December 2025 Random Ramblings
Andrew Walker’s working 10-year thesis is that public markets will keep getting “weirder and weirder” as computers eliminate much of the simple fundamental alpha. Like basketball optimizing toward rim shots and threes, or computer chess becoming unrecognizable to ordinary players, market strategies are migrating to their extremes. Zero-day trading, leveraged ETFs, retail participation, and prediction markets favor unusual, path-dependent situations over stocks that merely screen as cheap.
Fundamental analysis remains “table stakes,” but Walker expects more edge in situations where attention and reflexivity can change the company itself. His example is Opendoor: a retail “mob army” helps drive the stock up 20x, enabling equity issuance and potentially reshaping the company. He explicitly says he is not calling that a pump-and-dump; he sees it as evidence that “all the juice” may increasingly be in unusual situations.
Walker has become skeptical of valuation theses that a Yahoo Finance screen can reproduce in five seconds. An 8x earnings multiple or low price-to-book ratio may look attractive, but he increasingly suspects such simplicity offers “not only no alpha there but probably negative alpha.” He concedes that a diversified basket of 50 low-P/E stocks might eke out a return, but doubts it produces large alpha.
Buybacks and hidden real estate have become much smaller parts of Walker’s approach because both can sit atop deteriorating businesses. Bed Bath & Beyond bought stock around $40 before later diluting shares around $0.10 in a death spiral, while department stores such as Macy’s, Kohl’s, Nordstrom, and Seritage produced poor long-term outcomes despite property theses. His diagnosis: “You have all this real estate ownership attached to a truly negative-EV department store business.”
Three years without performance has become Walker’s practical timeout for forcing a thesis review. Cable taught him that a monopoly-or-duopoly premise could not simply survive the arrival of fixed wireless and the possibility that many markets had become oligopolies: “The market is hitting you in the face with the fact that the thesis is wrong.” A flat or falling stock does not automatically require selling, but his own history says he usually would have been better off moving on.
Risk management now means refusing to turn a broken event trade into progressively deeper flavors of value investing. His recurring loss pattern starts with a takeover trade at $10, continues after the deal dies at $9, and gets relabeled as value at $6 and distressed at $3. The corrective is blunt: “The answer there is you’ve got to sell.”
Exceptional track records may reflect insight, luck, or an investor’s willingness to ignore a risk that happened not to materialize. Walker has interviewed investors whose largest position rose 6x in 18 months, yet wonders whether they identified and correctly dismissed the risk or simply “glossed over” it. His podcast has also made him more alert to domain arrogance: smart media investors can misunderstand tender-offer mechanics just as smart commentators misunderstood specific performance during Elon Musk’s Twitter bid.
1. Simple alpha is disappearing into stranger markets
Walker’s working thesis after about 10 years of professional public-market investing is that markets are entering “the final stages of the efficient market” and getting “weirder and weirder.” SPACs and the post-COVID boom were early signs; zero-day trading, leveraged ETFs, retail participation, and prediction markets are now blending speculation, attention, and investing.
His basketball analogy supplies the mechanism. Once mathematics established that efficient offense meant shots at the rim, free throws, or three-pointers, the middle disappeared; elite basketball became unlike the game ordinary people play. He sees a similar transformation in high-level computer chess, which began looking like “a completely different sport.”
Markets should follow the same path: computers have made straightforward fundamental analysis largely table stakes. Some of the year’s individual-stock leaders may still have long-term paths “to zero,” but can rise 10x first; path dependency matters when a higher price itself creates financing and strategic options.
Opendoor is Walker’s specimen of reflexivity at the frontier. Build a following early, create a cult around the stock, drive attention and a 20x move, then issue equity and potentially reshape the company. He explicitly says he is not calling this a pump-and-dump. He thinks adaptable investors will increasingly find alpha where “all the juice” sits: unusual situations beyond conventional fundamental value.
2. Cheap multiples, buybacks, and hidden property have become less reliable standalone theses
Walker’s first major change of mind is about pure valuation. He still feels the pull of 8x earnings and price-to-book, but warns: “If your core thesis is something that can be recreated by a Yahoo Finance screener in five seconds, you’re probably not going to get paid for that.”
