Swart Donkey

  The Quiet Art of Leaving it Alone Most of us start by trading time for money. We work, earn, save, and hope one day to spend what we’ve ...

Money often gets treated better than people. A company can rebrand, pivot, acquire, or spin off new divisions. Its capital is fluid. We, by ...

There’s a big difference between embodied knowledge and surface-level learning.  Think about how we used to find our way home. You’d either ...

Time is the foundation of property rights. If you know that whatever you are going to do is going to get etch-a-sketched, then you rightly w...

The value of a business can be zero. Price can join it there. Now or later. Analysts will attempt to calculate their view of the intrinsic v...

It is not a mystery why there is not enough affordable housing. We have not built enough houses. There has been a multiple decade-long proce...

There is a constant wrestle between price (a number) and value (qualitative and dynamic). Not everything that has value can be counted, and ...

Trading is sensing the patterns. It is like poker where you are playing against another person. Attempting to go with the momentum when the ...

Fundamental investing is the idea that what money does matters. Money is abstract. It is not a thing. It is a tool. It is a way we communica...

The vast majority of people, even those earning a lot of money, live hand-to-mouth. One way to view meritocracy is that it shifts capital to...

Part of the story I tell myself about money comes from the micro-world I grew up in. The bubble within a bubble where my parents were the de...

Investing is a solved problem. As Seth Klarman points out, “the real secret to investing is that there is no secret to investing”. The unsol...

I don’t like the term “playing the markets”, but even I have to admit that it is possible to hype it up and play it as a game. Throw in some...

“The real secret to investing is that there is no secret to investing. Every important element of value investing has been made available to...

I view investing as getting my money a job. When things are complicated, we simplify them into stories (based on what we already understand)...

Investing is a lot like dieting or exercise. It is not a secret how to do it well. The difficult bit is doing it consistently. With a little...

One huge advantage of being an Investment Analyst is yogic sage level detachment. You pass judgement on the value of a business, but active ...

I am making it up as I go along. If I sound confident in the way I write, it is because I like editing out wiggle words like “I think”, “for...

One of the eternal questions in Investment is “Active vs Passive”. Should you just invest in a diversified index or is it worth paying a man...

I studied money partly because I hated it. Not money itself, because money isn’t a thing. Money is a communication tool. Mostly I hated the ...