“Preparation. Discipline. Patience. Decisiveness.” Thoughts on #ValueInvesting #HumanNature #Wisdom
Joined June 2021
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“Strip out Starlink and you are left with a money furnace.”
(Not an endorsement of the views expressed! 🤣）
Jun 11
Peter Lynch would have HATED everything about this SpaceX IPO.
I know because I worked with him at Fidelity in the 1980s. Companies like this came across our desks all the time - the hot story, the charismatic founder, the trillion-dollar promise.
The answer was always the same:
Pass, move on, and find a REAL business.
Today, SpaceX prices at $135 a share. $1.77 TRILLION valuation while all the numbers that actually matter look TERRIBLE.
"Long shots almost never pay off."
Peter spent his entire career proving this. He made his money on Dunkin' Donuts, Taco Bell, Hanes, Chrysler - businesses you could walk into, understand in 30 seconds, and value off a napkin. He avoided the hot moonshot stocks of his era because the math never worked.
SpaceX is one GIANT long shot...
- Starship has to work at scale
- Starlink margins have to hold as the satellite competition floods in
- xAI has to catch OpenAI and Anthropic in a race it is currently losing
- Mars has to generate returns inside our lifetimes
Every one of those is a coin flip. But the $1.77 trillion price tag assumes ALL FOUR are near-certainties.
Peter taught me a stock should be describable in a sentence a sixth-grader could understand. SpaceX cannot be described in a paragraph an MBA can understand.
What even is SpaceX? Is it a rocket company? A satellite internet company? An AI company? A defense contractor? A Mars colonization project?
The honest answer is yes to all five. Which means no real answer at all.
That alone would be enough for Peter to pass.
He also had a soft spot for what he called the boring profitable company. His favorite example was Kellogg's. As he put it, no matter how bad things get, people still eat cornflakes.
Now look at SpaceX.
It lost $4.9 BILLION in 2025. The xAI division alone burned $6.36 billion at the operating line. The only segment actually making real money is Starlink, at $11.4 billion in revenue.
Strip out Starlink and you are left with a money furnace.
Peter would have looked at this and bought Kellogg's instead. He would have laughed at the idea of paying $1.77 trillion for a company that loses money everywhere except one segment.
By the time a hot company hits the public market, the institutions have already taken the upside and the public is being handed the bag.
Just look at this offering:
30% allocated to retail investors worth $22.5 BILLION. That's triple the industry norm.
I have seen this with Pets .com, Webvan, Snap, Peloton, Robinhood, Coinbase, and many more.
Every one of them was the future on day one. And every one of them destroyed retail capital after the hype faded.
SpaceX enters the Nasdaq-100 15 days from now. MSCI inclusion starts tomorrow.
An estimated $22 to $27 BILLION in mechanical, forced buying from index funds is the entire short-term bull case.
Peter built his career getting into stocks BEFORE the institutions arrived. He believed your edge came from being early.
SpaceX is the opposite - every passive index fund in America is about to be forced to buy this thing at $1.77 trillion whether they want to or not.
The smart money is NOT buying SpaceX today.
You shouldn't either.
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Doubly true ‘dat.
Jun 11
When startups fail the reason is almost always that they haven't made what people want.
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True ‘dat.
Jun 11
You are far more dangerous to your startup than competitors are. A hundred times more startups die from poor execution by their founders than are killed by competitors.
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Highly readable, cogent and well-reasoned write up on the upcoming Space X IPO 👍🏻
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“The course of the stock market will determine, to a great degree, when we will be right, but the accuracy of our analysis of the company will largely determine whether we will be right. In other words, we tend to concentrate on what should happen, not when it should happen.”
-Buffett
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“There is nothing at all conservative, in my opinion, about speculating as to just how high a multiplier a greedy and capricious public will put on earnings.
You will not be right simply because a large number of people momentarily agree with you. You will not be right simply because important people agree with you. In many quarters the simultaneous occurrence of the two factors is enough to make a course of action meet the test of conservatism.
You will be right, over the course of many transactions, if your hypotheses are correct, your facts are correct, and your reasoning is correct.
True conservatism is only possible through knowledge and reason.”
-Buffett
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An amazing interview with an amazing leader.
High level, vastly experienced, measured.
youtu.be/uwK1Ed1C1fQ?
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T Poon retweeted
Feb 28
Iran's threat pushes Gulf states to diversify their partnerships, and this very diversification increases Chinese leverage. And the more leverage China holds over Gulf capitals, the less likely those capitals are to side with Washington on the questions Beijing cares about most: Taiwan, semiconductor export controls, sanctions enforcement, and the future of the dollar-based financial order.
zinebriboua.com/p/the-iran-q…
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Whoa….
Feb 11
New art project.
Train and inference GPT in 243 lines of pure, dependency-free Python. This is the *full* algorithmic content of what is needed. Everything else is just for efficiency. I cannot simplify this any further.
gist.github.com/karpathy/862…
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It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity, but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own neces-
sities, but of their advan-tages. Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens. Even a
beggar does not depend upon it entirelv.
-Adam Smith
1776
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A Polymarket bot developer mass deleted his code last week. I found his Reddit confession before it disappeared.
I'm done. Not because the money stopped. Because I can't sleep anymore.
He built prediction algorithms for 3 years. Made $2.1M. Then wrote 47 paragraphs explaining why he's walking away.
The part that haunts me:
Every time you place a bet, you're not competing with other humans. You're feeding data to systems that learned your patterns months ago. Your hesitation. Your favorite markets. The exact moment you check your phone after news breaks. We have all of it.
He described the architecture:
Layer 1: Sentiment scrapers reading 140,000 tweets per minute. Before a rumor becomes a headline, the position is already built.
Layer 2: Exchange bridges. The bot sees BTC move on Coinbase, calculates Polymarket impact, and executes. Total latency: 80ms. Your finger hasn't touched the screen yet.
Layer 3: Behavioral modeling. They know retail traders panic-sell at -15%. So they push prices to -14.8%. Wait. Then buy your shares at discount when you finally crack.
The worst part? We call regular traders yield. Not competitors. Not opponents. Yield. Like crops we harvest seasonally.
Stop being yield: thetradefox.com?ref=JUSTBLAZ…
He ended with this:
The only retail traders making money are the ones who stopped trading. They just copy the wallets that copy us.
I read it three times.
Then I deleted my indicators. My charts. My strategy.
Because there's no strategy against someone who sees your cards, knows your tells, and moves before you think.
There's only one play left:
Stop being yield. Start being a shadow.
They spend millions on infrastructure. You spend nothing.
They take the risk. You take the same entry.
They do the math. You copy the answer.
In Polymarket, you're either the algorithm or the agriculture.
Choose.
Not financial advice.
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When you invest and build, do you ever think of when you are no longer here on earth?
A hike in the forest can set things straight. For what better way to gain perspective than to walk among ancient living things.
Pass on your timeless ideas, hard wrought experiences, and inspire the generations to come!
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True ‘dat!
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Conventional thinking says stock prices are the leading indicators, but in reality this is false.
Know the business deeply, the driving forces, the indispensability (or not) of its products, and one will find that stock prices are LAGGARDS to take advantage of. When something is priced in, it’s often too late.
Example $GOOGL at $152 as recently as THIS year.
$MELI at $1680 as recently as THIS year.
$AVGO at $167 as recently as THIS year.
And on and on…
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