Video
We’ve read two stories yesterday that “clicked” together. One was Seth Godin’s post on media choices and how one must now deal with scarcity of attention. Another was a NYT story on the Disney deal with Youtube. Disney has incredible content, but they don’t have kids’ “ears” anymore – incredibly enough for people over 30, Youtube does. On the other hand, Disney brings Youtube credibility with advertisers and families (the latter worry their kids only go on Youtube to watch what they perceive as useless, mindless, purposeless videos). What can we do as long-term investors? Probably nothing, and that’s OK.
The London Business School has made all of the presentations and panels from the 2011 Global Leadership Summit available (if you complete a free registration form). It’s their flagship annual conference and the theme this year is “innovation”. So far it’s been great to watch, starting with 3M’s CEO George Buckley on the first video – and not just because of the pretty decent joke about “3M’s greatest marketing mistake”: the company should have branded “3M” in Neil Armstrong’s boots that landed on the moon…
First a quick interview (yes, that’s right) with Stephen Hawking. Off-topic for sure, but still inspiring. His sense of humor is impressive. Now for the meat of this post, a one-hour video (also embedded below) with Buffett and Ajit Jain, who emerged from the Dave Sokol affair as a very likely “candidate” for Buffett’s succession [...]
The London Business School’s Business Strategy Review (BSR) magazine/ website has a “World Business Leaders Series” worth spending some time on. We comment on a video with the Chairman of the London Stock Exchange and we highlight sections that, although intended for business in general, can also be framed for the specifics of investment management.
We’re glad to post a recent story from new Blogroll inductee Simoleon Sense. This blog is a great source for thought-provoking, multidisciplinary everything. This post is a video interview with James Simons of Renaissance Tech, the famous “quant” fund. Mr. Simons’ talk goes about how he started his life with a passion for mathematics and how that eventually led him to investments. We’ve embedded the video and highlighted a few moments inside.
In our latest quarterly report, we discuss the notion of “economic moat” in the second part of the Sand Castles, Concrete Walls text. In it we quote from a 1998 Warren Buffett talk to Florida University MBA students that is simply a must-see. It’s a very candid talk in which Mr. Buffett discusses not only the fundamental aspects of value investing in a bit more detail than we get nowadays, but also some sector and company-specific opinions that, again, he now seems more reluctant to share outside of the Berkshire letters to shareholders. We post the 10 videos inside and the link to a transcript of the entire session. Video number 10 alone is worth watching and sharing with friends, and not just those in the financial industry: he proposes a mental exercise about the “ovarian lottery” that’s really thought-provoking.
Read more about Investment classics: Buffett @ Florida, 1998
One month or so ago we received a newsletter from another asset manager with links to TED talks by Sir Ken Robinson. Today is a holiday in Rio (yet another one), and our state has been hit with torrential rain and subsequent land slides that killed over 650 people – the type of tragedy that unfortunately keeps occurring in Brazil. We can’t help but be reminded of the power of education in changing societies: it’s not all about short-term economic growth. It’s not just “any” education either, although Brazil is still at such a low level that literacy rates still matter, it’s about the quality of education as well. That’s the subject of the inspiring and often funny talks inside. We hope you will enjoy them and think about the issue as it applies to your country.
As we return from the November 15th holiday, we highlight a few of the interesting “building blocks”-pieces we’ve read or watched, in this case “watched”. Some more useful and actionable, some to keep in the back of our minds and “ruminate” on and see if later “clicks” with other issues in our minds. “The day only has 24 hours” for sure, and yet we must find the time to expand horizons and read widely as well. We’ll start things lightly with these two videos…
We love it when readers send us great material, and when they’re 16 years old we’re even more impressed. This video is a very well-crafted summary of and ad for Steven Johnson’s new book (same name as our post). There’s also a TED talk that expands somewhat and exemplifies. In the TED video Mr. Johnson gets a bit more “pro-crowdsourcing”, in the sense that there’s an obvious trade-off between intellectual property protection vs. opening up to collaborative business models. As we’ve posted here almost a year ago, there are limits to crowdsourcing that should be minded before launching any type of “open” initiative.
Update (April 6th, 2010): Please see inside for Mike Burry’s op-ed in the New York Times ranting on the Fed. On tour to promote his book “The Big Short”, Michael Lewis interviews have been popping up all over the Internet. Required reading is the excerpt from the book at Vanity Fair. We especially liked this bit: “I hated discussing ideas with investors,” (Mike Burry said), “because I then become a Defender of the Idea, and that influences your thought process. Once you became an idea’s defender, you had a harder time changing your mind about it.”
