As an investor my job is to figure out what will happen rather than what should happen.
The loss was not bad luck. It was bad analysis.
One of the best investors around, Joel Greenblatt, has written a popular, charming and funny book about investing in great companies at low P/E multiples. To simplify an already simple book, great companies are generally measured as companies that can generate lots of profit without requiring a lot of capital. This means that they have high ROEs.
You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.
In the real world, illiquid assets carry a discount.
What do you call a stock that's down 90%? A stock that was down 80% and then got cut in half.
A 99% Value-at-Risk calculation does not evaluate what happens in the last one percent... This is like an airbag that works all the time, except when you have a car accident.
When people ask me what I do for a living, I generally tell them 'I run a hedge fund.' The majority give me a strange look, so I quickly add, 'I am a money manager.' When the strange look persists, as it often does, I correct it to simply, 'I'm an investor.' Everyone knows what that is.
When you leave a good job to go off on your own and don't expect to make money for a while, you name the firm whatever your wife says you should.
I will keep a substantial long exposure to gold -- which serves as a Jelly Donut antidote for my portfolio. While I'd love for our leaders to adopt sensible policies that would reduce the tail risks so that I could sell our gold, one nice thing about gold is that it doesn't even have quarterly conference calls.
What is uncertain is how much further the bubble can expand, and what might pop it.
Microsoft has one more shot at a role in smart phone software through its deployment on Nokia phones. Nokia is still the global market share leader in cell phones. Maybe it will work out, but this is hard to envision great success in the area coming on the heels of so much disappointment in missed opportunity in this important and visible category.
Ive got a fantasy-baseball team with my brother. But I have to admit, he does all the work.
Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user's experience. It's obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.