He has also downgraded buybacks from a huge buy signal to one useful input. The John Malone-style combination of leverage, free cash flow, and aggressive repurchases often belonged to legacy businesses with no reinvestment runway; technology then attacked their moats, with Netflix and cable networks as his headline example.
Bed Bath & Beyond captures the capital-allocation danger: management repurchased stock around $40, then later issued shares around $0.10 in a death spiral. Walker still prefers buybacks to dividends when executed intelligently—and enjoys tracking daily UK repurchase disclosures—but no longer treats a shrinking share count as evidence that the underlying business is safe.
Hidden real estate produced the same disillusionment. Seritage offered a spin-off, rights offering, and property story that looked extraordinary to value investors, while Macy’s owned Herald Square; yet department stores broadly became 10-year disasters. The businesses consumed value every year even as investors focused on the land: valuable real estate attached to “a truly negative-EV department store business.”
3. Timeouts and fast exits matter more than defending the original price
Walker has moved from “zero out of 10” to roughly one out of 10 on technical analysis. He still regards much of it as “mumbo jumbo” or “voodoo,” but now sees possible risk-management value in watching a 200-day moving average on shorts or relative-strength indicators when deciding whether to deploy cash into an oversold index.
His larger evolution is abandoning indefinite patience as a virtue. Three years without progress does not prove the market is right, but it is long enough to ask, “Is it me or is it them?” His experience says a position bought at $50 in 2019 and still at $50 in 2022 was usually better sold and perhaps revisited after new evidence emerged.
Cable is the painful example. Walker’s 2016 thesis worked for five to seven years because many markets looked like monopolies or duopolies; the subsequent three years were terrible and should have forced recognition that fixed wireless had created the possibility of oligopolistic competition in many places. Better investors saw the threat sooner while he kept emphasizing cash flow and asset value.
The same discipline applies faster after material news. His instinct is to love at $8 what he liked at $10, but maturity means reassessing rather than defending ownership. The nightmare progression—“this was an event, now it’s a value investment,” then deep value, then distressed—begins when a failed takeover trade is not sold after its catalyst dies.
4. A grand-slam record does not reveal how much was skill
After roughly 350 podcast episodes, Walker says even a guest on the left tail can teach him something: an hour spent probing another investor’s analytical holes makes similar weaknesses easier to spot in his own portfolio. He cares less about charisma than whether the fundamental work is there. He hopes—and acknowledges he may be talking his book—that the average guest is a very above-average investor.
The deeper puzzle is that the best track records do not always belong to the most impressive thinkers he has interviewed. Two equally smart venture investors can become a legend and merely average respectively because only one entered Facebook in 2009; in public markets, one grand slam can likewise separate a very good record from an unbelievable one.
When a guest’s largest position rises 6x in 18 months, Walker asks a counterfactual question: across 10 other universes, is that investor “dunzo” in eight? A 10x may mean the investor identified and correctly dismissed a risk—or that arrogance allowed them to gloss over a risk whose benign resolution made the record look brilliant. He does not know which explanation is right.
5. Expertise travels badly across domains, while investing rewards humility
Walker sees the same uncertainty in commentary on the Paramount–Netflix bidding war for Warner Bros., where he disclosed that he is very long Warner Bros. Smart media investors and commentators can sound “comical” when discussing tender-offer mechanics. During Elon Musk’s Twitter bid, Walker likewise heard smart people make legal claims he considered obviously wrong; he recalls a Delaware judge saying Musk could get out of the deal for $1 billion and says he wondered whether the judge understood specific performance.
His unresolved question is whether those mistakes are isolated “shoe-button expert” overreach or evidence of shortcomings in the person’s home field. He does not claim an answer; the point is to remain suspicious when prestige in one domain gets mistaken for mastery in another.
Walker closes by hoping today’s thinking will look foolish to his future self. Investing’s appeal is that practitioners probably do not peak until their mid-to-late 40s, giving him another decade to compound judgment even as physical performance fades: “I’m so much better today than I was 10 years ago,” and he wants that sentence to remain true 10 years from now.
