Figure Out What Not To Do & Don’t Do That

When you are learning something from scratch, Charlie Munger’s tool of inversion is very helpful. In other words, figure out what not to do and stay away from that. Learning from the mistakes of others is much cheaper than making them all yourself, in life and especially in investing. And Charlie really likes to rub his nose in his own mistakes, so the lessons sink in and aren’t repeated.

Chase Heavily-Hyped Innovation At Your Peril

Warren Buffett has always been wary of investing in innovation. Two of the greatest industries for innovation in the 20th Century were autos and aviation, and the historical record is littered with dozens of companies that have gone out of business in both sectors.

Much more important is finding a business with an economic moat, which means one or more sustainable competitive advantages that keep competitors at bay. To an investor, boring can be beautiful, especially if you can find it with a moat and buy it at a discount. Areas like consumer staples aren’t cheap these days, but selloffs will come.

If you are ready with a watchlist of great stocks and some cash, you will know what to do when everyone else is selling and losing their minds. Investing is a marathon, not a sprint. Don’t let your ego make you chase the high-fliers, especially without a margin of safety.

“The Big New Thing is often a terrible, terrible investment. Even if it pans out, there will be gobs of competitors.”
— Eddy Elfenbein

The Rule of 72

Divide 72 by your annual return and it will tell you how many years your investment will take to double. An 8% annual return with reinvesting will double your money in 9 years.

This also works for inflation in an inverse fashion: 3% inflation will cut your purchasing power in half in 24 years. Hat tip to Don Yacktman, who notes that 3% inflation for 100 years turns a dollar into a nickel.

Incentive-Caused Bias Predicts Behavior

Charlie Munger talks about incentive-caused bias being a superpower in terms of its ability to predict the behavior of others. Moral suasion that runs counter to strong incentives to the contrary has little chance of getting the desired result. It helps to think about the motivations and incentives of the guy on the other side of the table or the other side of the trade. Looking at the compensation incentives at a business also helps to make sure they are aligned with the best interests of shareholders.

Politics & Investing Don’t Mix

If you let your politics rule your investing, you will pay a grievous price. With all of the negativity and polarization on talk radio and Fox News, many people have dug themselves quite a hole in the Obama years by assuming that the economy and the markets would go off a cliff. These folks have missed out on one of the great bull markets of all time.

Are Things Getting Better or Getting Worse?

As Jeff Saut says, the market doesn’t care about the absolutes of good or bad, but whether things are getting better or getting worse. Another reason to compartmentalize your political opinions when thinking about investing.

Doom and Gloom Is for Losers

Related to the point about politics, doom and gloom is for losers. There have been near infinite and continuous market crash and hyper-inflation predictions over the last 7 years. Anyone who has followed such doomsayers as Paul Farrell, Zero Hedge, or Peter Schiff has had their rear end handed to them.

The strength of America is in its people and their ability to work hard and innovate. We face tough issues, but we faced a lot of tough issues in the 20th Century, too. World War I, the Great Depression, World War II, the inflation and malaise of the 1970’s, and more. And yet living standards and markets kept rising.

Like Warren Buffett, I believe in my fellow Americans. Future living standards will almost certainly continue to improve over time. Particularly if we can remember we are all in it together and unite against our problems, instead of seeking to pin the blame on others.

Gold Won’t Save You If The World Ends

If the zombie apocalypse happens, gold isn’t going to save you. It will be guns, ammo, bottled water, and canned food. Speculate if it makes you happy, but gold has no cash flows and therefore no intrinsic value. And gold mining stocks have been one of the prime places money goes to die, as mining CEOs are quite possibly the worst operators and capital allocators known to man.

Other thoughts:

Everything that is probable is possible, but not everything that is possible is probable.

Seek margins of safety, including beyond just price. A defensive business model can give a margin of safety of sorts. A low payout ratio and low debt levels can as well. Find all of these in one stock and you have hit the jackpot.

You need to balance probabilities and consequences. In general go with the probabilities, but be mindful of small but catastrophic risks that you should avoid. Like Howard Marks says, it’s not good enough to survive on average, you need to survive on the bad days.

Measure what you manage so you can manage what you measure. If you don’t know your performance figures, you can’t know if you are adding value or not. Concentrate on what you can control (risk), and not on what you can’t (returns). Process over outcomes.

Pay careful attention to portfolio construction and position sizing. While seldom talked about, these factors are at the core of good risk management.

See also:

Inverting the How-to-Invest Question: How Not to Invest?

Less than 1% of Daytraders Are Consistent Winners!

The Nature of Value

Creating a Latticework of Mental Models: An Introduction

Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases by Tversky and Kahneman