Q3 2024 Letter

“And let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we do not lose heart.” – Galatians 6:9

“Which of you by worrying can add one cubit to his stature?” – Matthew 6:27

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Q2 2024 Letter

“First day of practice we had to learn the rules of basketball. Now, most people think rules tell you what you cannot do. But rules also tell you what you can do.”

– Bill Russell

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Q3 2023 Letter

“Yet we cannot avoid the conclusion that the most generally accepted principle of timing--viz., that purchases should be made only after an upswing has definitely announced itself--is basically opposed to the essential nature of investment. Traditionally the investor has been the man with the patience and the courage of his convictions who would buy when the harried or disheartened speculator was selling. If the investor is now to hold back until the market itself encourages him, how will he distinguish himself from the speculator, and wherein will he deserve better than the ordinary speculator’s fate?” – Benjamin Graham & David Dodd

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Q2 2023 Letter

“Often when a young coach comes to see me to ask for advice, I tell them to imprint their vision of the game and not to forget that the game itself is a good coach and that observation is often as effective as talking. During a match, there are billions of possible combinations, and that’s what makes football the wonderful, rich, surprising sport that it is. A player is constantly adapting his technique to the situation. He cannot act just on reflex. He has to prepare, correct himself, find his place, decide: All this is something he acquires, he works on, he builds on. But he will need to be innovating constantly as he makes his decisions because the situation will never be exactly the same as whatever he experienced in the previous scenario, in the previous match. Our sport depends on three criteria: ball control, decision making, and the quality of execution.” – Arséne Wenger

“Rather than being told which tools are available for which ends, it is more useful to invent your own tools.” – Richard Serra

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Q2 2022 Letter

Yes. You can short civilization if you want. Not a bad bet really. But no one to pay you if you win. Whereas if you go long on civilization, and civilization (therefore) survives, you win big. So the smart move is to go long. Go long. – Kim Stanley Robinson

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Q3 2021 Letter

“Mediocre people don’t like high achievers, and high achievers don’t like mediocre people. So, if everybody doesn’t buy into the same principles and values of the organization at the same high standard, you’re never going to be successful. Just like our spring practice right now. You know what my goal with spring practice is? Get the right guys on the bus. Get them in the right seats. And get the wrong guys off the bus.” – Nick Saban

“They're a rotten crowd,” I shouted across the lawn. “You're worth the whole damn bunch put together.” – Nick Carraway

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Q2 2021 Letter

“I venture that ‘current trends’ will no longer hold. That’s because ‘current trends’ always look linear while history’s full arc almost never does. […] Life is like the Mississippi. It flows. It meanders. Zoom in close enough, and you may find a straight edge, but the whole landscape is a restless and ever-curving thing.”
– Ben Orlin, Change Is the Only Constant

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Q1 2021 Letter

“Each crisis also has its unique individual features – the nature of the shock, the object of speculation, the form of credit expansion, the ingenuity of the swindlers and the nature of the incident that touches off revulsion. But if one may borrow a French phrase, the more something changes, the more it remains the same. Details proliferate; structure abides.”
– Charles P. Kindleberger and Robert Aliber

”The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices / Make instruments to plague us.”
-
King Lear (5.3.162-163)

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Q3 2020 Letter

“Newton’s patience was limitless. Truth, he said much later, was ‘the offspring of silence and meditation.’ And he said: ‘I keep the subject constantly before me and wait ‘till the first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into a full and clear light.’”
– James Gleick, Isaac Newton (2003)

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Q2 2020 Letter

“It’s important therefore to know who the real enemy is and to know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language and so you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn’t shaped properly so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says that you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of that is necessary. There will always be one more thing.”
– Toni Morrison (1975)

“But over the years, no amount of wealth, education or prestige has distracted me from the discrimination, prejudice and segregation of opportunity that America’s communities of color endure. In my years on Wall Street, I have been doubted, discounted and judged reflexively on the basis of my skin color. The past few months have exposed our societal failures even further. We must heed the call to dismantle the inequality that makes careers such as mine the exception — rather than the rule.

“In finance, firms owned by white men manage 98.7 percent of the $69 trillion managed by the U.S. asset management industry. Similarly, 88 percent of senior fund managers are white and even analysts and associate managers, more junior positions, are more than 70 percent white. When it comes to the Federal Reserve, the State Department, the legal profession or myriad other fields, extraordinary qualifications are required for blacks to compete at the same level as their white colleagues.”
– Eddie Brown (2020)

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Q1 2020 Letter

I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (1954)

“I tried to look ahead by decades rather than by quarters, and to rebut economists who contended that the advanced economies were doomed to subpar growth for a long time. I told the graduates, ‘Both humanity’s capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.’ In short, I tried to convince them that the New York Yankees Hall of Famer Yogi Berra was wrong when he said that the future ain’t what it used to be.”
– Ben S. Bernanke (2015)

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Q3 2019 Letter

“‘Let me taste the dish,’ said Brillat-Savarin, ‘and you can spare yourself the rhetoric on how well you cook.’” – As paraphrased by Rosser Reeves in Reality in Advertising (1961)

“Real G’s move in silence like lasagna.” - Lil Wayne

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Q2 2019 Letter

“Your opportunity here and beyond this campus is huge, demanding, and vital. You are singularly able more than previous generations; not because you are smarter (although you may be) or because you have tools your predecessors lacked, but because you have time. Time is on your side, as is a chance to fashion an amazing future. Relish it. Use it. Revel in it.” – Toni Morrison

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Q1 2019 Letter

“I was lucky to come off no worse than I did. None of this would have happened if, as I wish I had done, I had asked myself beforehand, ‘If you do this, what do you want to happen?’ and ‘If you do this, what do you think will happen?’ I wouldn’t have liked either answer. These two questions became valuable guides for me in the future.” – Ed Thorp

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Q3 2018 Letter

“Just stay busy, stay working. Puff told me, like, the key to this joint—the key to staying on top of things—is treat everything like it's your first project, nomsayin'? Like, it's your first day, like, back when you was an intern. Like, that's how you try to treat things like, just stay hungry."
— The Notorious B.I.G. on the intro to “My 1st Song” by Jay-Z

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Q2 2018 Letter

 “A man who examines the saddle and bridle and not the animal itself when he is out to buy a horse is a fool; similarly, only an absolute fool values a man according to his clothes, or according to his social position, which after all is only something that we wear like clothing.” – Seneca

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