Listen to the deep-dive discussion – Why Moody’s beats the Coca-Cola moat (19:37 min) “We lived in a torrent of money, and we were constantly deploying it.” — Charlie Munger, Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting, 2016 What if the torrent deployed itself? I. Two Holdings, One Portfolio Warren Buffett has held Coca-Cola since 1988 and…
The Compression Harvest – When You Get Paid to Own Growth
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – Harvesting Freesurfers during market panics (17:13 min) “The market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” — Warren Buffett I. The Tide Goes Out When the tide goes out, the naked are exposed. The speculative growth stocks without earnings. The AI stories built…
The Permanent Wave – When the Negative Risk Premium Breaks the Spreadsheets
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – Why Spreadsheets Misprice Return on Infinity (21:04 min) “Bearing a gift beyond price — almost free.” — Neil Peart, “The Spirit of Radio,” 1980 * * * I. The Toll and the Wave Every business can be decomposed into two forces operating on different time horizons. The A…
From the Visible Trap to the Invisible Gift : Return OF Capital, Return ON Capital, and the Third Category the Spreadsheet Cannot See
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – Why Spreadsheets miss infinite return (20:03 min) “The market makes you overpay for what you can see — and underpay for what it cannot.” — Averaging Up I. Return on Reinvested Earnings Warren Buffett identified the benchmark decades ago. A great business compounds book value at approximately 15%…
From the Margin of Safety to the Free Growth Premium – How a Century of Investment Thinking Led to the Freesurfer
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – Why Wall Street misprices zero cost growth (19:05 min) “If the job has been correctly done when a common stock is purchased, the time to sell it is — almost never.” — Philip Fisher, Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958) I. The Bond Investor Who Built the Stock…
The Visa Reef – How the World’s Strongest Moat Absorbs Every Threat — and Why It Remains Structurally Undervalued
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – Why Visa is Safer Than Treasury Bonds (19:05 min) I. The Architecture Visa does not lend money. Visa does not hold deposits. Visa does not take credit risk. Visa does not own inventory. Visa does not build factories. Visa does one thing: it operates a network through which…
The A Paramount – When Growth Dissolves Into the Toll
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – Why invisible growth breaks valuation models (27:31 min) “The best business is a royalty on the growth of others, requiring little capital itself.” — Warren Buffett * * * I. The Dissolution In “The Freesurfer,” we established that certain rare businesses ride structural waves at zero cost. The…
The Hierarchy of Moats – A real-time case study in moat fragility
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – The Only Five Perfect Monopolies (17:19 min) “The most important thing is high barriers to entry. If you find a company that is going to be a good company long-term, then you should hold on to it because there’s a persistency of these barriers to entry.” — Chris…
The Big One – When the Double Swell Freesurfer Meets Multiple Expansion
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – When the Best Growth Costs Nothing (19:42 min) “That wave was a wave we didn’t know existed. We hadn’t seen waves like that.” — Laird Hamilton, on the Millennium Wave at Teahupo’o * * * I. When Growth Is Free Every business can be decomposed into two forces….
The Convergence Model
Listen to the deep-dive discussion – How Convergent Businesses Grow for Free. (36:02 min) “When somebody says, ‘Any idiot could run this joint,’ that’s a plus as far as I’m concerned, because sooner or later any idiot probably is going to be running it.” — Peter Lynch, One Up On Wall Street “In my…