Readwise Highlights

Each quarter we try to study an admirable company and discuss it with our Operating Group managers and board members. We focus on high performance conglomerates that have demonstrated at least a decade of superior shareholder returns.

From a practical standpoint, the biggest contributor to your errors and emotional volatility is what lies below the surface, such as flaws like:

Once you’re consistently meeting the expectations of the majority of your customers, you’ve already done the most economically valuable thing you can do.

why you should invest: To save for your future self. To preserve your money against inflation. To replace your human capital with financial capital.

One: You have to train yourself to notice things. It's not 100% natural at first – it certainly wasn’t for me – but raising those antennae is a very worthwhile thing to do. And it snowballs: once I got started taking notes, I ended up taking more and more of them.

Two: Be very liberal about what you keep. If you're going through your notes, cross

Affect (influence) vs. effect (accomplish)

• Compliment (praise) vs. complement (go well with)

• Discreet (careful) vs. discrete (distinct)

• Its (possessive) vs. it’s (it + is)

• Principle (rule) vs. principal (authority figure)

• They’re (they + are) vs. their (possessive) vs. there (adverb of place)

• Venomous (having a toxic bite or sting) vs.

Expected Annual Return = (1 + % Gain Needed to Recover)^(1/Number of Years to Recover) – 1 But since we know that the “% Gain Needed to Recover” is 50%, we can plug in this number and simplify this equation to: Expected Annual Return = (1.5)^(1/Number of Years to Recover) – 1 So, if you think the market recovery will take: 1 year, then your

Doing our work to the best of our ability, with the highest quality and deepest integrity, gets us into contention.