The Last Straw

Strawman member Bushmanpat kicked off an interesting thread this week, pointing out how pessimistic takes tend to dominate headlines, while optimistic ones are often ignored. Inspired by a piece in the AFR, it was a good reminder of the persistent bias in both media and markets: we are hard-wired to give more attention and credibility to bad news. Our tendency […]

I was looking through the archives and realised that since starting Strawman, I’ve written something like 330 articles. Some of them I’m proud of. Most of them… not so much. Looking back, the difference is obvious. The good ones — the ones that still feel sharp — came from a place of genuine interest and conviction. I had something I […]

Investing, for all its spreadsheets and metrics, is largely an emotional game. We dress it up in the language of rationality — discounted cash flows, valuation multiples, risk-adjusted returns — but under the surface, it is a theater of human psychology. And at the center of this drama sits one virtue, unglamorous yet essential: patience. Not the passive kind of patience, the […]

Tune into any results call and you’ll hear plenty of smart-sounding questions (and a lot of alpha-male signaling). What you almost never hear are the questions that risk making someone look silly — even when they’re the ones that are really worth asking.   Technical, sophisticated questions are great for showing off, but it’s the simple, ‘dumb’ ones that really crack things […]

Modern economics is littered with ideas that are, frankly, wrong. Not obviously so, which is partly why they are so hard to kill. That, and the fact they tend to be politically comforting, at least in terms of their intended outcomes. That those outcomes would indeed be nice if achieved, and often come from the best of intentions, is not […]

We tend to lump stocks into two camps: small and risky, but with tantalising upside, or big and boring, plodding along with dependable (but modest) returns. But that’s a false binary; there is, of course, a vast and often fertile patch between these two extremes. Not that this is news to Strawman members. But Corey Leung from WCM Investment Management makes a compelling […]

In his 2005 shareholder letter, Warren Buffett shared a neat little parable about a wealthy family called the Gotrocks. It’s a sharp jab at the investment advisory industry — and it clearly struck a chord with Vanguard founder Jack Bogle, who later gave it a starring role in The Little Book of Common Sense Investing. Here’s the gist: The Gotrocks family […]

There are really only three levers a business can pull to juice its profits: price, cost, or volume. That’s it. As an investor, your job is to figure out which of these levers matters most for any given company — and how management plans to yank it. Because if you don’t know what’s driving growth, you’re essentially investing on hope. […]