The Mentors: Nomad Letters Quotes

[Dave86ch]

I just finished reading the entire saga of Nomad Partnership (From 2001 to 2013 Nomad returned 20.8% CAGR before fee). It was an amazing avventure, worth the time reading the 218 pages which compose the letters written by Nicholas “Nick” Sleep during his adventure.

Investing goes beyond the simple research of money, but it encompasses the whole spectrum of human existence, passing through psychology, history, charity, adventure and discovery.

Nick Sleep itself named it as “Our adventures in capitalism”.

Like all adventures, an adventure hides dangers, but even great opportunities  to become free and enlightened, more creative, and more productive. Free time for yourself, over and above that, for our family and for the entire humanity.

I underlined the best parts in the article and I categorized them by theme.

Article The Mentors: Nomad Letters Quotes

https://dscompounding.wordpress.com/2022/01/25/the-mentors-nomad-letters-quote/

[RadMan24]

The articles were a good read. I'll have to spill through your notes in due course, thanks for posting. 

[Dave86ch]

4 hours ago, RadMan24 said:

The articles were a good read. I'll have to spill through your notes in due course, thanks for posting. 

Thank you, I really appreciate.

[CafeB]

Thanks for sharing your notes, @Dave86ch

 

Comment on Nomad investor letters in recent Greenhaven Road investor letter:

 

"If we can find the right combination of reasonable price and the ability to sustain growth, we can do quite well over time, even with multiple compression.

 

The “over time” part of the last sentence is important. For the last four years, my work bag has held a bound copy of the investor letters for Nomad, a simultaneously storied and under-the-radar investment partnership run by Nick Sleep and Qais Zakaria from 2001-2013. These letters were gifted to me in a shroud of secrecy. I was to tell nobody I had them and show nobody their contents, just study them. About a year ago, the letters were published online by Nick Sleep’s charitable foundation (link), so I was released from my vow of silence. I have never met Nick Sleep, but from everything I can tell, he managed their partnership in the right way, attracting philosophically-aligned limited partners and generating very attractive risk-adjusted returns. I occasionally daydream that investing would be so easy if I had had those letters in real time. With the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, we know the returns are excellent. Buy, hold, and ring the register. It would have been so easy just to copy Nomad… or would it have been?

 

One of Nomad’s largest investments was Costco (COST), whose share price is up more than 11X from their thesis write-up published in Value Investor Insight (link) back in 2005. If you had reinvested your $50+ in dividends along the way, you would have done even better. But here is the rub: if you bought at the date of publication, you would have lost money at the end of the first four years. It was not a straight line up. The returns came in chunks, over time." (emphasis in original)

 

www.greenhavenroad.com/investor-letters