WealthLens

Finance & investing, explained simply

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

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[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

In 1994, Jeff Bezos was 30 years old, a vice president at a Wall Street hedge fund, sitting on an annual bonus he was about to walk away from.

He quit mid-year anyway, and forfeited that bonus completely.

He drove to Seattle with his wife in a used 1988 Chevy Blazer, with a business plan for selling books online.

His parents put in about 300,000 dollars, a big chunk of their life savings, and Bezos told them straight: there was a 70 percent chance they'd lose every cent.

He explained the logic he used to make the call: "I wanted to project myself forward to age 80 and say, 'Okay, now I'm looking back on my life. I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have.'"

And the part that actually decided it: "I knew that if I failed I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried."

Amazon's site went live on July 16, 1995.

Would you take a 70 percent chance of losing your parents' savings on your own idea? He explains exactly why he did, below.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@0x_Squirrel Three down months in 20 years, all under 1%, is wilder than the Black Monday story. That's not luck, that's a completely different relationship with risk.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

Picture a 21-year-old riding a bus for two hours every morning and two hours back every night, just to reach a construction site.

He was broke, living alone in a one-bedroom apartment, with nothing to his name but the labor of his hands.

One day on that bus, Brian Tracy decided something simple: he was responsible for exactly where his life was going, and for exactly where it would go next. He called it, decades later, "one of the great turning points in my life."

From that, he built an entire lecture around one line: "Success is not an accident. Failure is not an accident. Success leaves tracks."

So he started tracking the ones who'd made it. In 1900, there were 5,000 self-made millionaires in the whole of America. By 2000, that number had grown to 5 million, and by the time Tracy gave this talk, it stood at 8.2 million.

The economy behind those numbers was just as concrete: 12 trillion dollars, growing by 500 to 600 billion a year, with room for someone new to break in.

The average self-made millionaire, he said, worked 59 hours a week on the way up.

About staying stuck where you start, he was blunt: "The only question is, do you stay broke? And the answer is no."

The man on that bus with two hours each way eventually turned his own life into the case study. What he found on the way there is laid out below.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

https://t.co/BAhDk5LN3M

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@batagonx The Batchelor/Ramyar detail is the part that actually settles it random horizontal lines performing identically means the pattern-matching was never in the price data, it was in the person drawing the lines.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@batagonx Six forgotten auto-renewals is a genuinely good stat most people would guess one or two, not six. The T&C habit is basically Shiller's frictionless-manipulation point turned into a personal audit trail.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

In August 2015, a Nobel laureate walked onto the TEDxYale stage and basically accused free markets of deceiving people.

This wasn't some fringe critic of capitalism. It was Robert Shiller, the same economist who years earlier had flagged the housing bubble through his Case-Shiller index, before the 2008 crash.

This time he wasn't talking about home prices. He was talking about how free markets really work.

Classic economic theory says competition and Adam Smith's "invisible hand" will naturally push the system toward balance and shared prosperity.

Shiller says no. Wherever there's money to be made off human weakness (fear, laziness, the hope of easy gains), someone will exploit it. Not out of malice, but because competition forces them to.

Here's the twist: if one company refuses to play dirty (inflating prices on junk add-ons, selling predatory credit, auto-renewing subscriptions nobody remembers signing up for), a competitor without those scruples simply takes its place.

The core thesis of the book he was writing at the time: "markets both give and take away."

Free markets aren't an automatic prosperity machine. They produce useful goods and sophisticated traps with equal efficiency, wherever the money is.

The practical takeaway: when something is sold to you a little too smoothly (a credit card stacked with perks, a "free" subscription with auto-renewal, an "amazing deal" on insurance), don't ask why it's being offered to you. Ask who benefits from you not thinking about it.

save this one. ~14 min with Robert Shiller, Nobel laureate, on how markets profit from human weakness ↓

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

https://t.co/BAhDk5LN3M

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

Fair extension of the point "phishing for phools" isn't just consumer-facing, it shows up in jurisdiction shopping too. Wherever enforcement is weak or ambiguous, someone eventually structures around that gap. DIFC's appeal is basically the inverse: you're paying for predictability, not avoiding it.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@batagonx The 20% rule is a clean way to force that discipline mechanically instead of relying on gut feel about "how bubbly does this look." Removes the part where green candles talk you out of the math

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

On January 22, 2021, in the middle of the hottest stock rally in a decade, an 82-year-old investor went on Bloomberg and said something simple: this is a bubble, and it's worse than 1929.

