Todd Combs: "[The qualitative is the] secret sauce...when Warren and I were talking about stocks, acquisitions, whatever we talk, it's 95%-99% qualitative, qualitative, qualitative. And that comes down to all the stuff that he talks about in terms of moats, barriers to entry."

Galbraith: "The process by which banks create money is so simple that the mind is repelled. When something so important is involved, a deeper mystery seems only decent." Werner who coined "QE" argues retail banks create 97% of money supply. Interesting:

Druckenmiller at Sohn: "If we get a hard landing, there will be unbelievable opportunities, and I don't want to miss those opportunities by blowing my money now and having some 20-30% loss where my head is all screwed up when those opportunities present themselves."

"We are now in the process of quickly rotating out those members of our team who have been underperforming and bringing in new with salespeople who have a proven track record of success, grit" --> this is not going to help the leavers get new jobs

This is a brutal takedown of his own sales team by Matthew Prince $NET, including the unnecessary analogy of his own people swimming without shorts. This is not a good look right? "That allowed many on our sales team to succeed largely by just taking orders. When the fish are…

Also the comments from Zuck: "building AI tools to help engineers write better code faster"

Fits with the comments from Satya about fast adoption of GitHub Copilot. "over 10,000 organizations have signed up, including the likes of Coca-Cola and GM as well as Duolingo and Mercado Libre, all of which credit Copilot with increasing the speed for their developers"

"...where developers can plug in a natural language, something like -- I want to build a video hosting website. And CodeWhisperer will bring up the code you need and the developer needs to employ and put that in production, which is really compelling."

Interesting line from Jassy: "we think one of the most compelling applications that are going to be built in generative AI have to do with making developers much more effective with coding assistance." "And so we built something called CodeWhisperer..." (cont'd)

"If you think about how much more productive a developer is going to be and what they're going to spend their time on instead of rewriting code that as median takes time, I think it's a big deal."

Latest post:

Dalio predicts: - we are "just before the economic contraction that is likely to make the next year or two difficult ones in the economy" - "the debt ceiling increase will not go as smoothly as most people expect" - "debts...will have to be bought by [CBs]" Says we are here:

@patrick_oshag 's interview with Tim Urban was great as well and catalyzed my starting the read of the book, which had been sitting unread in my bookshelf.

Couldn't stop reading @waitbutwhy's book. Blazed through it over 2 days with the same feeling of a lightbulb going off as I did when I read Selfish Gene by Dawkins a decade ago. An incredible framework that provides us w/ the tools essential to understand our changing society.

Talk about vindictiveness - after the health insurance mandate was ended by the federal government, New Jersey implemented its own individual mandate w/ fines for not having insurance. Max fine of ~$4100 per person (2.5% of AGI up to a cap), highest in the country (CA is $850)

Also, been surprised at the # of vendors in the space who provide quality services at low prices. E.g., would echo what HFR says about NAV - high quality fund admin at <$7k/year. Prime broker is paid through commissions. Legal setup costs can be amortized over 5 years. Etc.

Great thread. Adding a few thoughts: @TegusHQ and @StreamRG have changed the game for small funds. GLG's rate is >$1300 per call (~4x markup per S-1), whereas I estimate my blended cost per call is ~1/5 that. Ie vs. few years ago you can do 5x the # of calls for the same budget!

That's a massive leverage point, to still be able to do 20+ calls per idea despite a small budget. (+of course the library itself) Use the expert network economics to your advantage. Tegus/Stream need suppliers of content and thus are willing to provide calls at or below cost.

This is really impressive - ChatGPT was able to explain correctly a very niche concept (Datadog's 99th percentile pricing). Use ChatGPT as your personal analyst! I have it open as a separate window (separate browser for this purpose) and constantly ask it questions as I read.

Ironically, being promised so much before sale, after closing the treatment the CEO received seemed quite different. - "Unlike the formal sale process," negotiating the employment agreement took months - same salary and bonus as pre-merger - 1.7% of post-transaction equity

Full text of the Delaware court's decision here: Super, super impressed with the Delaware court's analysis. Seems like the Delaware system is a crown jewel in American capitalism. Same judge, McCormick, who presided over Elon's acquisition of Twitter.

- "IVP had internal reasons to exit. By August 2018, IVP's position in Mindbody reflected an unrealized gain of $68 million...IVP's partners "agreed to target at least $200M in additional liquidity by year end." Mindbody was listed as one of five positions that would contribute"

- "...substantial progress integrating Booker. He pulled other "good stuff" from his script, deciding to "save [it] for future use" - "At the summit, Vista made presentations advertising the immense wealth that CXOs had achieved by selling to and working for Vista"

- how easily earnings scripts can be tilted to achieve a desired outcome on the stock - how easily a sale process can be tilted to one buyer (not least of which: "On January 6, halfway through the go-shop process, [CEO] went on vacation to Costa Rica")

Some quotes: - "[VC holder] also knew that lowered guidance would make a sale more attractive. He and a colleague discussed that "the PE guys will drag it out if they think we will miss numbers." - "[CEO] deleted the portion of his script that noted Mindbody's..." (cont'd)