Weekly Digest – November 11, 2022

Published on November 11, 2022

Friday, November 11, 2022
Volume 3, Issue 54

Gell-Mann Amnesia

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect works as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray’s case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward-reversing cause and effect. I call these the ‘wet streets cause rain’ stories. Paper’s full of them. 

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story-and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read with renewed interest as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about far-off Palestine than it was about the story you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

— Michael Crichton

Newsletter Update

There is a tremendous amount of content online, so the fact that thousands of subscribers receive Rational Reflections is a great compliment. An even greater compliment is the fact that the newsletter now has hundreds of paying subscribers.

When I started The Rational Walk in 2009, I did not have any particular plan in mind and I still operate with no “master plan”. That being said, nearly fourteen years of writing online has clarified the type of content that I enjoy writing and has given me a sense of what readers find valuable.

The Weekly Digest is mostly about content curation and current events. Although the digest takes several hours to put together every week, I would be reading all of this material whether I write the digest or not. I read based on where my interests take me and select what resonates the most for inclusion in the digest. 

Business Profiles are very different, both in terms of preparation and the writing process. So far, I have written about companies that I find interesting, but not necessarily ones that I have invested in personally or are necessarily good current investment opportunities. As I described in Selecting Companies to Research, the general idea is to be unconstrained when it comes to current valuation. 

When I announced a paid tier for Rational Reflections in April, I wrote that this will not be a stock picking newsletter and that is still very much the case. At that time, I did not contemplate writing the Business Profile series, but readers indicated that this was the type of content they would be most likely to be willing to pay for. Since I enjoy research and writing and people seemed to be willing to pay for this work, I embarked upon this project and there are currently nine profiles in the archive.

I have been “retired” since 2009, as I described in The Trouble with FIRE, and I have not started a subscription business primarily for extra income. My goal is to provide value, hopefully well in excess of the cost of a subscription, and to measure how much value I am creating by the reception to my work in the market. In this way, Rational Reflections is a sort of “outer scorecard” that allows me to measure whether what I am spending my time on has value to others. 

The plan going forward is to continue the Weekly Digest and to publish Business Profiles on a monthly cadence, although I prefer to think about it as roughly twelve installments per year rather than one per month. Although there’s likely to be content other than Business Profiles that will be restricted to paying subscribers, Business Profiles should be considered the primary benefit of a paid subscription.

I plan to continue writing the newsletter as long as I enjoy doing it, and I will continue the paid offering for an extended period of time to see how it does in the market. While the paid offering is not at the point where the time commitment can be justified, hopefully that will change over the next year if sufficient value is provided.

Thanks for reading! I truly appreciate the privilege of having an audience of thousands of free subscribers and hundreds of paid subscribers!

Articles

Here’s the trouble under the hood at Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway by Steve Goldstein, November 8, 2022. My recent article, A Closer Look at Berkshire’s Operating Income, was quoted at length in this article which focuses on GEICO. While I am happy to be quoted and definitely have concerns about GEICO, I am not quite as negative as the excerpts might imply. GEICO could be a topic in Warren Buffett’s 2022 shareholder letter as well as the subject of questions for Mr. Buffett and Vice Chairman Ajit Jain at the 2023 annual meeting. (MarketWatch)

Graham & Dodd Annual Breakfast 2022, November 4, 2022. Todd Combs was the guest speaker at the Graham and Dodd breakfast which took place on October 28. While these notes are interesting, I should point out that the link is from a brand new Substack account and the event invitation said that it was “off the record” (I did not attend). I found the notes interesting enough to post a link with this caveat. On Todd Combs’ schedule: “From an allocation perspective, 100-110% at GEICO, 16-hour days there, and he does his investing at nights and weekends, which makes up approximately 25%, and finally bank board meetings and other is 25%” (Investment Management Insights)

Companies Look for Ways to Bring New Directors Up to Speed Quickly by Emily Glazer, November 7, 2022. The premise of this article is peculiar. There are references to sending new directors the company’s annual report and proxy in a binder as part of an “onboarding process”. This is shocking to those of us who expect directors to already be significant shareholders who are very familiar with the business for which they have become fiduciaries. Shouldn’t someone under consideration for a director role already be a shareholder who is familiar with the company’s annual reports? (WSJ)

  • Berkshire Hathaway’s Corporate Governance Guidelines is a short document that describes director orientation: “All new directors receive an orientation from the Chief Executive Officer and are expected to maintain the necessary level of expertise to perform his or her responsibilities as a director. The Company does not maintain any formal orientation or continuing education programs.” (Berkshire Hathaway)

Meta Lesson 1: Corporate Governance by Aswath Damodaran, November 4, 2022. This is the first in a three-part series on Meta. In addition to discussing corporate governance issues, the article has a useful recap of Meta’s recent results in the context of the larger decline of technology stocks this year. “In this first post, I will use the investor debate about Facebook to talk about corporate governance, what it is, why it matters and how I think governance disclosure research, rules and scoring services have lost the script in the last two decades.” (Musings on Markets)

Why Costco and Trader Joe’s Stopped Selling Your Favorites by Nathaniel Meyersohn, November 5, 2022. Trader Joe’s shares similarities with Costco in terms of merchandising. Both carry a limited number of SKUs, have an extensive private label business, high quality standards, and a customer-centric focus. This article explains the logic behind allowing certain products to go out of stock. (CNN Business)

