oscarazocar

That's a silly and almost meaningless observation. Almost all major sports are defined by slight edges multiplied by many attempts in the game, similar to blackjack. In baseball, a player who gets a hit 31% of the time is bound for the Hall of Fame and a hitter who gets a hit 28% of the time is a reasonably good player who few will remember. It may seem intuitively like Federer should have won 65% of the points of whatever, but that's just way outside the parameters of the game. All the top players in history are clustered similarly - Djokavic and Nadal also won 54% of their points. Specifically, in tennis, roughly half the time the player is serving and half the time he is returning. Federer won 70% of his serves and 38% of the points where the other guy served. That's why the number is going to end up a few ticks above 50%. An average grand slam tennis match has around 200 points. Winning 54% of the time over 200 points is total domination.

@John Hjorth You are giving the guy a very hard time when he is well-meaning. Below are the relevant parts of the letter. If you don't know a lot about brain cancer, you could easily take from reading it that Spier expects to maybe live 10-20 years, when the reality, which he does not state for understandable reasons, is that the odds of someone with recurrent glioblastoma surviving even a few years are very low. (Although I will caveat that by saying that his cancer may have certain features which vastly improve his odds vs typical recurrent glioblastoma cases.) I wish Spier the best. It's an interesting topic - doctors are generally <extremely> wary of giving even patients themselves the cold hard facts about specific illnesses. If you hear someone has a disease and want to know their odds, search "Kaplan-Meier survival plot" and the disease. That's going to give you the best numbers, and the more specific the chart is to the exact profile of the disease, the more useful it is. For instance, say you are an adult with Acute Myeloid Leukemia (AML) - the first thing they do is run a test and it spits out the specifics mutations you have. While the overall survival rate for adults with AML might be 20%, the ones with your mutation might have a 50% survival rate and those with some other mutation might have a 5% survival rate. https://www.eortc.be/tools/recgbmcalculator/Curves.aspx "The tumor was small, the doctors caught it early, and I immediately underwent the appropriate treatment, so my chances of beating the worst outcomes were good, and I continued my life as normal. However, that changed in September 2025 with an unclear MRI and minor (or focal) seizures. These led to a second craniotomy and the conclusion that the cancer had returned. This recurrence changed the calculus for Aquamarine Fund. Previously, I could have every hope and expectation that the cancer was in remission and that my top priority of compounding our capital could remain unchanged. The recurrence meant I could no longer say that. Although my mind and investing abilities remain intact today, we have no way of knowing when that might change. My condition could stabilize for a long time, or it might not. While I continue to have every hope of living a long and productive life, that is less likely than before. The range of outcomes has widened considerably. Faced with that uncertainty, I knew I had to reprioritize my life. Up to this point, despite my many outside interests, my top priority was to continue to compound your capital at Aquamarine Fund. This is no longer the case. My top priority has become my health and spending precious time with my family."

That’s not him. He is zeke375.

Robert Miles says definitively here at 32:35 that Weschler was behind the Apple investment at Berkshire, in recounting his interviews with Weschler.

What's going on with this one?

My bet would be that is a sloppy translation and what they write as "Musk persuaded Charlie to invest with him" is actually "Musk tried to persuade Charlie to invest with him." The interview is translated from Chinese and there is a lot of rough translation in there. For instance, "The first time I had a long conversation with Charlie was on Thanksgiving Day in 2003. We talked for four or five hours, and then we officially became partners. It has been 20 years since he passed away." https://moiglobal.com/wp-content/uploads/li-lu-on-charlie-munger-202412.pdf

Immelt was a heroically bad CEO, mostly because of terrible large scale M&A, with a unique talent for buying at the top and selling at the bottom - Alstom Power, Baker Hughes, NBCUniversal, etc. For those who like big company disaster porn, there are two books on the topic that are very good - Light Out by Ted Mann & Thomas Gryta and Power Failure by William Cohan