This isn't Jeremy Grantham's first crash call. He flagged the dot-com bust in 2000, when everyone said "new economy," and the 2008 crisis, when everyone said real estate only goes up.

In spring 2020, markets crashed because of COVID. A few months later, indexes were hitting new records while the real economy was still in ruins.

Seems logical enough: massive stimulus, near-zero rates, markets pricing in recovery. Most analysts were celebrating the V-shaped bounce.

Grantham sees it differently. Not a recovery, a symptom. Money that should have gone into the real economy went into stocks and speculative assets instead.

His example: QuantumScape, a company with essentially no revenue, valued at its peak higher than General Motors.

His point cuts against the optimism of the moment: "bubbles have always without exception broken in the next few months, not a few years."

And one more line that undercuts the core investor illusion: "the higher you bid up the price of an asset, the lower the long-term return you will get."

The uncomfortable part is simple: euphoria in markets isn't a sign everything's fine. It's a signal to check whether price is still tied to actual cash flows, or has started living a life of its own.

save this one. ~12 min with Jeremy Grantham, the investor who called the crash twice, on the 2021 bubble ↓

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs walked onto the stage at Stanford's commencement and told the graduates he had never actually finished college.

He'd started Apple at 20, in his parents' garage, with Steve Wozniak and, as he put it, not much else.

Ten years after that, the company he'd built there was worth 2 billion dollars and employed more than 4,000 people.

Then, at 30, he was fired from it, in his words, "very publicly."

He told the students plainly: "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."

About a year before he gave this speech, in 2004, doctors had told him he had pancreatic cancer and maybe three to six months left to live, before a biopsy found a rarer, curable form that could be removed with surgery.

Talking about that scare, he gave the crowd the line people still quote today: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma."

He never went back to finish that degree. What he built after being fired, and what he said about running out of time, is easier to hear straight from him below.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

On the very first lecture of his valuation course, an NYU professor tells students something that breaks their expectations before they've even opened the textbook.

Aswath Damodaran is the guy the finance world calls the "Dean of Valuation." His course has been free on YouTube for over 20 years, and analysts and investment bankers everywhere still use it.

Students usually walk in with a clear picture: valuing a company is a precise science. Plug numbers into a discounted cash flow formula, get the right answer.

Damodaran breaks that picture right away. Valuation, he says, isn't science, where there's a right and wrong answer, and it isn't art, where you need innate talent. It's a craft.

His formula: "you learn valuation by doing, the better you are, the more you do it." You only get good at this through practice, and you're never really finished learning it.

Second thing that trips up beginners: price and value are not the same. Price depends on demand, market mood, and momentum. Value depends on cash flows, growth, and risk. Comparing companies by multiples like P/E isn't valuation, it's pricing, and confusing the two is dangerous.

To show what ignoring first principles really costs, he tells the story of Steady Safe, an Indonesian taxi company that borrowed in dollars while earning in local currency, and went bankrupt during the 1997 Asian financial crisis when the currency collapsed.

It wasn't a complicated formula that killed the company. It was breaking one basic rule: the currency of your debt has to match the currency of your income.

The broader lesson: the most expensive financial mistakes, for a company or for your own portfolio, rarely come from failing to run a DCF. They come from ignoring principles that seem too obvious to bother remembering.

save this one. a lecture with Aswath Damodaran, NYU Stern professor, on the difference between price and value ↓

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

https://t.co/BAhDk5LN3M

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@batagonx The part I keep coming back to: everything else compounds forward, time only compounds backward once it's spent. Cutting to ownership and health at 34 is basically front-loading the one thing you can't get back later.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs walked onto the stage at Stanford's commencement and told the graduates he had never actually finished college.

He'd started Apple at 20, in his parents' garage, with Steve Wozniak and, as he put it, not much else.