Full transcript
You're about to listen to the Another Value podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker.
It is December 23, 2025, and today I’m recording my monthly random rambling. I’ve got about 4 topics we’re going to talk about. I have a general thesis on why I think the stock market is getting weirder and weirder over time, and we’ll dive into that.
I’ve been quote-unquote investing professionally in the public markets for 10 years. I’ve got some things that I’ve learned, thought about, and changed my mind on over the past 10 years that we’re going to talk about. Then I’ve got a real ramble that just comes out of nowhere, and I have no clue where I’m taking it: arrogance, expertise, and risk in the public markets. I don’t even know where I’m going. I say this every month in my random ramblings, but this is probably my randomest, ramblingest ramble yet. I hope you enjoy it, and I hope you have great holidays.
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For those who don’t know, once a month I try to hop on and just ramble for 25 to 30 minutes about different things on my mind. That’s what I’m going to do today. Before we get to that, let me just disclose that nothing on this podcast is investing advice. That’s always true, but again, today it’s just me going on and rambling for 25 to 30 minutes. Do you really want to listen to somebody who would take 25 or 30 minutes out of their day to scream like a maniac into a microphone? I certainly wouldn’t, so you shouldn’t either.
What do I have on my mind today? Let’s start. First, I had a baby, so I haven’t talked to everyone since I had the baby. It’s going—I don’t know what the word is. The baby is healthy, but, boy, am I tired.
I’ll hear from my friends, “Oh, our baby sleeps for 6 hours a night. It’s just so hard to wake them up to feed them.” That ain’t the case here, folks. I’m tired. But you don’t care about that, so let’s talk about what I want to talk to you about today.
One more thing: I’m recording this on December 23. Obviously, the holidays are coming up, and I want to wish all of you happy holidays. One of the fun things about running a podcast that has dozens of listeners is that 5 or 6 of you have thrown me on your Christmas mailing list. For maybe 3 of the 5 or 6, I email with you every now and then. For maybe 3 of the 5 or 6, I’ve never emailed you before.
I get those cards every year, and it’s kind of the 4th or 5th year in a row. It really tickles me, and I really enjoy following these families I’ve never met. I think Yet Another Value has a great community. I want to express my heartfelt, warm wishes to those of you who’ve added me to your mailing list, or who just listen to this in general.
Okay, what do I want to talk about today? I have been quote-unquote professionally investing in the public markets. Again, heavy on the air quotes, because in my mind I’m still a teenager sometimes, but I ain’t a teenager anymore. If you’re watching the video, you can see the grays are really starting to come in.
I’ve been quote-unquote professionally investing in the public markets for about 10 years. I’ve been professionally investing a little bit longer than that, but this is about my 10-year anniversary. I’m working on an annual letter, a 10-year letter, and all that type of stuff. I’m using this podcast, this ramble, to soft-run some of the things that have been on my mind, some of the things I’m thinking about, and some of the things I’m trying to finalize in the letter.
Let me start with this high-level outlook. I’ve done this for 10 years. Take a breath and look out over the next 10 years. I have a thesis—and again, I’m soft-running this—that markets are getting weirder over time. I’ll write more about this if I think it’s correct. I won’t write more about it ever if I think it’s wrong.
In every sport, as things evolve, strategies move toward the far edges. I’m a big basketball fan; I mention basketball all the time. About 10 years ago, the mathematicians realized, “Hey, the optimal shot is either at the rim, at the free-throw line—which you generally get by getting to the rim—or a 3-pointer. Everything else is a waste.”
Today, when you watch professional basketball, it’s increasingly rare for a shot to come from anywhere other than directly at the rim or beyond the 3-point line. Every other shot is inefficient; those shots are gone. We’ve gone to the extremes of the mathematization of basketball. You do see a counterstrategy developing: maybe we should play in the midrange because defenses don’t even guard that anymore.