What is the source for Combs bringing the Apple investment to Berkshire? I have talked to a few investors who believe that Combs has tried to take credit for the Apple investment (see Graham & Dodd breakfast in 2023 where he implies it) when they think that Weschler is the one who initiated it, and that seems to fit a pattern where Weschler stays quiet on things and avoids taking credit and Combs tries to puff up his importance. Buffett and Weschler have both pointedly refused to acknowledge whose idea it was directly. Make of that what you will. There is a lengthy comment from VIC floating around where someone litigates the case against Combs. Here is a 2016 interview with Weschler where he discusses Apple and Berkshire. https://blog.umd.edu/davidkass/2016/10/23/ted-weschler-explains-berkshire-hathaways-investment-in-apple-to-german-magazine/#:~:text=Warren Buffett's portfolio manager was,disclosed whose position Apple is. Here are the Combs 2023 breakfast notes: https://investmentmanagementinsights.substack.com/p/graham-and-dodd-annual-breakfast

People like to make this all much more complicated than it is by dressing it up in these terms like "scaled economies shared", or Tren Griffin goes on about "wholesale transfer pricing" like it's some new thing he discovered. https://25iq.com/2013/06/12/wholesale-transfer-pricing-and-the-free-parking-business-model/ "Scaled economies shared" means you have a structural low cost position and you maintain a constant margin/relative price in order to grow faster and reinforce the advantage. Buffett has talked about this, I think somewhere he made the comment that if you have a 10% cost advantage to your competitors, it's like putting your competitors through a meat grinder. Over time, you grow steadily and maintain reasonably constant ROE and margins (maybe you show a little margin growth over time). This is GEICO, Progressive, Costco, Nebraska Furniture Mart. A nice thing about finding these companies is that, depending on the specific nature of the competitive advantage, it can stay in place for a long time and you can grow for decades as you take share from competitors who have a higher cost position and can't compete with you. You see this clearly with GEICO and Progressive going from low single digit market share to teens market share over last several decades. It's why Costco limits gross margin on products to 14% on third party products and 15% on private label products. "Wholesale transfer pricing" is nothing more than gold old fashioned pricing power, exercising power over your suppliers to either pay them less or demand other benefits because you have a strong market position.

The $450M you cite above isn't related to RYAN's past taxable income, it does not foot to the $1,216 EBIT they have generated. It's the undiscounted estimated future payments related to the TRA. Whenever a unit is converted, it creates a future tax benefit over 15 years. TRAs are generally structured (and is so here) so that the company pays 85% of that tax benefit to the unitholder and keeps 15%. The liability is the estimate of what the company will pay out over time related to the TRA. C corp shareholders aren't really getting a raw deal, basically they are paying a slightly lower tax rate than they otherwise would. You can argue over the whole structure and whether or not it's unfair that the company doesn't keep the whole benefit, but the structure has been in place for decades and is now commonly accepted.

I don't think it's a hate fest to point out that someone is nowhere close to being in the top 10% of his field. It's important in investing and life to be reasonably accurate about relatively objective assessments like that. Baker Mayfield is a good quarterback but he's nowhere close to being in the top 10% of his field, I'm a a fan, it's not an insult. I think it's fairly common to have 3 generations of a family in the same profession. My dad was 5th generation in a small family business. My best friend and his dad & grandfather are lawyers. I think you don't see it too much in investing nowadays because the business was very small before, really, the 1980's so there just hasn't been that much time. Run ahead 30 years and there will be a zillion funds/investment firms that grandpa started in the 1980s, son joined in 2010, and granddaughter joins in 2040.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find any metric by which Chris Davis could be considered in the top 10% of the field as an investor. Davis NY Venture Fund (flagship) has underperformed S&P 500 by 340 bps in last 10 years (15.3% vs 11.9%, 250 bps over 20 years (11.0% vs 8.5%), and 60 bps (9.2% vs 8.6%) assuming he took over in late 1998, it's unclear when dad handed over the CIO reins. It's amusing, in his 2007 interview in Value Investor Insight they quoted the 10 year record vs S&P but in the 2015 interview they switched to quoting the 46 year record of the fund of outperforming because the 10 year at that point lagged by 160 bps.

Shareholders of common equity of Fannie Mae/Freddie complain about the NWS, but one argument I have found persuasive on the other side is that the only reason that Fannie/Freddie make such large profits is because of the implicit government backing. Shareholders are trying to have their cake and eat it too - keeping the profits due to the government backing but then complaining . When everything went sideways, the government stepped in and took ownership, and that was ruled legal by the Supreme Court. That doesn't seem entirely unfair in the scheme of things. The entities were insolvent post-GFC and the government stepped in. When companies file Chapter 11 and ownership gets reshuffled, the old equity shareholders don't get a claim when 10 years later the company is making tons of money. Shareholders don't like how the ownership was reshuffled in this case (first 80% to government, then 100%), but that ship has sailed legally. Of course, the government could reshuffle ownership again, but that seems like entirely a political decision and claims of "fairness" ring hollow to me.

