Webinar starts tomorrow, my UBS interview, Nikola Tesla, All It Takes Is One
1. This morning Glenn and I finished our Lessons from the Trenches: Value Investing Bootcamp and tomorrow morning start our webinar on How to Launch and Build an Investment Fund, which is aimed at folks who are thinking of launching their own fund or have already done so and are looking to grow it.
Over three 2.5-hour sessions (tomorrow, Monday and Tuesday, from 7:00-9:30am ET), we'll cover the following agenda:
- Overview, introductions and agenda
- The decision to launch a fund
- Legal matters
- How to choose and negotiate with a prime broker
- Key logistical questions (hedge fund vs. separately managed accounts, fees, redemption terms, when and who to hire, whether to have a partner or seed investor, etc.)
- How we made a name for ourselves and built our business
- How to raise $1 billion (or not)
- Great investor pitch decks
- Great (and not so great) investor letters
- How to survive periods of poor performance
- Why I paid the Navy SEALs kick the xxxx out of me
- How to create a great slide presentation & make a killer stock pitch
It's not too late to register and join us – and best of all, it's only $295 (ditto for our webinar that follows, an Advanced Seminar on Short Selling, which is Wed-Fri next week). They will never be priced lower. Just register here and use discount code FLASHSEMINAR.
PS – The most common question I get is from folks who can't make one or more of the sessions and worry about missing the content. Fear not! All are recorded and by the end of each day we send every participant the link to that day's video (which is available for a full year) and the associated pdfs from which we taught (plus additional background material). Thus, the only thing you miss is the ability to ask questions (which you can email to us anytime).
2. I did a 15-min video interview with UBS when I was in Singapore a couple of weeks ago. Here are the topics we discussed:
- 0:21: Definition of Value Investing?
- 3:54: Value of a stock vs. the quality of a business?
- 5:42: Opportunity for value investors in China?
- 8:27: Advice on timing a short idea?
- 11:05: Have automated and passive funds made fundamental investing harder?
3. This is a fascinating article about Nikola Tesla, The Rise and Fall of Nikola Tesla and his Tower. Some parallels to Elon Musk! Excerpt:
By the end of his brilliant and tortured life, the Serbian physicist, engineer and inventor Nikola Tesla was penniless and living in a small New York City hotel room. He spent days in a park surrounded by the creatures that mattered most to him—pigeons—and his sleepless nights working over mathematical equations and scientific problems in his head. That habit would confound scientists and scholars for decades after he died, in 1943. His inventions were designed and perfected in his imagination.
Tesla believed his mind to be without equal, and he wasn't above chiding his contemporaries, such as Thomas Edison, who once hired him.
... By 1912, Tesla began to withdraw from that doubting world. He was clearly showing signs of obsessive-compulsive disorder, and was potentially a high-functioning autistic.
4. I enjoyed these stories of investors who discovered Berkshire, Amazon and Alibaba early and rode them for years. All It Takes is One. Excerpt:
It is incredibly humbling, inspiring, and a bit scary when you realize that one great investment can make your year, decade, and even career.
In 1980, Stewart Horejsi was having doubts that his business would survive. His company, Brown Welding Supply LLC, had been in business for 50 years, but they were slowly losing market share to the competition.
Horejsi heard about Berkshire Hathaway in John Train's "The Money Masters". He was frustrated with the growth prospects for his business, so he took some cash and bought 40 shares of Berkshire Hathaway at $265. Two weeks later he bought 60 shares at $295. A month later he bought 200 shares at $330 per share.
He went to the annual meetings when there were less than a dozen people in attendance. He actually made his friends go too because he was worried the company would stop having them because attendance was so low.
His 4,300 Class A Shares are now worth $1.4 billion.
In 1999, legendary fund manager Bill Miller ran into some Amazon executives at the Santa Fe Institute.