"Otis: Fallen Back to Earth, Now Less Than 20x P/E" Shares down by 15.9% since the war in Iran, back to levels briefly seen in late 2023 #$OTIS #$KNEBV

Stay away from anyone who claims (or the media claims) that they are the ‘next Warren Buffett.’ This also applies to any ‘the next Berkshire.’ 1) 99% of active managers underperform. 2) This is often soullessly used as a marketing shtick to package high fee/high risk investments.

As crude as the fear/greed tool is - it works a lot better than S&P targets and banks telling you to get ‘defensive’ or whatever.

Hanging in there.

The books get really weird.

The thing about macro valuation metrics is that, eventually, they all stop working. Then, we invent new ones. My conclusion is that the whole thing doesn’t work. There isn’t a valuation metric for the whole market that tells you when to buy and sell. It’s a foolish pursuit.

The extent to which tobacco products are price inelastic is astounding. Prices have massively outperformed inflation. Tobacco companies have been able to grow revenue through price increases alone even as the total # of smokers in the USA declines.

Reminder: geopolitics are unpredictable. There is no one with a good track record of predicting it accurately. Making moves with your asset allocation because you think something will happen is typically a mistake. We all have a ton of biases and are often wrong.

Transporters

Me at 17 watching Fight Club: "Tyler Durden is so cool." Me at 43 watching Fight Club: "Tyler Durden is completely full of s*it."

I’m starting to think that melatonin gummies don’t actually do anything and we’ve just given ourselves a reason to have fruit snacks before bed.

We think about the 2010’s as mainly prosperity driven by big tech, but it was really about prosperity driven by cheap oil.

Good rule of thumb: don’t change an asset allocation unless you’re at an all time high from a performance perspective. Otherwise, there is a high probability you’re emotionally reacting to recent performance vs. making a rational decision.

The problem with ‘it doesn’t matter if the hedge fund has low returns as long as it is uncorrelated with the market’ is that you can get the same damn thing from treasuries or gold without paying absurd fees.

Imagine telling someone in 2008 that a Middle East war was endangering the Strait of Hormuz and oil is only $74. That would have been a $200/barrel event back then.

About 90% of personal finance comes down to housing, college, and cars. Make good decisions there and good things happen almost effortlessly. Make bad decisions there and it’s going to be near impossible to get ahead.

A proper Berkshire letter should open with "Berkshire’s Performance vs. the S&P 500." It's sad that it hasn't been there for four years. I also miss the column measuring the compounding value of the book value per share which went away in 2019.

Fears of AI-driven mass unemployment seem mostly speculative to me. We're still below 5% unemployment. This is 2007/1998 levels. It's affecting tech, but there's little evidence it's causing the kind of mass unemployment that people are worried about.

The cure to financial stress is getting out of debt and having 6 months of cash sitting in emergency fund. Once that foundation is in place, all financial decisions can come from a rational place of strength vs. desperate anxiety. This results in better decisions overall.

When Bitcoin is up: HAVE FUN STAYING POOR MORON! When Bitcoin is down: This is just like the Global Financial Crisis, a total meltdown . . .

In 2008, I saw structural failure in how many folks I knew organized their financial lives. High fixed costs. Debt obligations. Lifestyles entirely dependent on continuous employment. A job loss meant collapse. I was in a similar spot and I vowed I wasn't going to live that way any more.

The weird portfolio is off to a strong start this year.

Very true in the 2000’s when ‘anything but market cap’ worked well. I think many famous investors from that era just started their funds at the right time . . . and you’d still be better off buying an equal weight or value ETF over the long haul.

The worst investment strategy is to go all-in on the asset class that worked in the previous 10 year period and assume it will work over the next 10.

I never really appreciated the Jack Bogle quote ‘nobody knows nothing.’ It sounded right. It was funny. I never really appreciated the extent to which it is true. Like literally 95% of every forecast I’ve ever heard on a podcast or cable has been wrong.