We’ve gone to the extremes in chess, too. About 7 years ago, AI really started coming for chess. I believe it was AlphaGo or whatever taking over chess, and high-end chess games between computers started looking completely different. Whether you were playing me or a high-level chess player, those games stopped resembling what humans play. It just looked like a completely different sport.
That happens over time in all sports. As they get more advanced, they stop looking like what normal people play. Again, to go back to basketball, if you and I went and played, we’d jack up 3s and do everything else, but the NBA game is completely different because we can’t dunk. Less than 1% of the people on Earth can dunk. The NBA is played above the rim; normal people play below the rim. As you get more specialized, the strategies change.
Why am I saying that? When it comes to the stock market, I think the stock market is getting weirder and weirder. As we’ve entered the final stages of the efficient market, I think the stock market is getting weirder and weirder. This probably started happening about 5 years ago with SPACs, the post-COVID boom, and everything else, but it’s fueled by zero day trading, leveraged ETFs, the rise of retail, prediction markets—everything blending together.
I think the stock market is getting weirder and weirder. We’re going to see the market continue to do weird things, whether it’s big jumps, big drops, or spikes. I’ll tell you that some of the leaders in the year-to-date returns category for individual stocks are companies where it seems pretty obvious to me that the long-term path trends toward zero. But what a run you can have in the short term. They’re up 10 times over the past year.
Sometimes you can get path dependency, but I think the fundamental alpha is gone because of computers and all of this. Increasingly, we’re going to see weirder situations and weirder things happening in the stock market. I think that’s where the stock market is going. It’s akin to what happens in chess, akin to specialization: the normal stuff is gone, and all the returns, all the juice, all the edge is in the weirder stuff.
I think there will be a lot of alpha made by the people who follow Opendoor, create a cult around the stock, and get in early enough to build that cult and drag a lot of attention to it. I’m not saying pump and dump, but Opendoor recreates itself, right? It gets this mob army, the stock goes up 20 times, it can issue equity, and it can bring in a new co.
I think we’re going to see a lot more things like that—things clearly at the far edges of fundamental value. I think investors who can adapt to those weird situations can adapt to what’s coming.
I think that's where we're going to see a lot of edge going forward. Now, I'm not saying there's no room for great fundamental analysis. I think it's almost table stakes, and unless you're really, really great at fundamental analysis—really on the edge of that—I don't know if there's going to be a lot of alpha just from pure fundamental analysis. I don't think there has been over the past 5 years, but I think it increasingly goes away because that side of the market is efficient and that's table stakes.
Maybe I'm a prisoner of the moment. Maybe I'm a prisoner of the past 10 years, which have been really great for growth companies. It just strikes me that if your core thesis is something that—and I use this line all the time—can be recreated by a Yahoo Finance screener in 5 seconds, you're probably not going to get paid for that. Maybe somebody can come and tell me I'm wrong: “If I run a diversified basket of 50 low-price-to-earnings companies, then I'm going to eke out a little bit of alpha.” Maybe. But for the big alpha, I kind of doubt that you're finding it there.
So, that's one thing I've divorced myself from. Maybe I'm pushing my own book, talking my own book here, because I love weird situations. That's what I've been doing for the past 10 years, and to my chagrin, I haven't done anything else. I increasingly lean into the weird situations. That's what I do. So maybe I'm talking my own book, but that's just kind of how I think about the past 10 years and the next 10 years going forward when I think about markets.
Maybe I'm crazy. Maybe I didn't define it properly. Again, this is my rough draft. I'll work on defining it better. Let me go to the next thing.
When I look back over the past 10 years, Charlie Munger—RIP—I think more and more highly of him every day, but I do think about him more often every day, I would say. Charlie Munger once said, “If you go a whole year and you haven't changed your mind on anything, it's a waste of a year.” I've been thinking about the past 10 years and what I've changed my mind on.
Here's the funny thing: If you change your mind on something, unless you're taking notes and saying, “I changed my mind on something,” it's actually hard to remember when you've changed your mind on something. You can change your mind on a stock and say, “I used to think it was a buy, and now I think it's a sell.” That's pretty easy. But when you change your mind on something big, it's actually hard to remember.
