Finance and Investing
A discussion about making money in financial markets. Nothing in this discussion should be taken as financial advice.
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas, and submit new ideas.You are fallible and the future is unpredictable. It is important to buy assets for significantly less than you think they are worth. The cheaper you buy something, the more margin you have for things to go worse than anticipated. This is called a 'Margin of Safety'. Paying a higher price for something inherently makes the investment more fragile and less profitable.
A crappy business can be a good investment if you get it cheap enough, and a wonderful business can be a terrible investment if you pay too much. (The dream is getting a wonderful business for cheap.)
It is important to buy assets for significantly less than you think they are worth. The cheaper you buy something, the more margin you have for things to go worse than anticipated.
According to Austrian economics, all value is subjective. How can we then know what an asset is intrinsically worth?
I was careful to say "It is important to buy assets for significantly less than you think they are worth". Value is certainly subjective (in the sense that things are valued differently by different people).
As for methods of valuation, there are many out there, each with their pros and cons. Discounted cashflow (DCF) valuations are my preferred method as they directly address the purpose of investing: giving up value today in exchange for more value in the future. The key problem with this is that the future is inherently unpredictable, so building a DCF involves educated guesswork about the future and is inevitably imprecise (varying massively by the nature of the asset... the USD return from a US govt bond is more predictable than the USD return of a tech stock).
The unavoidable flaws in valuation methods are why we should try to buy assets at steep discounts to our valuations of them. The deeper the discount, the bigger our mistake can be without it hurting us.
I was careful to say "It is important to buy assets for significantly less than you think they are worth". Value is certainly subjective (in the sense that things are valued differently by different people).
It can't only be about what I think an asset is worth though right?🤔 Isn't the important thing to buy assets that people will value higher in the future? And in the process try to explain what people will subjectively value?
If the business is cash-flowing it doesn’t matter if other people in the market don’t bid it up. The business can buy back shares or distribute dividends to enrich shareholders.
Obviously this assumes you’ve invested in a business with competent management.
Money is worth more today than in the future. We would all rather have $1,000 today than $1,000 in a year's time.
But how much more valuable is money now vs a year from now? Would you take $1000 now or $1100 a year from now?
Deciding what rate of return is acceptable to you is important for determining the rough degree of effort that will be required and what kinds of investments are worth pursuing. Someone trying to make 4%+ per year on their money has a much simpler task than someone trying to make 18%+.
Your answer will depend on what you are trying to achieve and what opportunities and knowledge you possess. Most prominent value investors want a minimum 10% return per year (often they are dealing with larger sums of money, which can make it harder to make higher returns).
This desired rate is what is used as the 'discount rate' when making a 'discounted cashflow' valuation of an asset.
My discount rate is 15%, as my goal is to make 15%+ per year in perpetuity.
…often they are dealing with larger sums of money, which can make it harder to make higher returns…
Why is it harder to make higher returns for larger sums?
Dealing with larger sums of money narrows your investable universe.
As an example, Berkshire Hathaway has an investable universe of only a few hundred companies. Everything else is too small to move the needle for them.
There are many great opportunities available only to smaller investors.
Dealing in larger sums means you have to make big trades to building meaningful positions. Moving large money in, around, and out of the market takes time and needs to be done carefully (so that the price doesn't get away from you). Small investors can build proportionally large positions much easier.
It is like piloting an oil tanker vs a speed boat.
The market often makes silly mistakes:
In 2021, Elon Musk tweeted "Use Signal" (referring to the private messaging app). Investors rushed into Signal Advance, an obscure medical device company, causing its stock to surge from around $0.60 to over $70 in days. The messaging app isn't even a public company.
Markets are made up of fallible people and are often wrong, sometimes wildly wrong about what an asset is worth. A good investment often involves reading the situation better than other market participants and going against the tide.
Markets are also mostly based on knowledge from the outside. If you invest based on internal knowledge, that will be called insider trading (not making a moral judgement whether insider trading is good or bad).