The key to good investing is to stop asking "what's going to happen?" and start asking "how do I build a portfolio that survives regardless of what happens?"

On my latest podcast, Matt Cochrane and I talk about "Nothing But Net" by Mark Mahaney.

Is AI actually disrupting employment in a serious way, yet? Is there any evidence of it? It seems like it's just vibes at this point.

How can anyone listen to Michael Saylor for more than 30 seconds and not conclude that he’s completely full of crap? The guy just oozes BS.

It’s such a relief to get my taxes done. Even when I owe money, it’s so satisfying to file and get it done and over with. It blows my mind how people file extensions or miss the deadline. I’m always eager to get that done asap.

‘Passive is distorting markets’ is the new ‘I’m underperforming because of the Fed’

It’s almost like Bitcoin isn’t a safe haven and is really just a risk-on asset on crack.

Personal finance is often framed like 'more spending = higher quality of life' and any cutbacks to lifestyle = lower quality of life. That hasn't been my experience at all. Some of the most miserable people that I know spend a lot on luxury. Some of the happiest people I know spend very little.

The defining weakness of high-income earners is assuming that the high income is permanent. The correct assumption is that high income will be disrupted at some point. High income should be treated as a tool to convert income into safety, not into lifestyle.

A lot of superinvestor discourse is the equivalent of finding someone who won the Powerball and asking them extensively how they picked their numbers, assuming it's a repeatable process.

I started investing in the weird portfolio to have a system that helps me stay invested when the world looks insane. The world looks insane to me all the time - especially in the last 10 years - and I'm glad I had this approach to help me stay invested when I otherwise wouldn't.

24/7 trading 1) There is already ample liquidity and it’s unnecessary. 2) Operational nightmare. 3) It’s very bad during a panic. Most of the deals during the GFC were done outside of market hours. You need time to process and react to what happened. 4) People trade too much, anyway.

I'm pleased to report that the weird portfolio was the #1 asset allocation in 2025 according to Portfolio Charts. portfoliocharts.com/2026/01/13/l...

It’s funny to me how many narratives are being made up to explain housing prices. Institutional investment is the biggest one that’s BS the minute you look at the data. The real reason prices are high: we haven’t had a recession in a really long time & unemployment is low.

The stereotype of FIRE is that they do stuff like reuse teabags, eat ramen daily, or wear socks with holes in them. The reality is more like buying a $15k car instead of financing an $80k one, cooking meals instead of Door Dashing everything, or moving to a cheaper zip code.

Fitness gurus are always knocking cardio. Well, the elliptical is super effectively for weight loss. It’s low impact so you can do it for long time periods, every day. I can burn 800-1000 calories in an hour. I can do it daily. I lost 100 lbs once doing nothing but that damned boring elliptical.

Here’s a wild stat I learned when digging into MarketAxess a couple years ago: only 40% of bond trading is electronic. As we move near 100% over the next couple of decades, that’s a long growth runway for MarketAxess - a stock that has been down since the bond bear of 2022 while still growing.

I updated my watchlist of wonderful companies today. I was shocked to see that Zoetis is trading at some of the cheapest multiples in its history. A very impressive moat combined with secular growth prospects in pet ownership.

Jeffrey Skilling used to talk about this shit.

Pretty amusing that Harvard allocated to Bitcoin at the top.

We haven't had a truly nasty bear market (like 1973-74, 2000-03, or 2007-09) through Bitcoin's history. If Bitcoin falls 80% whenever the market has a 10-20% tantrum, what do you think happens when we face the real deal?

The weird portfolio is my approach to "passive." I wanted a systematic ETF-based approach that didn't rely on forecasting. A portfolio with decent long term growth without huge drawdowns & lost decades. Tyler at portfolio charts created a nice breakdown of it: portfoliocharts.com/portfolios/w...

I research a company once a week, determine if it's 'wonderful' or not, and then regularly update subscribers with valuation updates. The goal is to identify when wonderful businesses are on sale. www.securityanalysis.org