I don't know of one good comprehensive book, but there are biographies on a number of the main players that pretty much get you to the same place - Gould/Harriman/Hill/Vanderbilt/Van Sweringen/etc. Jay Gould The Life & Legend of Jay Gould - this one is very long and comprehensive if you really want to get in the weeds. https://www.amazon.com/Life-Legend-Jay-Gould/dp/0801857716/ref=sr_1_5?crid=1DT0JUYCR277U&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.mt1TVjMgDxRFQIwlIxM4hPV0l22aVLApBZWPBgpq1JhL-7Jl7JbQIMmhyvZbGE2Ik3d2SJY_fGtJh-T8RMqt1XXnoRjALrtYXVmQKSdQEBIRRw3XHSNYqLKZIwnbbxE5Cv-pw9XEtBmhWtxj-bt71AJPFE9XN3YaXIYI_I9ggoAc7ebuJyWbmUb4XAYU70Hl-o7lA-XBvtkiMrogh4XTAoPYl42373TUapdAzKdEl-0.eivntz0f3KI-gtT-ullz3pNZKJ5wiBx_c-8QQSLu5FU&dib_tag=se&keywords=jay+gould&qid=1758552446&s=books&sprefix=jay+gould%2Cstripbooks%2C92&sr=1-5 American Rascal - this and the next are more recent and shorter, I preferred Dark Genius https://www.amazon.com/American-Rascal-Streets-Biggest-Fortune/dp/1982107405 The Dark Genius of Wall Street https://www.amazon.com/Dark-Genius-Wall-Street-Misunderstood-ebook/dp/B00A9XVLXI?ref_=ast_author_dp_rw&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.EnZgMbypos3lT9P404GKZ77XPuOy-TJ-ePHURf3_tfgbJ0pW0CU4W-BHNgdDtRgLWLzw9jix-tMB3uLfyg3VE3AfXWm-pAQReul_Nh6xK7C67x0wgXIuXjrdDBFJz0FvrbHJwNpuRlmp1sIlTBFacJmI7afXHaQXMqN6whAuguKRzVzQvoi0QWC03DmfYVK4JiIL6ERyKlcUZmp20Xw-Ft42jJtIjcO_6R5u3yWWMPw.9D0SbHQhHFYfQkHmzXQSFYmLhQxRQROchUn_dQdPL_Q&dib_tag=AUTHOR Van Sweringen brothers - I haven't read this but it is supposed to be excellent https://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Giants-Clevelands-Sweringen-Brothers/dp/0253341639 Charles Morris - The Tycoons - good broader coverage of all robber barrons, I thought this was great https://www.nytimes.com/2005/10/02/books/review/the-tycoons-benefactors-of-great-wealth.html Harriman vs Hill - I think Buffett recommended this somewhere years back, he blurbs it. Very well written account of Harriman/Hill 1907 battle and resulting panic. https://www.amazon.com/Harriman-vs-Hill-Streets-Railroad/dp/0816683646 Vanderbilt https://www.amazon.com/First-Tycoon-Epic-Cornelius-Vanderbilt/dp/0375415424

In September 1975, there were two serious assassination attempts on President Ford within a few weeks of each other. In one case, the woman attemped to fire a gun at Ford from two feet away. She hadn't correctly loaded a round into the chamber so the shot didn't go off, and she was tackled by Secret Service. In the other case, the woman got off two rounds from 40 feet away, one missing Ford's head by 5 inches, the other striking a bystander. https://www.history.com/articles/gerald-ford-assassination-attempts-1975-lessons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Gerald_Ford_in_Sacramento https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attempted_assassination_of_Gerald_Ford_in_San_Francisco Bryan Burroughs, co-author of the excellent Barbarians at the Gate, wrote a terrific book a few years ago on radical violence in the 1970's, Days of Rage, that I highly recommend. The number of politically motivated bombings and hijackings then dwarfs what we see today. https://www.amazon.com/Days-Rage-Underground-Forgotten-Revolutionary/dp/0143107976