The Last Straw

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 […]

Babe Ruth is one of baseball’s greatest players, but he also led the league in strikeouts. Over his career, he walked back to the dugout about one in every eight times he stepped up to the plate. And yet, he’s remembered as the GOAT. Why? Because when his bat did connect, it often left the park. 714 times, to be exact. […]

Making money in the market is hard. Not just because spotting an undervalued stock is tough, or because you have to stomach the occasional dump. The real challenge, most of the time, is staying sane through the long, mind-numbing stretches where nothing happens and doubt starts whispering in your ear. Understand the following, however, and you’ll be less likely to […]

In a 2014 interview, Lloyd Blankfein, then CEO of Goldman Sachs and part-time Bond villain lookalike, was asked a simple question: How far into the future can you see? Now, given Goldman’s reputation for spotting market trends before most, you’d expect a confident answer.  Instead, Blankfein deadpanned: “I don’t think I could see four inches into the future.” Not exactly […]

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 […]