an edge..........................

 

You have to figure out what your own aptitudes are. If you play games where other people have the aptitudes and you don’t, you’re going to lose. And that’s as close to certain as any prediction that you can make. You have to figure out where you’ve got an edge. And you’ve got to play within your own circle of competence.

-Charlie Munger, from here

thanks Chris

Opening paragraphs.............

 Spend enough time in activist spaces and you start to see the patterns unfold before you, like a skipping record.  I am now some twenty-five years into a career as a part-time organizer.  Some years I've organized more, some I've organized less, and I took a break during grad school, but I've tried to get involved one way or another since I first became politically conscious as a teenager.  Over that time, I have watched the same dynamics play out again and again, dedicated organizers falling into the same sad patterns that obstruct progress.  The victories have been real, but the failures have been more frequent and bitter, sometimes resulting in the fracturing of groups and friendships.  There are many stories I could tell, and in this book I will tell some of them.

-Fredrik deBoer, from his Introduction to How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

in the heat of the moment...............

      More significant, perhaps, for his fate as a strategist was a trait he first exhibited here in the face of overwhelming odds: He knew when to quit and cut his losses.  This is a much-overlooked military capacity: in the heat of the moment to retain sufficient objectivity to recognize the prospect of sure defeat and then to summon the self-control to reverse course and withdraw.  For some—Grant, for instance—this proved impossible.  But Sherman's military career was studded with such moments, epiphanies of defeat, and they were emblematic of his eventual success.  He came to realize that in war there would be good days and bad days, but the ultimate objectives must always remain paramount.

-Robert L. O'Connell, Fierce Patriot: The Tangles Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman

hard-won..........................

Among those dazzled by the Administration team was Vic-President Lyndon Johnson.  After attending his first cabinet meeting he went back to his mentor Sam Rayburn and told him with great enthusiasm how extraordinary they were, each brighter than the next, and that the smartest of them all was that fellow with the Stacomb on his hair from the Ford Motor Company, McNamara.  "Well, Lyndon," Mister Sam answered, "you may be right and they may be every bit as intelligent as you say, but I'd feel a whole lot better about them if just one of them had run for Sheriff once."  It is my favorite story in the book, for it underlines the weakness of the Kennedy team, the difference between intelligence and wisdom, between abstract quickness and verbal facility which the team exuded, and true wisdom, which is the product of hard-won, often bitter experiences.  Wisdom for a few of them came after Vietnam.

-David Halberstam, from his Introduction to The Best And The Brightest 

About "the long tail"..........................

 A takeaway from that is that no matter what you’re doing, you should be comfortable with a lot of stuff not working. It’s normal. This is true for companies, which need to learn how to fail well. It’s true for investors, who need to understand both the normal tail mechanics of diversification and the importance of time horizon, since long-term returns accrue in bunches. And it’s important to realize that jobs and even entire careers might take a few attempts before you find a winning groove That’s how these things work.

-Morgan Housel, as extracted from here

On investing competition..........................

       Frankly, there's no substitute for limited competition.  You can be a genius, but if there's a lot of competition, it won't matter.  I've spent my career trying to avoid its destructive consequences.  Competition skews people's assessment; as buyer get competitive, the demand for assets inflates prices, often beyond reason.*

-Sam Zell, Am I Being Too Subtle:  Straight Talk From A Business Rebel

*Also known as "the winner's curse"

Perhaps, then.........................

 ............we should argue to learn, not to win:

     image via

Reminiscent...............................

 If Mr. Trump was less than honorable in refusing to acknowledge defeat, his opponents are less than satisfied with mere electoral victory. The current impeachment is reminiscent of the beheading of Oliver Cromwell, which took place two years after his death.

-Arnold Kling, from this read-worthy post

almost easy...........................

The Winner's Game in investing—open to all investors, so every investor can be a real winner—is almost easy.  Almost.  The first secret for success is that each investor has to ignore the "beat the market" hype that pervades the advertising that floods out of stockbrokers, "performance" mutual funds, and the investment letters from stock market gurus—all working with Mr. Market.
     The second secret for success is that each investor must decide for himself or herself what investment policy will, over the long term, have the best chance of producing the particular results he or she most wants to achieve.  These winning investors are not in competition with each other; they are in competition only with themselves.  Can they stay "on mission"—even when Mr. Market goes into his gyrations?

-Charles D. Ellis,  Winning The Loser's Game:  Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing

Not totally convinced that...............

