EOY Reading List II

Easy money-making opportunities are almost never real; professional mercenaries would have found and exploited them first.

Hello everyone,

I hope this newsletter finds you well. This week, I wanted to fulfil the promise I made last week and share with you some of the articles I've read and found interesting from the beginning of the year. I will continue to send a list of articles I've read weekly until the end of the year.

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Today, I’d share mostly investing and finance articles with a dash of relationship articles too.

This year, I found

Frederik Gieschen

‘s

Neckar's Minds and Markets

, and I’ve been glued. The writing is clear, simple and insightful. With deep dives on some of my favourite investors and a series on Buffett. While it is mostly finance-related, it started with personal articles. Since I love most of what I read here, I’d list my favourites with no summary.

1. Money: One Hell of a Drug (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty)

2. The Tiger That Was a Wolf: Lessons From Julian Robertson

3. The Reading Obsession

4. Family Business

5. Thinking About the Next Warren Buffett

From other sources:

1. Why every knowledge economy worker should learn to invest: The notion that everyone should be invested in the stock market, i.e. in index funds and mutual funds that mirror the market(VOO, SPX). However,

   Adam Singer
   argues that if you are a knowledge worker, which by chance means you are extremely online and can notice some trends, then you should be able to bet on what could change or something entirely new. This is like giving startups small checks, or buying stocks in a relatively obscure company not being followed by many analysts. You get to learn more about finance, and the downside is mostly limited, like making sports bets, only to the money you bet. This goes with the suggestion I agree with, that every investor should allocate a small part of the portfolio for speculation purposes.

2. A Rare Interview with Phil Fisher Following the 1987 Crash: With the market currently around -19% YTD, and interest rate rising, this is an interview which is both timely and timeless. Phil Fisher is one of the most influential investors for common sense investing, and someone whose teaching is on par with the likes of Buffett.

   “There are two fundamental approaches to investment. There’s the approach Ben Graham pioneered, which is to find something intrinsically so cheap that there is little chance of it having a big decline. He’s got financial safeguards to that. It isn’t going to go down much, and sooner or later value will come into it. Then there is my approach, which is to find something so good–if you don’t pay too much for it–that it will have very, very large growth.” - Phil Fisher

3. Pricing Power is Divine: Few companies can raise their prices, even then, it can’t go on forever.

   MoneyLemma
   explains how companies and by extension individuals can charge more. Ultimately, you want to be able to control your prices.

   “ Companies can transform their pricing power into market power and then use that market power to increase their profit.”

4. On bullshit in investing: It would be nice if we all recognized things that are too good to be true and avoided them in the first place, or at least limit our exposure to them. The investing industry is ridden with bullshit. The most common form is over-optimism: offers of tantalizing risk/reward that defy any notion of reality, often based on misinformation or deception. With crashes, and many games of deceptions blowing up, you’d think we’d learn, but being humans means that history will almost repeat itself.

   “Easy money-making opportunities are almost never real; professional mercenaries would have found and exploited them first.”

   And the last one this week, an article on relationship

5. The Lifetime Value of a Single Contact: LTV, is an important metric for businesses. For the uninitiated, it means the total revenue derived over the lifetime of a customer minus the cost in acquiring the customer. In real life situations, you really can’t quantify the value of someone in clear-cut numbers. How do you know the lifetime value of your friend who introduced you to your current partner, or your ex who helped you with your dissertation? Ultimately, you want to expose yourself to more people, have more LTV yourself to do so, keep your dealings honest and approach them with an attitude of how you can mutually help each other (not just what you can "get" from the other person).

That’s all for this week.

See you next week.