Yes, but I think it is largely the interpretation of information that matters.
Different people respond very differently to the same information.
I don't like shorting.
When you buy a stock, the most you can lose is 100% of your investment, but your potential gain is infinite. When you short a stock, your maximum profit is capped at 100% (if the company goes bankrupt), but your potential loss is mathematically infinite because there is no limit to how high a stock price can climb. This creates a "bad bet" where you risk everything for a relatively small reward.
Shorting is also a battle against time. To succeed, you must be right about a company’s failure and the exact timing of the market's reaction, all while paying interest on the shares you borrowed. Instead of fighting the natural upward trend of human progress and productivity, it is far more rational to invest in "compounding machines"—high-quality businesses that grow in value over the long term. This allows time to work in your favor rather than against you.
Can shorting be a mechanism of error correction?
I've also noticed incumbent advantage in business. Unless a competitor offers a better product, a company can be as corrupt and lazy as possible.
I think it is an error to short stocks in most situations.
It might be an error correcting mechanism at the level of the market, but that is not what I am talking about when I say I don't like shorting. This discussion is specifically about making money in the markets.
This is not exactly true. The business still needs to produce something people want to buy, at a price they will accept. This is separate from competition.
Another way to say that is: all businesses are in competition with all others at the broadest level.
If you like Snickers bars, but they suddenly 5x in price, it isn’t necessarily true that you will buy a different chocolate bar. You might go to the bakery instead, or use that money to put a little more fuel in your car.
An economic moat is a structural barrier that allows a business to resist the natural forces of competition. In a standard market, high profits act as a signal for other companies to enter, replicate products, and drive prices down—a process that eventually erodes a company's ability to generate wealth. A moat interrupts this cycle by making it difficult or expensive for competitors to take market share, enabling the business to perpetuate its earnings and survive far into the future.Because these barriers exist, the company does not have to constantly reinvent its core model to survive. Instead, it can rely on its established position to maintain a steady output of value. This structural durability makes the business's long-term trajectory more stable and less prone to the sudden decay that typical firms face when a new rival appears.
One of the most enduring forms of a moat is Brand Power, where a name creates such high consumer trust or habit that people are unwilling to switch to a cheaper alternative. Coca-Cola provides a classic example of this; it has spent over a century building a brand that occupies a unique "real estate" in the consumer's mind, allowing it to sell what is essentially a commodity with much higher margins than generic competitors. Similarly, Scale and Cost Advantages occur when a company grows so large that it can deliver services at a cost that smaller rivals simply cannot match. Amazon utilises its massive logistics network and volume to offer prices and delivery speeds that would be financially ruinous for a smaller retailer to attempt.
Other businesses perpetuate themselves through Network Effects, where a service becomes more valuable as more people use it. Instagram is a prime example of this dynamic; the platform's primary value to a user is the presence of their friends and family, which means a new competitor cannot simply offer a better interface to win—they would need to move the entire social circle simultaneously. This is often paired with High Switching Costs, which make it too painful for a customer to move to a competitor. Apple provides a masterclass in this with its "walled garden," an ecosystem where its hardware, software, and services (like iMessage, iCloud, and the App Store) are designed to work harmoniously together but intentionally difficult to use with outside devices. Once a user has invested in the apps, storage, and accessories within this garden, the cost of leaving—not just in money, but in time and frustration—creates a barrier that preserves the company's customer base. Each of these moats serves to insulate the business from the "mean reversion" that typically forces profits toward zero, making the long-term outcome of the business more a matter of its internal nature than of market dynamics.
Because these barriers exist, the company does not have to constantly reinvent its core model to survive.
This sentence makes an opposite point if it stopped at "does not have to constantly reinvent," meaning economic moat is slowing down error correction.
Do you mean error correction within the company or at the level of the economy?
Both. But I might be wrong on this, because competition doesn't create error correction either, humans do.
Apparently, stocks have fallen since the dot-com bubble when measured in gold instead of dollars: https://x.com/elerianm/status/1976237139185574170
Some comments suggest measuring stocks in gold is arbitrary, others say this development is simply due to inflation.