......accurate explanations are all that easy, but this merits repeating:

"Coming up with explanations for past successes is easy but figuring out who the winners will be going forward never is."

-As concludes this Ben Carlson post

Even though I never watch.................

..................................... award shows, rarely go to the movies, and haven't seen an Oscar winning movie since 2010,  I am suspecting that this is really funny.

Parenting..............................

Deacon and Arnold Palmer

I've always had a fairly easygoing disposition.  But in my younger days would wouldn't have known it if you'd seem me on the golf course.  Something significant happened to me in 1946 that really changed how I went about my business on the golf course.
     My mother and father were on hand to watch my match in the West Penn Junior finals.  At one juncture I missed a short putt, something that infuriated me.  (It still does.)  In frustration, I flung my putter in disgust over the gallery and some small trees.  I won the title, but you wouldn't have known it on the car ride home.  I was met with stone silence.  Finally, my father spoke up.  "If you ever throw a club like that again, you'll never play in another golf tournament."
     I knew he was serious.  To Pap, there was nothing worse than a poor loser - except being an ungracious winner. ... I never threw another club again.

-Arnold Palmer,  A Life Well Played:  My Stories

As arguments go...............................

..........this one on behalf of free trade sounds pretty good.


"Free trade is the enemy of complacent corporations and their crony conspiracies with corrupt politicians. It ensures that business serves its customers more than its owners."


-as culled from #6, here

On Moral Hazard...............

Mr. Bondi:  "Would the American economy have been better off in the long run if there had been no exceptional government assistance to financial institutions?  In other words, do you think we've increased the likelihood of moral hazard in the long run?"

Mr. Buffett:  "No, I think the moral hazard has been misunderstood in a big way.  There is no moral hazard existing with shareholders of Citigroup, with Freddie Mac, with Fannie Mae, with WaMu, with Wachovia - you just go up and down the line.  I mean these people lost anywhere from 90 percent to 100 percent of their money, and the idea that they will walk away and think, 'Ah, I've been saved by the federal government.'
      I think just the companies that I've named there's at least a half a trillion dollars of losses to common shareholders.
      Now, there's another question with management, which we might get into later, but in terms of moral hazard, I don't even understand why people talk about that in terms of equity holders."

Mr. Bondi:  "Uh-huh.  Do you think we would have been better off, though, if we had not had the infusion of government assistance?"

Mr. Buffett:  "I think it would be a disaster.  No, it would have been the disaster of all time."

-Questions and answers at the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission

On war..............................

"Every war is a national calamity whether victorious or not."
-Helmuth von Moltke

 Which reminded me of this beauty:

Ouch.........................

Methinks Spengler is not a big fan of The Donald:

"Trumpelstiltskin, meanwhile, has revealed a side of his character that voters hitherto have ignored, or even admired in a perverse way. He inherited wealth and ran a private company the way he wanted to, saying what he wanted and hiring and firing whom he pleased, without answering to partners, shareholders or the general public.

"He is not a particularly good businessman; had he invested his inheritance in a stock-market index fund, his net worth would be double what it is today. But the psychic rewards of unrestricted narcissism more than compensated for the unperformance of his portfolio."

Pretty sure Spengler is rooting for Cruz.  Full post here.

Counter-intuitive.......................

From the article on the retail sector of the real estate world, titled Back to Normal?, in the January print issue of National Real Estate Investor:

     But Moore isn't concerned about the increase in bankruptcies;  he's reassured by it.

     "The reason we weren't seeing any bankruptcies was because no one new was starting up -- there was an absence of new concepts," he says.  "As the retail sector improved, people decided to jump in with new concepts.  That's why we're seeing bankruptcies:  not everybody is going to win."

Must have something to do with that necessary "creative destruction" part of a capitalistic economic system.

Mathiness............................

..............If everybody who bought a lottery ticket for tonight's monster Powerball drawing took the time to read this, our nation would be way smarter, and probably way more prosperous.

On the importance of a good coach...

"People say there are winners and losers in life.  But typically, it's more like this:  There are winners, and there are people who would like to be winners, but just don't know how.  Intelligent and talented people who are motivated can learn how to become winners if they have someone who will teach them."
-Bill Walsh

Learning through losing................

"If you win every time, you don't learn anything.  You don't learn anything about yourself.  You don't learn anything about the other person.  You don't learn anything about the game.  You don't learn anything about life."
-Jack Nicklaus, as excerpted from Michael Bamberger's essay in the latest Sports Illustrated