Dare to Be Great II

In September 2006, I wrote a memo entitled Dare to Be Great, with suggestions on how institutional investors might approach the goal of achieving…

Most importantly for the purposes of this memo, how will you define success, and what risks will you take to achieve it? In short, in trying to be…

Dare to Be Different Here’s a line from Dare to Be Great: “This just in: you can’t take the same actions as everyone else and expect to outperform.”…

Of course it’s not that easy and clear-cut, but I think that’s the general situation. If your behavior and that of your managers is conventional, you…

Non-consensus ideas have to be lonely. By definition, non-consensus ideas that are popular, widely held or intuitively obvious are an oxymoron.…

Any attempt to compile superior investment results has to entail acceptance of the possibility of being wrong. The matrix on page two shows that…

The goal in investing is asymmetry: to expose yourself to return in a way that doesn’t expose you commensurately to risk, and to participate in gains…

Or as Charlie Munger told me, “It’s not supposed to be easy. Anyone who finds it easy is stupid.” In other words, anyone who thinks it can be easy to…

While they accept the intellectual proposition that attempting to be a superior investor has to entail the risk of loss, many institutional investors…

Most “agents” – those who invest the money of others – will benefit little from bold decisions that work but will suffer greatly from bold…

Keeping in mind, however, that only one event and its consequence will occur (not the weighted average consequence),” agents may not be able to…

Fear of looking bad can be particularly debilitating to an investor, client or manager. This is because of how hard it is to consistently make…

Third, even well-founded decisions that eventually turn out to be right are unlikely to do so promptly. This is because not only are future events…

Investors who aspire to superior performance have to live with this reality. Unconventional behavior is the only road to superior investment results,…