“A wise man looks for everything inside of himself; a madman seeks for everything in others.” —Confucius “There's only one success: to be able to live your life your way.” —Christopher Morley

Seth Klarman: "This Is a Bubble" | The Legendary Investor's Brutal AI Wa... youtu.be/AbZYb11A-Hw?is=H8G4… via @YouTube

Weekly Summary: 06/05/2026 valueinvestingworld.substack…

"The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves." - Carl Sagan 1994. Astronomer.

“Trends can reverse for no apparent reason with incredible celerity.” —Barton Biggs “Know thyself and know thy foibles. Study the history of your emotions and your actions. At the extreme moments of fear and greed, the power of the daily price momentum and the mood and passions of ‘the crowd’ are tremendously important psychological influences on you. It takes a strong, self-confident, emotionally mature person to stand firm against disdain, mockery, and repudiation when the market itself seems to be absolutely confirming that you are both mad and wrong. Also, be obsessive in making sure your facts are right and that you haven’t missed or misunderstood something.” —Barton Biggs

Thanks for sharing. Makes sense given some old Munger and Greenwald comments… valueinvestingworld.com/2013…

Interesting to think about this comment from Mark Leonard last year, given what's been happening lately. There are new AI concerns, and I don't yet have a position, but it's probably a reasonable data point when thinking through potential returns from here.

Just released on Latticework: Weekly Inspiration - Wisdom, Insights, and Ideas for Intelligent Investors latticework.com/p/weekly-ins…

Sorfis 2025 Annual Letter to Clients sorfis.com/2025-year-end-let… “And I’ll leave you my last bit of wisdom. There’s another proverb, it’s a Turkish proverb. ‘No road is long with good company.’ The essence of life is to surround yourself, as continuously as you can, with good company.” —Peter Kaufman

"Be always at war with your vices, at peace with your neighbours, and let each new year find you a better man." -Benjamin Franklin

“He who receives a benefit with gratitude repays the first installment on his debt.” —Seneca “All you need are these: certainty of judgment in the present moment; action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.” —Marcus Aurelius

John Malone at his finest… youtube.com/watch?v=tsA7y8jH…

Peter Kaufman: I’m the only person on Earth who can define Circle of Competence Here it is…

"[There's] this theme of ‘finding your own way.’ One of the most common mistakes that I see people make—whether you're talking about kids or adults—in the learning curve is trying to do it like someone else does it; whether it's your dad, or your hero, or Michael Jordan, or Tiger Woods, or whatever the sport is. There are people who are at the top, and you can try to do it like somebody else, but that's very different from trying to figure out the relationship to the art which is completely your own." —Josh Waitzkin

“Talking to management is not a perfect art. Management talks about what management wants to talk about. And they have, sometimes, their own agenda. But I think you can get a lot from the conversation around what’s the likely direction—both of where they’re taking the assets, what new bets are they going to make, and how much do they care about shareholder return. One of my favorite questions for a lot of the stocks we look at that haven’t done much in the market lately is ‘Why should we or anybody buy the stock here? What’s the plan for how you’re going to deliver value for your shareholders, especially because the last couple of years your stock really has lagged?’ You don’t have to agree with the answer, but hearing it shows you something about the caliber and character of management.” —Seth Klarman

I enjoyed the thoughts from @iancassel in this chat, especially the golf analogies. It reminded me of more parallels between golf, investing, and greatness, as exemplified by the legend that was Ben Hogan. In Omaha for the Berkshire Meeting this year, a friend, also named Ben, whom I met via @ChrisBloomstran, gave me Tim Scott's book on Hogan and said Chapter 15 might be the best chapter ever written on the golf swing. As I read it, I realized how many of the lessons apply to investing as well, as the excerpt below shows: Herbert Warren Wind, the noted author who penned Hogan’s Five Lessons with him, noted of Hogan’s intellectual curiosity, “It would not be remiss to add that the superlative game he ultimately developed depended as least as much on the tireless thinking he put in over the years as it did on his tireless practicing.” From his early days on the tour, Hogan knew his poor results were due to his own poor efforts, and while he quickly learned that in golf, he was the master of his own ship, it took him quite a while to get all the sails fully up. In his 1974 interview at the World Golf Hall of Fame in Pinehurst, N.C., he commented on the development of his golf game, “I’ve had all the problems. You could run the gamut. There’s no problem I haven’t had. But, I’ve worked on every one of them. Not that I’ve conquered all of them, but I got it to where I could handle most of them. And that’s one of the greatest rewards in golf, I think. Learning… I’ve gotten just great satisfaction, as much as or more than anybody in learning how to swing a golf club and what is going to happen when you swing it this way or that way.” He had this to say about himself regarding his knowing everything about the golf swing: “There’s nine jillion things to learn… It’s a very complex thing. Some days you react differently, your muscles and your eyes change from day to day. Even a driving machine won’t react the same on a cold day as on a warm day. It’s utterly impossible. Everything changes… There’s always a gray area there. There are so many things I don’t know about golf, you could fill a room with them. I don’t know them all, and if I did, I wouldn’t enjoy practicing. I like to practice and fiddle around and prove or disprove things. I’m a very curious person, and I enjoy that. And if I knew it all, I wouldn’t have any more enjoyment.”

This Howard Marks quote from 2017 seems especially relevant after the last week or so: “Most people don’t want to tempt fate by saying things will go well forever, and in fact they know they won’t. It’s just that they can’t decide what it is that will go wrong. The truth is that while I can enumerate them, the obvious candidates (changes in oil prices, interest rates, exchange rates, etc.) are likely to already be anticipated and largely priced in. It’s the surprises no one can anticipate that would move markets most if they were to happen. But (a) most people can’t imagine them and (b) most of the time they don’t happen. That’s why they’re called surprises.” —Howard Marks

Links - 05/05/2025 [free] open.substack.com/pub/valuei… “You get a few breaks in life in terms of people you will meet who will just change your life dramatically. You need a handful of those and, when you get them, you treasure them.” —Warren Buffett

These related quotes seem relevant for many things happening in the world today (and always)... “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth. Authoritarian institutions and marketers have always known this fact.” —Daniel Kahneman “Hitler had argued that people would believe anything if it was repeated often enough and if disconfirming information was routinely denied, silenced, or disputed with yet more lies.” —Viktor Frankl

I’m happy to share the Semper Augustus annual letter. We’ll have the letter on the website shortly. In the interim, here’s the letter posted by great friend @jtkoster this evening. Many thanks for the encouragement and appreciation of this annual effort. drive.google.com/file/d/1e2w…