When I first went to look, I said, “I haven't changed my mind on anything.” As I really started thinking about a lot of things, I realized, “Oh, no. I've changed my mind a lot.” I feel like there's a lot more, but here are some things that I've changed my mind on that I remember.
My first is pure valuation metrics. It is nice to buy something for 8 times price-to-earnings. It is nice to buy something for price-to-book. I still find myself being pulled toward those metrics, but I increasingly believe that if the core of your thesis is simply, “Hey, this trades cheap on an LTM earnings multiple,” you will find not only no alpha there, but probably negative alpha.
Maybe I'm a prisoner of the moment, but it just strikes me that if your core thesis is something that can be recreated by a Yahoo Finance screener in 5 seconds, you're probably not going to get paid for that. Maybe somebody can come and tell me I'm wrong: “If I run a diversified basket of 50 low-price-to-earnings companies, then I'm going to eke out a little bit of alpha.” Maybe. But for the big alpha, I kind of doubt that you're finding it there.
Another big thing that I've changed is this: If you came to me 10 years ago and asked me to look at my early investments, it was John Malone. It was levered return-on-equity stories, big free cash flow, and lots of repurchases. Those investments generally have not worked out well.
I still love repurchases, but increasingly, maybe it was selection. The companies that were doing big repurchases 10 years ago or 5 years ago tended to be companies that had big legacy moats, lots of free cash flow, and no area to reinvest in. Guess what? Basically all the tech companies came and ate their lunch. The headliner would be Netflix coming and eating all the cable networks' lunch, but you can go across the board through a lot of them.
Maybe it's that, but increasingly, I used to look and say, “These guys have repurchased 15% of their shares over the past year. That is a huge buy signal.” Now, I like it. I think repurchases are a much more capital-efficient return than dividends. I do like that I own the company and that I own a little bit more of it every day if they're buying back shares.
In international markets, I've mentioned this on a few recent podcasts. I love that, in the UK, they file their repurchases every day. Every day I can say, “Hey, I own a little bit more of this company,” and I can track their allocation that way. But I will say repurchases over the past 10 years have become a much smaller part of my investing style.
You can only watch someone like Bed Bath & Beyond, the famous example. They were buying back shares at $40, and then they were diluting shares at $0.10—not literally 10 cents on the dollar in terms of value, but $0.10 per share—and increasing the share count in a death spiral 18 months later, maybe if even that. Department stores are obviously great examples of this.
Actually, off the top of my head, that's another one: real estate in the public markets. When I started, I would look a lot for companies that had hidden real estate. Restaurants have them all the time. Restaurants that have been around for 50 years and have 200 chains are kind of owning and building their own boxes. I used to look for those a lot.
A lot of the restaurants are gone because private equity came and picked them over. But all the department stores—I think 10 years ago, when I launched, I was still really interested in the department stores. Seritage would have been the big one. My God, the Seritage theses were unbelievable when they came out. To a value investor, you had a spin-off with a rights offering, hidden real estate, and all this sort of stuff.
Disasters across the board. All the department stores—Macy's, Kohl's, Nordstrom—and yes, you could get one nice pop from them if you traded them well. I know many people have and did. But in general, you look at the 10-year charts, and they've been a disaster.
This is despite them saying, “Macy's owns fucking Herald Square in New York City,” and none of them can figure out how to monetize it. For the department stores, you have all this real estate ownership attached to a truly negative-EV department store business. The issue is that the department store business consumes value every year. At least in my opinion, I think that's the issue.
I've become really disillusioned with trying to find publicly traded, hidden real estate assets. Repurchases—I already mentioned that.
Technical analysis: 10 years ago, 7 years ago, 5 years ago, 3 years ago, I was a zero out of 10 on technical analysis. I thought it was complete mumbo jumbo, complete voodoo, and all that sort of stuff. Honestly, I still do. I don't do any of it myself, but I would say I'm kind of a one out of 10 now.
