Willis Cap

The father of seven has not finished a thought in four years. he is just moving. feeding. driving. wiping. his brain is soup and his back is finished and he has no opinions about civilization he is too tired for opinions. and meanwhile civilization is growing out of him like he is dirt and he doesnt even notice because there is milk on the floor again. the childfree man has read eleven books this year about the decline of the west and he is the decline and the books are the evidence and he will understand this at fifty eight in a room that is very clean and very quiet

Steven Bartlett says a few glasses of wine ruined the next 3 days of his life “It's one of those areas where you don't understand the hidden cost until you really give it up for a while. I stopped drinking at 30 years old. I'm now 33. When I was 31, I thought, I'll have a drink again because now I could really A/B test it. I had a year of not drinking, decided to have a drink again” “It ruined three days of my life. I had a couple of glasses of wine, didn't get drunk. It ruined three days of my life because of the domino effect it caused” “I got worse sleep that night, and then because I got worse sleep that night, I ate more poorly the next day because my dopamine system or whatever, the cortisol system was all messed up. I podcasted worse. I didn't go to the gym that day or the day after because I felt really bad. I then slept worse, and I could track all of this on my Whoop”

The 13Fs I have seen so far this quarter are, with maybe four exceptions, the most embarrassing display of professional herding I have witnessed in a decade. Every “widely followed” fund owns the same nine names. The differentiation between them, when you actually lay the holdings out side by side, is statistical noise dressed up as conviction. These are people charging 2 and 20, and 1.5 and 15, and a flat 1% on $4 billion accounts, to deliver portfolios that a Vanguard index fund could replicate at 4 basis points, except with worse turnover, higher tax drag, and a manager letter every quarter explaining why owning the same seven mega-cap names everyone else owns is, in fact, a contrarian act of independent thought. There is no work in these portfolios. There is no original research. There is no name on any of these 13Fs that required the manager to fly somewhere, sit in a lobby, eat a cookie, call a CEO at a number listed in a proxy statement from 2011, or do anything that any well-read 19-year-old with a Bloomberg login could not have done in an afternoon. The entire industry has, in the last decade, quietly stopped doing the work, because the work is hard, the work is lonely, the work makes you look stupid for 18 months at a time, and the work, when it produces a name nobody else owns, is the single greatest career risk in modern asset management. Nobody gets fired for owning Microsoft. Everyone gets fired for owning a $90 million market cap Pennsylvania bank that the LP committee has never heard of, even when the bank doubles, because by then the LP has already pulled the capital and the manager is already at a different firm doing the same thing he was doing before, which is owning Microsoft. You can do the work. You can own the small cap they will not. You can build a portfolio that does not look like anyone else’s. You will not be on Bloomberg. You will not be invited to speak at the conference. You will, however, in some ten-year window that you will not be able to predict in advance, outperform every one of these herded portfolios by margins that will, in retrospect, look obvious to everyone except the people who were doing the herding, who will, as they always do, explain that they were right in spirit and just wrong in price, which is, as it has always been, the entire reason the trade on the other side keeps working.

Hard not to contrast this to $BRK today. $BRK used to be sortof a better managed, better governed, better allocated version of the S&P. Now one is 40% AI and one is 40% cash. Berkshire is almost a bet against AI and on a market crash. Greg Abel pretty explicitly said on the stage they need a crash to deploy the excess capital, as equity prices in March weren’t enough (still net sellers of stocks in 1Q). Meanwhile the index construction has made it so dominated by tech and AI stocks that you basically need an AI selloff to crash the market.