The Quarterly Dispatch

The Only Asset That Has Never Gone Down

There is one holding I have never trimmed, never hedged, and never once questioned, and it is my own belief in what I am doing. You cannot chart it. You cannot short it. And it has, I will tell you plainly, outperformed every other position in this portfolio by a margin that is technically infinite, because the others are at zero.

A man from the bank called on Tuesday. He was polite. He used my first name, which nobody has done since the spring, and I will admit that for a moment I stayed on the line longer than the conversation strictly required. But conviction, cats, does not take a call. Conviction lets it ring.

On the Discipline of the Empty Room

The great firms of the sixties understood something the moderns have forgotten: a deal is made in a room, and the room must be controlled. Lighting. Temperature. Who speaks first. I have applied this rigorously. My room is controlled absolutely, because there has been nobody else in it since a Tuesday in February.

I do not say this for sympathy. I say it because solitude is a competitive advantage that most operators are simply too soft to acquire. They need affirmation. They need a colleague. I have Barnaby, and Barnaby has never once told me I was wrong, which after four years I have begun to find slightly upsetting, and which I am choosing to interpret as trust.

Notes on the Alternator

A great deal has been made, in certain circles, of the fact that the firm's vehicle is inoperable. Let us address it directly, in the spirit of transparency for which this house is known.

The 2009 Toyota Corolla requires an alternator. The alternator is four hundred and twelve dollars, installed, at the shop on Delmar where the man knows me now and has stopped asking when. This is not a hardship. This is a capital allocation decision, and I have decided, with total clarity, to allocate that capital elsewhere, namely nowhere, because I do not have it.

Immobility focuses the mind. Rockefeller walked. Buffett drives a modest car. I have gone one step further and eliminated the vehicle from the equation entirely, and I would ask you to look honestly at whether you have the nerve to do the same.

On Patience, and the Fourteen-Day Grace Period

The market rewards the man who can wait. So, it turns out, does the utility company — though considerably less so, and only once, and with a tone that I felt was unnecessary given that we had been doing business together for nineteen months.

I sat in the dark that first evening and I want to tell you what I felt, because I think it matters. I did not feel fear. I felt the enormous, humming quiet of a man with no distractions left. The laptop was at eleven percent. The charts were still there. And I thought: this is the room where it gets decided. Then the laptop died. But the thought stands.

Diversification Is Cowardice Wearing a Nice Suit

They will tell you to spread the risk across asset classes, geographies, and time horizons. What they are describing is not a strategy. It is a man hedging against the possibility that he was never right about anything.

I put it all in one place. I know exactly where it is. It is in a thing that no longer trades, on a venue that no longer answers, administered by a person who no longer exists under that name. But I know where it is, and I would ask how many of you, with your eleven funds and your target-date whatever, can say the same about a single dollar you own.

The Board Meeting: A Study in Silence

Convened 6:00 a.m. Present: the Managing Partner, and Barnaby. Item one: the thesis. The thesis was reaffirmed. Item two: the runway. Discussion was tabled. Item three: whether it is normal to hold a board meeting with a cat, raised by the Managing Partner, withdrawn by the Managing Partner.

The motion carried unanimously. Barnaby abstained, as Barnaby abstains from everything, and in this abstention I have come to see a kind of institutional wisdom that the boards of larger firms would do well to study. Meeting adjourned 7:40 a.m. Nobody had anywhere to be.

Why I Left

In 2021 I walked out of a regional carpet retailer in the middle of a Thursday shift, and I did not tell anyone, and I have never gone back. My manager's name was Denise. Denise was, in every measurable respect, good to me.

I sold carpet, cats. Rugs. And one afternoon I stood in that showroom under those lights and I understood, with a force I can only describe as clinical, that I had spent two years putting rugs down when the entire arc of my life was pointing toward pulling them up. That is not a coincidence. That is the universe issuing a directive.

I have thought about calling Denise. I think about it more than I let on. But a man does not go backward, and anyway the phone is off until the fifteenth, which is fine, which is optimal actually, because the greatest returns in history were compounded by men who could not be reached.