breakdown of the NEO catch i've seen. the fine print rents you a person, said perfectly.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

@Rulyaxd exactly. the leg everyone calls impossible is the one with the least competition left. that is why it pays the most and shakes the most people out right before it runs.

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Peter Thiel sold his Facebook stock for $638 million in 2012. the company he walked away from is now worth 1.5 trillion dollars.

and he is the one investor who should have seen it coming.

Thiel built his whole career on a single rule: bet on what is true when almost everyone thinks you are wrong. he was the first outside investor in Facebook, in 2004, back when the entire company was worth five million dollars.

he watched it climb one order of magnitude at a time. 5 million in 2004. 85 million in 2005. 525 million in 2006. each jump looked about as hard as the last.

so at the 2012 IPO, around 100 billion, he sold. he assumed the next step, 100 billion to a trillion, would be the hardest one of all.

on camera, he admits it was the opposite.

"you always want to invest in things that are true and contrarian"

going from 100 billion to a trillion turned out to be the easiest jump of them all, and almost nobody believed it was possible. true, and contrarian. the exact trade he spent his life preaching, sitting in his own portfolio, and he let it go.

Piers asked if it was the biggest mistake of his career.

"the biggest mistake people make is never making mistakes"

the insight to buy early is common. the rare thing is the conviction to hold through the stretch nobody else believes in ↓

[Mirel @mireltrace]

Warren Buffett explains the whole business of risk in one sentence a child understands

he was asked about insurance, and answered with the line he has been repeating for decades

pause at 1:51, that is the sentence the whole industry runs on

"only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked"

every crisis proves it again, from 1998 to 2008 to now

the smartest risk is the kind nobody can see because the water is still high