The Last Straw

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. […]

When Harvey Firestone published Men and Rubber back in 1926, he wasn’t just telling war stories from the factory floor. He was laying out a blueprint — a business philosophy that, nearly a century later, still feels radical. Not because it’s new, but because so many have forgotten it. In his view, if the only reason you’re in business is […]

Everyone loves a good stock chart. Up and to the right, all green candles and glory! But that is rarely how things play out in the real world, at least not over any meaningful time frame. What the latest research from Michael Mauboussin and Dan Callahan makes painfully clear is this: if you are aiming for outsized returns, you will […]