Read More“‘The prize ring lost a good man in you,’ he said, laughing. ‘You were getting a licking but you hung on. That’s what you always want to do. You know how you feel and maybe you feel pretty bad. But you don’t know how the other fellow feels. Maybe he is worse off than you are. A fight is never over until one man is out,’ he emphasized. ‘As long as you ain’t that man you have a chance. To be a champion you have to learn to take it or you can’t give it.’” – Bernard M. Baruch (1957)
“Don’t call it a comeback. I’ve been here for years.” – L.L. Cool J (1990)
Q3 2019 Letter
Read More“‘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
Q2 2019 Letter
Read More“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
Q1 2019 Letter
Read More“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
2018 Annual Letter
Read More"It's all a process, steps along a path. Becoming requires equal parts patience and rigor. Becoming is never giving up on the idea that there's more growing to be done." - Michelle Obama
Q3 2018 Letter
Read More“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
Q2 2018 Letter
Read More“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
Q1 2018 Letter
Read More“Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can’t nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” – Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (1977)
2017 Annual Letter
Read More“Tomorrow hides inside yesterday.” – Yusef Komunyakaa
Q3 2017 Letter
Read More"Be entrepreneurial about your education." – Ta-Nehisi Coates
Q2 2017 Letter
Read More"Men may not get all they pay for in this world, but they must certainly pay for all they get." – Frederick Douglass
Q1 2017 Letter
Read More“The problem is that we’re asking the wrong question. The issue is not which horse in the race is the most likely winner, but which horse or horses are offering odds that exceed their actual chances of victory. This may sound elementary, and many players may think they are following this principle, but few actually do. Under this mindset, everything but the odds fades from view. There is no such thing as ‘liking’ a horse to win a race, only an attractive discrepancy between his chances and his price.” – Steven Crist
2016 Annual Letter
Read More“The surprise came at the conclusion of the event. The winner was revealed to be not a grandmaster with a state-of-the-art PC but a pair of amateur American chess players using three computers at the same time. Their skill at manipulating and ‘coaching’ their computers to look very deeply into positions effectively counteracted the superior chess understanding of their grandmaster opponents and the greater computational power of other participants. Weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone, and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.” – Garry Kasparov
Q3 2016 Letter
Read More“What I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; sweep streets so well that all the hosts of heaven and earth will have to pause and say, ‘Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.’” – Martin Luther King Jr.
Q2 2016 Letter
Read More“A man with a bulldozer can dig a ditch faster than one with only a shovel, but he is not more efficient; he just has more capital to work with.” – Paul Krugman
Q1 2016 Letter
Read More“By their fruits you will know them.” – Matthew 7:16
2015 Annual Letter
Read More“Why shoot the breeze about it when you could be about it?” – Nasir Jones
Q3 2015 Letter
Read More“In the search for truth there are certain questions that are not important. Of what material is the universe constructed? Is the universe eternal? Are there limits or not to the universe? What is the ideal form of organization for human society? If a man were to postpone his search and practice for Enlightenment until such questions were solved, he would die before he found the path.” – Buddha
Q2 2015 Letter
Read More“But to [yield superior results] he must follow specific methods that are not generally accepted in Wall Street, since those that are so accepted do not seem to produce the results everyone would like to achieve. It would be rather strange if—with all the brains at work professionally in the stock market—there could be approaches which are both sound and relatively unpopular. Yet our own career and reputation have been based on this unlikely fact.” – Benjamin Graham
Q1 2015 Letter
Read More“The notes I handle no better than many pianists. But the pauses between the notes— ah, that is where the art resides!” – Artur Schnabel