The Philosophical Investor's Blog

Charlie Munger, Robert Hunter, and Worldly Wisdom

Charlie Munger, Robert Hunter Worldly Wisdom

“What is elementary, worldly wisdom? Well, the first rule is that you can’t really know anything if you just remember isolated facts and try and bang ‘em back. If the facts don’t hang together on a latticework of theory, you don’t have them in a usable form.”

— Charlie Munger

For me,

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Flow - The 8 Elements of Enjoyment

Flow Enjoyment

For many years I have wanted to read the book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience but think I have subconsciously put it off because of the author’s unpronounceable name (at least to me) for fear if someone asked me who wrote it I wouldn’t be able to say his name.

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Monday Motivation, Being Robotic and Interest Rates

robotic

I must admit that I was struggling to find the motivation to do this week’s post after three straight weeks of travel and a particularly busy seven days that included late-night business dinners for a number of them. Woe is me. I only bring it up because all of us face those times when we don’t want to do something and yet after we do it we inevitably feel better about having taken on the challenge.

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What Movie Are You Creating And Watching?

Barry Ritholtz Gary Carmell

Scott Adams is someone I follow and I appreciate his insights about persuasion and human nature. He often says that everyone is living their own movie. They write the scripts and they have cast them with characters they have developed with personalities they have created for them.

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Rent Control - Then and Now

With rent control being passed in California, Oregon, and New York, government intervention in rental housing is heating up. This is something we have been predicting for a number of years given the housing shortage and relatively stagnant wages for lower to middle-income earners. We also had a lot of experience with it when we owned manufacturing housing communities where it was much more widespread than apartments so we had a sense of the conditions that would lend itself to rent control pressures.

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And Roneet Lived

Roneet Eulogy

Roneet passed one year ago today. I wrote the following for Roneet’s memorial service.

In the book of Genesis the chapter discussing the death of Sarah is called “The Life of Sarah” while the one dedicated to the death of Jacob is called “And Jacob Lived”.

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More Haikus

Haiku

Please note that since the S.E.C. thinks some of my blogs crossover in terms of promoting CWS or making investment recommendations, they now need to be reviewed by our Chief Compliance Officer before being posted. As a result, after this week I anticipate that future blogs will be posted on Tuesday.

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Mind Your Legacy and a Pet Peeve

Mark Hurd Legacy

I was going to write about some interesting charts that caught my attention such as this one.

Average of five key Philly Fed subindexes

And while this divergence definitely caught my eye and makes me wonder if the recent rise in yields (nearly 0.25% over the last couple of weeks on the 10-Year Treasury) is foreshadowing economic improvement like this chart seems to suggest,

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Barcelona and the Beautiful People

Gary Carmell Barcelona Vacation Pictures

Barcelona has been on my bucket list. I was heading to Europe for another reason but decided to tack on visiting the city to the beginning of my trip. I flew through Istanbul and since I’m a big fan of naps I thought I would take this picture to show my support for this activity (or inactivity).

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A Memorable Cab Driver and Eavesdropping in Austin

cab driver Austin

I was in Austin a couple of weeks ago and had a very interesting cab driver who looked like one of the wild and crazy guys from the classic Saturday Night Live skits played by Dan Ackroyd and Steve Martin as the two brothers from Czechoslovakia.

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