  • Becoming Trader Joe, February 17, 2022. This article reviews Trader Joe’s founder Joe Coulombe’s autobiography. (The Rational Walk)
  • Costco Wholesale Corporation, October 25, 2022. In this business profile, we examine Costco’s impressive track record and consider whether future growth prospects are likely to justify today’s lofty valuation. (Rational Reflections)

How Do the Wealthy Invest by Nick Maggiulli, November 8, 2022. The wealthy have investment options that are not available to the masses. This article looks into how the wealthy invest with a focus on how younger and older wealthy households allocate capital. One point made in the article is important but often overlooked: We should not assume that the wealthy got rich due to their investments. In many cases, wealthy people amassed their fortunes in other ways, so how they allocate capital today isn’t necessarily responsible for how they got rich to begin with. (Of Dollars and Data)

How to Power Down to Reclaim Your Life by Sahil Bloom, November 9, 2022. These ideas especially useful for those of us who work at home. “It’s difficult to overstate the importance of having a Power Down Ritual. Without one, we allow our work and professional life the freedom to completely control every other aspect of our life. This makes us less present with our family, friends, and personal activities, leading to atrophy in these areas, which are so important to building a comprehensive, fulfilling life.” (The Curiosity Chronicle)

The Staircase of the Self by Lawrence Yeo, November 2022. This is an interesting essay regarding the journey our sense of identity takes through life. I wrote a few sentences attempting to summarize the essay but deleted them, finding my description to be quite inadequate. Although this essay is quite long, I think that the ideas presented are worth the time investment. (More to That)

Podcasts

Paul Graham’s Essays were featured on the Founders Podcast in a two-part series. These essays are familiar to longtime readers of the Weekly Digest. Paul Graham is most well-known for co-founding Y Combinator but he is also a prolific essayist on a wide range of interesting topics. (Founders Podcast)

The Capacity to Suffer Applied to Meta, November 6, 2022. 41 minutes. Tom Russo has often spoken about the concept of “capacity to suffer” which has to do with the willingness to endure short-term pain in order to generate exceptional long-term results. Is this what Mark Zuckerberg has been doing at Meta with his massive bet on the metaverse via the Reality Labs segment? (This Week in Intelligent Investing)

The Home Depot: The Pro Builder’s Choice, November 2, 2022. Home Depot has executed very well in recent years. Although the store count has been flat for over a decade and revenue growth has been in the mid-single digit range, management has successfully expanded operating margins resulting in strong earnings growth which has translated to excellent shareholder returns. This podcast breaks down the key elements of the business and management’s recent strategy. (Business Breakdowns)

Nick Sleep: The Best Investor You’ve Never Heard Of, November 7, 2022. “Clay Finck reads through Nick Sleep’s letters and distills the biggest lessons he learned from studying his writings and investment career. Through Sleep’s fund, the Nomad Investment Partnership, he achieved a stellar total return of 921% versus 117% for the world index from 2001 to 2014. Sleep is known for betting a good majority of his personal fortune on just three stocks – Amazon, Costco, and Berkshire Hathaway.” (We Study Billionaires)

Ooni Pizza Ovens, November 7, 2022. Fascinating story of how two entrepreneurs created a $250 million business starting with a $26,000 kickstarter campaign. “In 2012, Kristian Tapaninaho was experimenting with making his own pizza, but he couldn’t get his home oven hot enough to produce an authentic, Neapolitan-style crust … Kristian decided to design a portable, wood-fired outdoor oven.” (How I Built This)

Tweets of the Week

This is a disturbing thread about Twitter’s culture. There are many opportunities for privacy violations given the voluminous amount of data tracked by apps.

This is similar to Taleb’s suggestion that surgeons should not look like surgeons. 
“… The one who doesn’t look the part, conditional of having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game, the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.”

TikTok is the 21st century version of a Trojan Horse. How long will we ignore the obvious evidence that TikTok is harming an entire generation of young people?

I highly recommend following The Cultural Tutor’s account. The Wikipedia article for The Battle of Alexander at Issus is also very interesting. The painting is located at the Alte Pinakothek museum in Munich, Germany.

Business Profiles

The purpose of a business profile is to provide background information about how a business works rather than to serve as an investment recommendation. Profiles are not stock picks, although they should help investors save time as part of a complete due diligence process. For more information regarding how companies are chosen for this series, please read Selecting Companies to Research.

All business profiles include an Excel file containing financial statements going back at least a decade along with other important data, statistics, and charts. The Costco, Union Pacific, and George Risk profiles also include formatted PDF downloads.

The following profile is available for all readers:

George Risk Industries, September 8, 2022

The following profiles are available for paid subscribers:

Fastenal — Coming later this month
Costco Wholesale Corporation, October 25, 2022 
Union Pacific Corporation, September 26, 2022 
Burlington Northern Santa Fe, August 25, 2022
CarMax, August 16, 2022 
Tractor Supply Company, July 13, 2022 
Investors Title Company, June 30, 2022 
America’s Car-Mart, June 8, 2022 
DaVita, May 20, 2022

I am working on a profile of Fastenal which will be published later this month. To gain access to the entire archive of profiles listed above as well as this month’s profile, please consider purchasing a subscription.

Copyright and Disclaimer

Nothing in this newsletter constitutes investment advice and all content is subject to the copyright and disclaimer policy of The Rational Walk LLC.  

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Weekly Digest – November 11, 2022
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