Mentalmodels
Quick post. This long May 2010 interview with Seth Klarman (by WSJ’s Jason Zweig) is pretty interesting in all regards. While we don’t necessarily agree with everything he says or does, long-time readers of our reports have probably noticed by now that we like to quote his no-B.S. lines – and his famously out-of-print book is a perennial reading list favorite here.
The text inside did not appear in our Q2 2010 report in English, but we’ve brought it to Buysiders. It’s about “visibility” in the markets: do investors really alternate between periods of “excellent” and “very poor” visibility or is that just an illusion? We choose the latter. As Warren Buffett says, “Forecasts usually tell us more of the forecaster than of the future”.
Read more about IP report excerpts, vol.7, part 1: on visibility
Many analogies with investing in this Slate post about a mountaineer’s worst mistakes. Quoting from the introduction: “(…) I was curious about the kind of attitude you develop toward error when a single mistake can easily cost you your life. I also wanted to test a hypothesis that I call “the paradox of error”: If your goal is to avoid making mistakes, then you must constantly assume that you are about to make one. That’s why fields like aviation and medicine have, at their best, a productive obsession with error.”
Quick collection of articles and papers with “psychological tidbits”. The first one is interesting as it can be seen as a sort of counter-argument against “confirmation bias”, but there’s more…
Munger’s classic speech in 1995 at the Harvard Law School is the quintessential example of the multitude of his mental models. In it Mr. Munger describes 24 “standard causes for human misjudgement” in separate, but then reminds us that these can combine to create potentially multiplied consequences. Since it can happen for good or bad, we’re better off informed and much smarter for the effort.
A few (seemingly) random thoughts and quotes on misdirection, disorientation and how to benefit from it. If that doesn’t convince the reader to click on “read more”, there’s a Charlie Munger quotation inside worth the read.
Reader-suggested video in which James Surowiecki (author of “The Wisdom of Crowds”) interviews Michael Mauboussin from Legg Mason about “Think Twice”, Mauboussin’s book. It’s about mental traps we fall into and how to think better, and the video discusses many of the examples in the book. “Think Twice” has been out for a while and it’s a good “building block” read, a contrast to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Blink”. Read them both and more.
We can’t resist repeating this funny story about change – and we suspect more than a few readers will relate to it. But ultimately this is about how feeble our attempts at forecasting really are. For some things we are way too pessimistic and tend to ignore the exponential aspects of some innovation curves. For others, we are way too optimistic. The trick then is to not rely on either.
“If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?” Peter Drucker’s question can be applied in both the big picture and small picture – from the broadest strategic moves of your company to its tiniest daily processes. More than that: try substituting “company” in the previous sentence for “department”, “nation”, “regulatory system” and even “life”.
In his latest post, Tom Barrack of Colony Capital writes about some similarities between a big wave surfer and a successful investor. While we would be even more conservative in general, we agree with most the “credos”.