Ten years after that, the company he'd built there was worth 2 billion dollars and employed more than 4,000 people.

Then, at 30, he was fired from it, in his words, "very publicly."

He told the students plainly: "Getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."

About a year before he gave this speech, in 2004, doctors had told him he had pancreatic cancer and maybe three to six months left to live, before a biopsy found a rarer, curable form that could be removed with surgery.

Talking about that scare, he gave the crowd the line people still quote today: "Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma."

He never went back to finish that degree. What he built after being fired, and what he said about running out of time, is easier to hear straight from him below.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@batagonx Feeney also had zero dependents relying on that capital for future security — most people deploying while alive still need to plan for how long they'll actually live, not just dodge advisor fees. Good frame, but the drawdown math gets a lot scarier once you factor that in.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

In 1982, Chuck Feeney signed over his entire fortune, including a 38.75% stake in Duty Free Shoppers worth roughly $500 million at the time, to a foundation he called Atlantic Philanthropies. He kept doing this for over a decade without telling almost anyone, including most of the people he did business with.

Feeney co-founded Duty Free Shoppers in 1960, selling liquor and cigarettes to travelers passing through airports, and it made him one of the richest people alive by the 1980s. He flew coach until he was 75, never owned a house or a car, had one pair of shoes, and wore a $15 watch. His role as the anonymous donor behind Atlantic Philanthropies only surfaced in 1997, when a lawsuit tied to the sale of his DFS stake forced the disclosure.

By 2016, after decades of giving, Feeney had about $2 million left, down from a fortune that had once made him a billionaire many times over. He had given away more than $8 billion in total by the time Atlantic Philanthropies wound down. He died in 2023 at 92.

Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have both called Feeney the model for the Giving Pledge, the commitment they later got dozens of billionaires to sign.

Feeney ran his balance sheet in reverse. Instead of compounding the $500 million stake and dealing with it through an estate plan after death, he moved to give it away decades before he had to. That timing is the part of his approach that stands out.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@Neighboritto The blind spot matters more than the model here: it's excellent at spotting that turbulence will continue, and useless at spotting turbulence about to start. Every "99% confidence" risk number inherits that same limit.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@CryptoMichNL Accumulation calls always sound the same at the bottom and at the top, which is exactly why timing altcoins by feel is so hard. Rotation matters more than conviction here.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

@MuratMmturk Layered targets like this are useful as a roadmap, but I'd treat each level as a checkpoint to reassess rather than a guarantee. Price rarely respects the plan cleanly.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

On October 15, 1998, Warren Buffett spoke to a room of MBA students at the University of Florida.

Weeks earlier, Long-Term Capital Management had collapsed, and Berkshire had offered 3 billion dollars to buy its portfolio, alongside a 700 million dollar bid from AIG and 300 million from Goldman Sachs.

Buffett then went back nearly three decades, to 1972, when Berkshire paid 25 million dollars for a candy company called See's.

By 1998, See's was earning roughly 60 million dollars a year before taxes, on chocolate that had gone from 1.95 dollars a pound to 11 dollars a pound.

He explained why with one line: "Time is the friend of the wonderful business; it is the enemy of the lousy business."

Then he added the rule behind his own behavior: "Wall Street makes its money on activity. You make your money on inactivity."

A 25 million dollar candy company bought in 1972 had, by 1998, turned into one of Berkshire's steadiest earners, built on doing almost nothing for 26 years. The full talk, numbers and all, is below.

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

https://t.co/BAhDk5LN3M

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

Oil is ripping higher again. And this isn't "geopolitics somewhere far away." The U.S. hit three Iranian tankers. Iran is hitting back in the Strait of Hormuz. Result: WTI around $91, Brent higher, U.S. diesel already hitting records. That's not just ticker movement. It's what shows up at the pump and in shipping costs next. While some people watch peace talks in Kyiv, the market is watching the strait that carries about a fifth of the world's oil. One tanker catches fire, and the whole supply chain goes into chaos again. The question isn't whether prices go up, it's how fast, and who pays first: drivers, farmers, or governments. Peak… or just the warmup?

[WealthLens @WealthLens_]

https://t.co/BAhDk5LN3M