Tag: investing

  • Market Main Characters

    Adam Neumann spotted a big funding bubble, and found the most efficient way to exploit it, by taking an existing asset that he could buy at a real estate multiple funded by equity he raised at a startup multiple. This drew money away from better companies in a sense, but the money it was going after probably would have ended up in some other business with similarly bad returns on capital. What WeWork accomplished was to speed up this process and make it more visible—someone who ruthlessly exploits a poorly-justified bubble is basically an efficient markets accelerationist who is heightening the contradictions and pushing the system towards its inevitable collapse as a side effect of their effort to get rich quick at the expense of others.

    From “Financial Markets aren’t Closed Systems” in Capital Gains by Byrne Hobart.

  • Avoid Idiocy

    “I don’t have any wonderful insights that other people don’t have. I just have slightly more consistently than others avoided idiocy. Other people are trying to be smart. All I’m trying to be is non-idiotic. I find that all you have to do to get ahead in life is to be non-idiotic and live a long time. It’s harder to be non-idiotic than most people think.”

    -Charlie Munger, as quoted by William Green in Richer, Wiser, Happier