I don't do it, but I do think there's something to technical analysis, especially on the short side. I don't do a lot of shorting, but if you're shorting something, you probably want to be aware of the 200-day moving average or something like that, just as a rule of thumb. I do think RSI measures—relative-strength measures—are interesting, particularly on the index side, when you're thinking about whether markets are oversold or undersold and when to deploy cash into a bottom.
I was a zero out of 10; I would just dismiss it. Now I'll say, if you want to talk to me about very basic stuff, especially when it comes to adjusting risk parameters, I'll entertain it. I think that's a big evolution, to go from being completely dismissive to saying, “Hey, maybe.” But that's one.
The last one that I've really evolved on is this: If you had asked me 10 years ago what a value investor does, I would have said they go and find a company that's undervalued, do a ton of work on it, and then hold it, hold it, hold it, hold it, and hold it until the market agrees with them. Whether that's 3 years, 5 years, 10 years, 50 years, whatever, they hold it.
Obviously, if the facts change, they change their mind and sell. But if the stock price isn't working, they don't let that hit them. I've kind of come to the opinion that if you buy something and then hold it—and I think 3 years is the time frame, though it might be 5 years—you hold it for 3 years and the stock doesn't do anything or it goes down, it's not that you must sell and it's not that you must be wrong. But 3 years is a long time, and it's probably time to start looking yourself in the mirror and saying, “Hey, is it me or is it them?”
I'll give you an example. I was and am a longtime cable bull, though I don't own much in the cable sector anymore. I think I started becoming a bull in 2016, so that's about 10 years ago.
For 5 to 7 years, it really worked. And the past 3 years, it's been terrible. The whole time, I was saying, “Look, competition’s a little worse than I thought, but look at the cash flows, look at the asset value, all this sort of stuff.” And I think the right answer was, “Hey, Andrew, your thesis was wrong. The market is hitting you in the face with the fact that the thesis is wrong. The thesis has changed.”
Far better investors than me noticed that the competitive threat was ramping up and that was going to be bad for cable. The thought was that it was either a duopoly or a monopoly, and fixed wireless has changed it to the possibility that it might be an oligopoly in a lot of places now. There’s a price for everything, but I think if I had been honest with myself years ago, I could have said, “Hey, I invested in this on a duopoly thesis, a monopoly thesis, and that has changed. I need to step back, sell, and reassess.” I didn’t do that, so that’s just one that’s really developed for me.
But there are others: stocks I’ve held that I bought at 50 in 2019, and in 2022 they were still trading at 50. In general, if it’s been 3 years and it hasn’t worked, my history has been that you’d probably be better off selling and saying, “Hey, I missed something. I can go invest in other things, and maybe I’ll revisit this a year from now and see how things play out.” Again, I’m not saying that works for everyone, but my history has been that I would have been better off, after 3 years of something not working, saying, “Move on. Do something new.”
Those are the things I’ve evolved on. Let’s see what things I talked about. I said disillusionment with free cash flow and repurchases. I said increasingly trailing metrics not valuable, going from a 0 out of 10 to a 1 out of 10 on technical analysis. And I call it timing out: after 3 years, saying, “Hey, this hasn’t worked. Let’s stop saying it’s the market. Let’s start saying it’s me and move on.”
One other thing I’ve evolved on: a friend tweeted this. I think he listens to the podcast, so he might recognize it, though. He tweeted about a month ago, and I liked it so much he might have forgotten he tweeted it. Who can remember all of their tweets? Who amongst us?
One thing I’ve thought about—and this relates to the timing out I just talked about—is one of the ways you mature as a value investor, I think, is along the risk-management side. Again, this relates to the timing out, but when I started, I thought, “Hey, value investing is you buy something at 8 times earnings, and if it goes to 6 times earnings, you suck your thumb and buy more, or you hold, or whatever it is.”
I think one of the places I’ve matured is that you’re a value investor, the stock goes from 10 to 8, and there’s news. It’s not just that the market went down or whatever, but there’s news. You need to be able to rip the Band-Aid off quicker. I’m terrible at this. My instinct is to defend everything I buy. My instinct is, “I liked it at 10. I want to love it at 8.”
