Investment Thoughts
Richard Farmer had a favourite way of explaining costs at Cintas . He told his people to imagine a new ship entering the water. “ When a new ship is put into the water, it has a clean hull, ” Farmer explained. “ It moves fast and is highly manoeuvrable. Nothing is holding it back .” Leave it in port for a year, though, and things change. “ Barnacles accumulate on the hull. They slow the ship down,…
In 80 CE, the Roman emperor Titus minted a coin with a strange little emblem on the reverse: a dolphin coiled around an anchor. It was already an old visual pun for balancing speed and restraint — one Augustus, a century earlier, had prized so highly he'd made festina lente , " hasten slowly ," his personal motto, warning his generals that nothing wrecked a campaign faster than an impatient…
Picture two people standing in the same restaurant, watching the same rival open across the street. In the first version, you own the place. A competitor selling the same food has just set up shop across the road, and it feels personal — a threat to your money, your reputation, your family's future. You notice whether its tables are full. You study its menu. You watch its prices. You wonder what…
Ron Vachris started at Costco forty years ago as a forklift driver. He unloaded pallets, worked the floor, learned the business one job at a time — merchandising, operations, real estate — for four decades, before eventually becoming the company's CEO. There was no shortcut through the middle. He walked the whole path. It's tempting to read that as a nice story about one particular warehouse, one…
Warren Buffett once said, half-joking, that the secret of life is weak competition. It's a strange thing for the world's most famous investor to admit — we're taught that competition is healthy, that rivalry sharpens products and disciplines prices. Buffett has spent sixty years looking for businesses that face as little competition as possible. He's not alone. Charlie Munger put it more bluntly —…
There’s a story from the early days of Charles Schwab — the steel man, not the brokerage founder — that tells you almost everything you need to know about internal competition. Schwab, running a mill for Andrew Carnegie , walked into one of his worst-performing plants and asked the day shift foreman a simple question: how many “ heats ” — furnace runs — had they completed that day. Six, came the…
Top 14 [Ranked Top to Bottom] By the time I closed the last page of The Invisible Billionaire — Jerry Shields' biography of Daniel Ludwig — I had read thirty-five books this year. A meatpacker from Austin, Minnesota. A five-star general. A Japanese electronics founder. Two advertising brothers who broke every rule in London. A tennis coach. A Dutch-Austrian who bottled an energy drink nobody asked…
A couple of months ago I spent eight days crossing America — Indianapolis to Cincinnati , Boston , New York , and finally Omaha for the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting — visiting businesses, investors, ballparks, bookstores and art galleries. On the surface, the itinerary made little sense. Fire safety equipment, diesel engines, uniform rental, furniture stores, hedge funds, modern art and…
Spend enough time studying exceptional organisations and you begin to notice recurring patterns. They recruit differently. They decentralise decision making. They think about capital allocation differently. They stay unusually close to customers. They build cultures that seem to compound over decades. Another pattern is less obvious, but it appears with remarkable consistency. The world’s best…
There's a consulting industry worth hundreds of billions of dollars built on a surprisingly simple arbitrage: companies pay outsiders enormous fees to tell them what their own employees already know. It's one of the great ironies of organisational life. The person in the corner office, armed with an MBA, a strategic framework and a PowerPoint deck, spends months searching for answers that the…
There is a word that appears, unbidden, in the writing and speeches of the founders of some of the greatest businesses ever built. It shows up in the memoirs of Ray Kroc , in the annual reports of Old Dominion Freight , in the founding philosophy of IKEA . The word is not "strategy." It is not "execution" or "competitive advantage" or "return on invested capital." The word is family . A pattern…
In his third year at a New York hedge fund, Christopher Hohn had a huge year — and they paid him a US$10 million bonus. Most people would call that “making it.” He didn’t. Hohn says he immediately gave it away — set up a foundation and put the money into it. “I didn’t want it… This isn’t really something I should have.” Then look at what he did next. When he launched his own firm, he didn’t reach…
Reading 2025 - Top 30 [Top to bottom] Each year I set out to read widely — across business, sport, art, psychology and history — knowing full well that it rarely follows a straight line. One book leads to another, then another rabbit hole opens. A footnote becomes a biography; a passing reference turns into a month-long detour. That wandering is the point. Pattern recognition is the by-product.…
Every so often you stumble across a book so old, so unassuming, that it shouldn’t have any relevance to modern investing… and yet it reads as if it were written yesterday. That was my experience with R.W. McNeel’s 1927 gem, Beating the Market . Nearly a century old, it feels startlingly contemporary. You might reasonably ask: How could a hundred-year-old investing book offer anything useful today?…
If you’ve ever wondered why some companies seem to compound advantage for decades while peers stall, In Search of Excellence - Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies is still one of the cleanest lenses you can pick up. Tom Peters and Robert Waterman didn’t write a finance book; they wrote a field guide to the systems, habits, and culture that produce outsize performance. Warren Buffett once…
At just five years old, Dame Stephanie Shirley’s parents placed her and her eight-year-old sister on a Kindertransport train from Vienna to England in 1939. The Refugee Children’s Movement gave the two girls a foster home and a chance to escape the Nazis, but their family was left shattered. Her father chose not to rejoin them, and her mother, though she came to England after the war, left…
One dollar invested in John Malone’s TCI in 1973 had grown to $3,950 by 2024. That’s an annualized return of 17.4%, compared to just 11.1% for the S&P500 ($234). Those numbers don’t happen by accident. They are the product of genius, discipline, and a relentless pursuit of advantage. Malone’s new biography Born to Be Wired is a masterclass in corporate transactions, navigating industry…
2025 Reading - Favorites People often ask me what's on my reading list, and to be honest, there’s usually one or two books I’m keen to read, but most of them pop up along the journey. 2025 has been no different. Of the thirty-plus books I’ve read this year, I can only think of two that would’ve been on the list at the end of last year. In fact, many of them I hadn’t even come across before. They…
If you're looking for a masterclass in business building — one that transcends geography, culture, and time — Born of This Land , the autobiography of Chung Ju-yung , is essential reading. Chung, the founder of Hyundai , grew up in poverty in rural Korea and ran away from home in search of a better life. With no formal education, no capital, and no connections, he went on to build not just a…
Earlier this month, I had the privilege of spending two weeks traveling across the U.S. - a journey that blended markets, memories, and meetings with some of the most influential minds in investing. From New York to Miami to Omaha, we connected with legends like Bill Ackman, Leon Cooperman, Joel Greenblatt and Chuck Akre, visited iconic businesses like Heico and Nebraska Furniture Mart, and capped…