The Last Straw

When people talk about capital, they tend to mean stuff: factories, patents, cash, code. Things you can count, stick in a spreadsheet, and list on a balance sheet. But that misses the point. The real magic of capital isn’t in the owning. It’s in the doing. Hernando de Soto, the Peruvian economist and author, put it brilliantly in The Mystery […]

In his book The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry sketches two archetypes: the nurturer and the exploiter.  “I conceive a strip-miner to be a model exploiter, and as a model nurturer I take the old-fashioned idea or ideal of a farmer. The exploiter is a specialist, an expert; the nurturer is not. The standard of the exploiter is efficiency; the […]

Most analysis starts with the financials. Earnings, margins, returns, and all that jazz. They’re important, sure, but they come after the fact. They’re downstream of what really matters. Before the numbers, before the model, you need to start with the business itself and the value it’s trying to create for its customers. If it can’t deliver real value, any financial […]

Trump’s trade war is dumb in almost every way. The tariffs are crude, cruel, and unfair. The execution is clumsy, and the rationale behind it, at least as presented, is vapid. The economic fallout will likely be painful. But whether he knows it or not, he’s grappling with a real problem. One that’s been building for years. One that was […]

Most people think of capitalism as a system about markets, competition, or even greed. But at its core, capitalism is about capital — specifically, the accumulation of tools that help us make more things, better things, and new things. Money is capital, but capital isn’t just money. The terms are often used interchangeably, but money is capital in the sense […]

This year’s federal budget landed with all the usual fanfare, with tax cuts and other ‘cost-of-living’ relief front and centre. Judging by how it was pitched by politicians and covered by the media, you’d assume the national budget was just a glorified lolly scramble — with the only real question being: what’s in it for me? And with an election […]

There’s a UK small-cap fund manager, now retired, called Harry Nimmo. In a recent talk for The Library of Mistakes, he gave a masterclass in small-cap investing. He knows what he’s talking about too. The fund he ran, the Aberdeen UK Smaller Companies Fund, delivered a 1,979% return over 25 years and was recognised as the second-best performing UK fund […]

There are few inventions in human history that can match the transformative impact of the internet. Fire, the wheel, language, the printing press, the Magna Carta—each fundamentally reshaped society. The internet belongs in this pantheon. It has revolutionized not just communication but commerce, finance, culture, and governance. It is difficult to overstate its significance. At its core, the internet is […]

We recently caught up with Dalrymple Bay Infrastructure (ASX:DBI) CEO Michael Riches. The conversation reminded me of a neat little rule of thumb for valuing dividend stocks. If you’re someone who likes your dividends, it’s a handy addition to your investing tool kit. It’s called the Gordon Growth Model, and the simple version tells us that a stock’s total expected return is […]

During the week, Strawman member tomsmithidg kicked off a great discussion on “red flags”—those factors that can sometimes (but not always) urge caution for investors. A bunch of other members jumped in, fleshing out the conversation with an absolute goldmine of insights. This is exactly the kind of no-nonsense, experience-driven discussion that makes our community so valuable. These aren’t just […]