But I think value investing is actually maturing and saying, “Hey, my thesis was wrong. I need to sell and move on.” I can always revisit it or something, but in general, I’ve found that if something goes from 10 to 8, I would be better off selling than holding or buying more or anything. I think that’s the maturation of a value investor, saying, “Hey, just because I bought it at 10 doesn’t mean I need to love it at 8. It’s time to reassess. Is the market telling me something? Is there new information?” All this sort of stuff.
Again, I’m not saying just because it’s down, you sell, but generally, when something moves down about 20%, that’s where you probably saw some material news. My instinct—and I’ve been using a value frame, but I’ll use events—is that I buy something at 10 and it’s rumor triage, right? There’s a rumor that it’s going to get taken out at 13, and I buy it at 10 because I say, “Hey, the downside’s 9, the upside’s 13, and I really think this deal is happening.”
Then the deal doesn’t happen and the stock trades for 9. Five years ago, 3 years ago, even now, I’m sometimes like, “Oh, well, it’s come to my downside, and yes, it’s not going to get taken out now, but they were in play, and there was all this upside and stuff. Let’s hold. Let’s wait.”
No. The answer there is you’ve got to sell. You’ve got to move on. I’m getting better at that. I missed it a few times, but my biggest losses have generally been when I bought something at 10 on an event, it trades to 9 when the event’s dead, and I say, “Hey, this was an event; now it’s a value investment.” Then it trades from 9 to 6, and I say, “Hey, this was a value investment; now it’s a deep-value investment.” Then it trades from 6 to 3, and I say, “It was a deep-value investment; now it’s a distressed investment.”
No, you’ve just got to move on. I think those are the ways I’ve evolved. Those are the things I’ve changed my mind on: the risk management, the timing out, all of that.
The last thing I wanted to talk about: one way I’ve evolved as an investor over the past 10 years is that I’ve started doing the podcast, and I effing love the podcast. I learn from everyone. If there’s a bell curve, I think one of the nice things about my podcast is—I hope my bell curve shifts far to the right. The average guest, I think—I hope—on my podcast, maybe I’m talking my book, is a very above-average investor. They’re a professional investor; they’re very above average. I’ve got great guests, in my opinion.
The above-average guests and the best guests are just far, far out in the right tail. And I hope every episode, because I do a lot of work for preparation, in terms of you learning something fundamentally, is like the bell curve shifted right. But there is a left tail to my podcast. I hope the left tail is truncated because of the work I do on it and the types of investors I have.
But with 350 podcasts, 1 in every 30 episodes is going to have a guest where I get them on and they’re—I don’t care if they’re a dud in terms of charisma on the podcast. I don’t need huge amounts of charisma on the podcast; I bring the charisma, right? I care a lot about whether the fundamental work was there. I’m not going to name any names, but of the past 300 episodes, I can think of a handful where that’s the case.
I learn something from every podcast. Even if it’s someone who’s on that left tail I’m talking about, I learn a lot because when I force myself to talk to them for an hour, and I’m seeing big holes in how they’re thinking, I’ve learned a lot. I think one of the main ways I’ve evolved over the past 5 years is that when I talk to people on the podcast, and I really have to talk to them because it’s an hour, I learn the holes and the errors and where I think they’re missing things, and I can apply that to my own investments.
Coming back to the podcast, I love the podcast. One of the great things is that I’ve got great investors on, but there is a line. Some of the best investors by track record, I’m not sure if they are the best investors I’ve talked to. I wonder if that’s because it’s me seeing holes in their thinking, or if it’s that these guys have done so much that they’ve got the best records.
Often, it’s 1 grand-slam investment that separates the people who have very good track records from those with unbelievable track records. Let’s use venture capital: 2 VCs who are equally smart—if 1 got into the Facebook deal and 1 did not in 2009, the 1 who got into the Facebook deal is a legend, and the 1 who did not might be okay or average. But is there any difference in intelligence? Probably not. I don’t know, but the returns are orders of magnitude different.
