Investing
How to make money work for you.
This is the follow-up package to both the April 30 and the May 15 presentation. The site exists for future reference to review the presentation and explore the concepts discussed.
Welcome
High Level Overview
The workshop covered three things:
- why investing matters (the compounding math behind retirement)
- how a value investor thinks (mindset, frameworks, research process)
- what that looks like in practice (the META 2022 drawdown)
April 30 attendees. The framework is the same, but May 15 added the retirement model and the research process. May 15 attendees: everything you saw plus the deeper treatments.
What's inside
The eight sections
- Slides — All 50 slides with synthesized takeaways; the live talk, re-readable.
- Q&A — 13 questions from both sessions, answered more thoroughly than in the room.
- Retirement calculator — Interactive compounding math; put the dials in your own hands.
- Value Investing — The mindset: downside-focus, margin of safety, the two-layer analysis.
- Frameworks — Price = E × M, the six quality dimensions, Greenwald's valuation, the META example.
- Research Process — How to do the work: sourcing, deep read, memo, sizing, selling.
- Terminology — Plain-English glossary cross-linked into the deep-dives.
- Further Reading — Books, free online sources, topical follow-ups for going further.
Reading plans
If you only have…
30 minutes
The seven KEY slides on the Slides page (2, 7, 13, 20, 24, 27, 49) and the META case study (37–44). Skip the deep-dives this round.
Two hours
Slides top-to-bottom, then Frameworks focused on Price = E × M and the META example, then sample the three Q&A questions most relevant to you.
A weekend
Start with Slides. Then explore the Frameworks, Value Investing, and Research Process. Understand your "target return" by using the Retirement calculator with your own numbers.
A year
Read the further-reading canon at one book per month. Track every investment decision in a notebook (date, thesis, position size, kill-thesis). Review the notebook: which decisions were right for the right reasons, which were right by luck, which were wrong, which were wrong for catchable reasons. That review is worth more than another year of reading.
Closing
One thing to remember
If only one idea from the entire workshop and this entire site is going to survive into your life: compounding only works if you stay in the game. Protect the downside first; losing money is catastrophic to compounding wealth. Diversify position concentration until one blow-up can't kill the retirement plan. Write the kill-thesis before you buy. Sell when the thesis breaks, not when the price moves.
Everything else on the site is in service of that one idea. The frameworks help you find investments with attractive risk-reward. The research process helps you avoid the mistakes that destroy capital. The Q&A page gives the questions raised in the room their fuller answers. The reading list is the source material for the lifetime of practice that turns these into instincts.
If a question isn't answered here, feel free to reach out.