go long, everyone else is going short

Writer David Foster Wallace said that he thought good nonfiction was a chance to “watch somebody reasonably bright but also reasonably average pay far closer attention and think at far more length about all sorts of different stuff than most of us have a chance to in our daily lives.” Amateurs fit the same bill: They’re just regular people who get

don't spend any time worrying about what other investors do I spent all my time studying great companies and studying great Industries if Nick and Zach were worried about what other investors were doing at this time they wouldn't be doing what they're doing they wouldn't have been buying Amazon they wouldn't have been talking about Costco

you cannot just focus on the outputs if you do you're going to sell you have to really understand the central engine of success you have to understand that business deeply

you need to be heavily concentrated and bet heavily it could be argued that lots of things had to go right for Walmart to grow for 40 years that is certainly true but at its heart a very few simple things really mattered in our opinion the central engine of success at Walmart was a thrift orientation so low costs low waste fueling growth with the s

he says in our opinion just a few things in life are noble and it is because just a few things are noble that noad has just a few Investments the Church of diversification is seen as an insurance against any one idea being wrong we would propose that if knowledge is a source of value ad and few things can be known for sure then it Li logically foll

our quantitative

understanding of elasticity is shortterm we can estimate what a price reduction will do this week in this quarter but we cannot estimate the effect that consistently lowering prices

why competing with Costco is so hard to do the firm is not interested in today's static assessment of performance it is managing the business as to raise the probability of

long-term success when Costco continues to recycle cost savings to the consumer it is lowering the probability of failure