In the public markets, it’s interesting because a lot of the return difference can be summed up by 1 great investment. But when you look at the investment, you wonder, “Hey, was this person super smart, or did they get lucky?” Am I talking to this person and there are 10 other universes where, in 8 of those 10 other universes, this person is dunzo? They took this huge, huge risk, and it didn’t work out for them. I don’t know the answer.
The podcast has been really interesting for me because I’ve talked to some of these people who’ve hit absolute grand slams. Sometimes I’ll talk to them in the moment, and then 18 months later, the stock’s up 6x and it was their largest position. I can go and listen to the podcast and say, “Hey, if your largest position is up 6x in 18 months, your near- to medium-term track record, at least, if not your long-term, looks pretty goddamn good.”
And I can look at the podcast and say, “Hey, this person was a great guest, I’m sure, but was this person a legendary investor, or were they a good investor who was a little bit arrogant, who ignored some risks, and because of that was able to hold something up 6x, 8x, or 10x?” I don’t know the answer. I don’t know the answer.
I understand that a lot of that sounds negative, but it’s what I’m thinking about. If you’re going to have something that goes up 10x, often there is a risk. Did it go up 10x because you identified that risk and rightfully dismissed it, or did it go up 10x because you glossed over that risk and didn’t know you were taking it?
I think it's a fascinating idea. But I am rambling. Here's one other area where I think about this. Right now, Paramount and Netflix are trying to buy Warner Bros. There's a bidding war there, and I'm very long Warner Bros., as a full disclosure.
I'm now seeing a lot of media investors and media commentators commenting on the Paramount–Warner Bros.–Netflix bidding war, and I think it's comical. These guys, many of them, are very smart media investors, but when I hear them talk about the Warner Bros. bidding war, I find some of the things they're saying comical—how wrong they are. If you do event investing for a living, you know the beats and rhythms of some of these things, and it's crazy how wrong these smart people are.
You see this and say, “When I see them coming into a domain that I think I know a lot about and they're just completely wrong on the mechanics of a tender offer or anything, how do I think about that when they're so wrong in this field, while I'm in their field? Is this just the shoe-button expert thinking they know everything? Is this something else? Does it show shortcomings in their current field?” I don't know.
I remember this happening a lot with Twitter when Elon was trying to buy it. You'd see very smart people opining on legal things, and you'd be like, “You have no idea what you're talking about.” I'm not a lawyer, but I know how contract law works on a general basis, and you'd hear opinions and think, “You have no idea what you're talking about.” I remember the Delaware judge who said Elon would be able to get out of the Twitter buy for $1 billion, and I was like, “Do you not know what specific performance in a contract is?”
It's just another thought. I don't know; it's interesting. Are they such experts in their field, and is it arrogance that they can come to another field? Is this just something else? Anyway, I'm rambling. I can feel myself rambling. You can probably hear me saying, “Should I be talking about this? Am I making any sense?” I don't know.
This was my monthly random ramble for December 2025: 10 years as a “professional investor.” I'm still learning. I just think about myself 10 years ago and how stupid I was. I'm sure I just mentioned arrogance and not knowing what you're talking about. Think about how dumb I was and how much of a better investor I am now.
My goal—my overarching thesis—is that I'm better today than I was 10 years ago. In 10 years, when I've got a lot more gray in my head, I'll look back at this random ramble and say, “Goddamn, that guy 10 years ago was so dumb. He didn't know what he was talking about. I'm so much better today than I was 10 years ago.”
I just hope—the great thing about investing, as I've said, is that you don't peak until probably your mid-to-late 40s. I've got 10 years from there, and hopefully I'm just hitting my stride. That's the great thing when compared to other pursuits. I get sore when I lift nowadays. I can't row like I used to. But the great thing about investing is that you've got a much longer career, a much longer time frame to build on everything.
I'm looking forward to the next 10 years. I hope you're looking forward to doing the next 10 years with me. I'm going to stop myself from rambling. I wish you happy holidays and a happy New Year. We've got some great podcasts coming up in January, and I'm looking forward to those. I'm looking forward to rambling in January with you, and I will see you in the New Year.
A quick disclaimer: Nothing on this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the host may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned during this podcast. Please do your own work and consult a financial adviser. Thanks.