how true...

To wit: In the same way that you can’t “win” an argument with your overly emotional wife (or husband), nor can you “win” an argument with a persistently delusion-embracing market.

Berkshire Hathaway

Dear readers,

Enclosed you find a sequence of the recent annual newsletter of Berkshire Hathaway. Seldomly seen so much truth in so less words:

We tend to let our many subsidiaries operate on their own, without our supervising and monitoring them to any degree... We would rather suffer the visible costs of a few bad decisions than incur the many invisible costs that come from decisions made too slowly - or not at all - because of a stifling bureaucracy... We will never allow Berkshire to become some monolith that is overrun with committees, budget presentations and multiple layers of management. Instead, we plan to operate as a collection of separately-managed medium-sized and large businesses, most of whose decision-making occurs at the operating level.

More Than You Know by Michael J. Mauboussin

These days I have started reading a book which has a nearer focus on investments, than the books I usually read. I'll start with a quote of a quote out of it:

The only certainty is that there is no certainty. This principle is especially true for the investment industry, which deals largely with uncertainty. In contrast, the casino business deals largely with risk. With both uncertainty and risk, outcomes are unknown. But with uncertainty, the underlying distribution of outcomes is undefined, while with risk we know what that distribution looks like. Corporate undulation is uncertain; roulette is risky.

by Robert Rubin, former Tresury Secretary.