Loser’s Game

  • A classic essay by Charles Elis.
  • It makes the distinction between a winner’s game (where you win by winning) and a loser’s game (where you win by not losing).
  • He argues that investing has become the latter but does offer some advice:
  • (1) play your own game“Impose upon the enemy the time and place and conditions for fighting preferred by oneself.” Simon Ramo suggests: “Give the other fellow as many opportunities as possible to make mistakes, and he will do so.
  • (2) keep it simple – “Play the shot you’ve got the greatest chance of playing well.
  • (3) concentrate on defence (selling) vs. offence (buying).
  • (4) don’t take it personal.

Long Volatility

  • This is a fascinating slightly old interview with Chris Cole of Artemis Capital Management.
  • He runs a long volatility fund i.e. a crash protection fund.
  • In the interview he talks about the core principle of the fund – to sacrifice the next linear predictable outcome in order to gain exposure to a truly convex upside outcome.
  • Around minute seven he goes into a brilliant analogy using George Lucas’ success with Star Wars.
  • Most interestingly, this idea can also be applied to life as Chris describes in minute 47 of the interview embedded here.
  • Worth checking out their writing and following him on Twitter.

Support Snippet

  • Snippet started as a passion project a year and a half ago.
  • Since then almost 5,000 of you follow us across various platforms.
  • A big thank you to everyone who reads and shares.
  • With such growth the site is starting to incur higher costs like our Mailchimp bill.
  • Therefore, I would be grateful for any support, commensurate to the value you feel Snippet provides.
  • Thank you in advance.
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Art of Reading

  • This is a neat post on the art of reading well.
  • Without giving too much away there is a lot to be learnt about how to read effectively.
  • One idea that really struck home was, as one reaches the fourth and final level of reading, synoptic, connections start to form.
  • Then, as Steve Jobs said, “Creativity is just connecting things”.

Christmas Competition 2020

  • Test your investing skill and win a prize!
  • The inaugural Snippet Finance Christmas competition is live.
  • Think you can predict the stock market? Think you know which stocks will outperform? Give it a shot.
  • The overall winner gets a bottle of champagne. The overall loser gets a wooden spoon.
  • Get your colleagues/friends involved – simply enter your company name and we will tell you how you ranked within your group.
  • Enter the competition HERE.

Snippet Blog

  • Snippet Finance is launching a blog.
  • As you know Snippet is a curation of the most interesting snippets on finance, investing and macroeconomics.
  • In the Snippet Blog I will periodically write longer articles on a range of financial topics and feature them on the main page.
  • You can find the blog in the top menu and in the Categories section.
  • Enjoy!

Best Performing Stocks

  • Alta Fox have done a massive analysis of all the best performing stocks over the last five years.
  • Overall – they find that financially healthy companies with advantageous business positioning tend to do better.
  • Acquisitions are a feature of these top performing stocks (perhaps because of the five year time frame).
  • The analysis is a bit too micro cap focussed and only concentrates on Australia, Europe and North America and excludes some sectors (e.g. materials), but is nonetheless useful.
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