Are they right or is this development a deeper sign that the economy is in trouble?
Measuring the stock market in fiat is more arbitrary than measuring it in gold.
A short video relating to that:
https://youtu.be/AGNvdN1Lw9A?si=b5vO7kx_pTRgEgrZ
Wiener says the dollar can go up or down in value (usually down; prices usually rise).
He suggests that, due to this volatility, measuring the value of something in dollars is like measuring the width of a physical object using a rubber band. He implies that this measurement is unreliable and arbitrary because you can ‘stretch’ it just like a rubber band.
He concludes that we should measure the value of something in ounces of gold instead.
Am I understanding Wiener correctly?
Wiener’s critique of the dollar applies to gold, too. Both fluctuate. I see no rational preference for gold following from his argument.
I think it would be arbitrary to measure the value in any unit that you aren’t hoping to trade your asset for.
For example, if you eventually want to get gold in exchange for your asset, measure the number of ounces your asset is worth and sell at an opportune time.
If you want to get dollars, measure your asset in dollars. Etc.
Thinking in terms of gold is less arbitrary than thinking in dollars because gold is anchored in physical reality, whereas the dollar is anchored in political decree. When you choose to measure your wealth in a unit just because you want to trade for it later, you are prioritising the convenience of a transaction over the integrity of the measurement.
Measurement requires a constant. If you measure a table with a rubber band, the "length" of the table changes depending on how hard you pull the band. The US dollar is that rubber band. Its supply and value are subject to the whims of central bankers, interest rate policies, and the shifting needs of government deficit spending. Gold, however, is a physical element with a high stock-to-flow ratio. Its total supply grows at a very slow, predictable rate that no person can speed up by decree. Measuring in gold allows you to see the real change in an asset's value, independent of the currency’s volatility.
Gold's value is anchored by the arbitrage of mining. If the value of gold rises significantly, it becomes profitable to mine more, which eventually brings the value back into equilibrium with the cost of production. This creates a feedback loop rooted in physics, economics and labour. The dollar has no such anchor; the cost to "produce" a trillion dollars is the same as the cost to produce one dollar: a few keystrokes. Using a unit that costs nothing to create to measure things that require real work is an arbitrary standard.
But if you decided, despite the dollar’s shortcomings, that you want to trade an asset for dollars, you wouldn’t measure your asset in ounces of gold. You’d measure it in dollars, wouldn’t you?
Or are you saying one should never trade assets for dollars?
What asset you measure in and what asset you trade for don't necessarily need to be related.
There is nothing wrong with trading goods for dollars. This is more an argument against measuring the changing value of assets across time in dollars.
What asset you measure in and what asset you trade for don't necessarily need to be related.
What are some cases where they wouldn’t be related?
I don’t see how one could determine a good time to sell an asset without knowing what it’s worth in one’s target asset.
Let’s say you wanted to know if your house was gaining or losing value over time. You can do a calculation using historical gold price records to see how many gold ounces the house cost you (opportunity cost), and how many gold ounces the house is worth now.
This doesn’t mean that if you eventually go to sell it you will only accept gold ounces. You might be happy with dollars because you plan to use the dollars to buy another house.
The point is that you are thinking about the value of things in units of gold, rather than units of dollars.
Funny you bring this up the day gold makes its biggest single-day USD move in history 👀
Dollar-Cost Averaging
Dollar-cost averaging (DCA) is when you invest a fixed amount on a regular basis regardless of market developments.
This practice can work well long term for assets that reflect the value of the entire stock market (or a big part of it).
Long term, we can expect the stock market as a whole to gain value. So if you invest part of your income every month, say, then your position will grow in the long run.
In the meantime, you get to reduce risk by not investing all your money at once. You also get to react to developments that affect the stock market and can decide to interrupt your investment schedule. But I personally like ‘boring’ investment strategies, meaning strategies that are automated and reliable.