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For one thing, Greenlight only hires nice people. By that, I don't mean that we avoid hiring jerks. I mean we actively look to hire people who are nice.
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Our view is that just because Amazon can disrupt somebody else's profit stream, it doesn't mean that Amazon earns that profit stream.
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We never invent new reasons to continue with a position when the original reasons are no longer available.
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The investing world is a little bit more multidimensional than poker.
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We take the traditional value investor's process and just flip it around a little bit. The traditional value investor asks 'Is this cheap?' and then 'Why is it cheap?' We start by identifying a reason something might be mispriced, and then if we find a reason why something is likely mispriced, then we make a determination whether it's cheap.
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Investing in a poker game and investing in stocks, at least the way I do it, it's a very similar skillset.
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I worked in investment banking for two years. I was in a program where they kind of just owned you. And you - I didn't realize that I've signed up for that, which was one of the problems. I didn't know anybody who'd done this.
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The enthusiasm for Tesla and other bubble-basket stocks is reminiscent of the March 2000 dot-com bubble. As was the case then, the bulls rejected conventional valuation methods for a handful of stocks that seemingly could only go up. While we don't know exactly when the bubble will pop, it eventually will.
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In my business investing, you are buying a stock, and someone else is selling the stock. Right there, that's like a debate. Is the stock going up, or is it going to go down?
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Most of the time, when someone tells you something, and it makes sense, it just makes sense. And that's that. But sometimes it really doesn't make sense.
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With poker, you have a resolution of the hand within a couple of minutes. Whereas, even if the thought process in investing is very much the same, you're looking at an outcome that could be 2, 3, 4, 5 years from when you make the original decision. And the mindset related to that is very different.
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I rooted for the Milwaukee Brewers and its stars, Robin Yount and Paul Molitor. I went to a lot of games, including the World Series in 1982. The Brewers may have been a bad team for most of my life, but to have your team at its peak when you are thirteen years old is an experience I wish for every fan.
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In an industry that celebrates personal sacrifice as a symbol of commitment, you might not consider 'making sure everyone gets home for dinner' to be a mark of success, but creating and maintaining that culture is one of the things I'm most proud of.
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I spent most of high school working on the debate team, probably at some expense to my grades. Being a member of the team was great training in critical analysis, organization, and logic.
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My parents are nice people, and they also made a point to have dinner as a family every night.
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We believe in constructing the portfolio so that we put our biggest amount of money in our highest-conviction idea, and then we view the other ideas relative to that.
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On my best days, I fancy myself a combination of Dad's persistence/patience and Mom's toughness/skepticism.
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Microsoft could help Facebook with one of the biggest challenges, namely monetizing its traffic without reducing the user's experience. It's obvious that Microsoft needs traffic and Facebook needs search.
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After my undergraduate, I've written a thesis that was in the government department, but largely, it turned out almost an economic type of thesis. And I was very interested in that, and I wanted to go get a Ph.D. in Economics.
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My father and grandfather were businessmen. The family business was Adelphi Paints in New Jersey. When the first energy crisis came in the early 1970s, the business suffered.
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During my freshman year at Cornell, I joined my dorm's intramural football team. At the first practice, upper classmen pointed out I was tall, so I should try playing QB. Well half an hour later, it was abundantly clear that I should not be the QB.
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Both poker and investing are games of incomplete information. You have a certain set of facts and you are looking for situations where you have an edge, whether the edge is psychological or statistical.
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We try not to have many investing 'rules,' but there is one that has served us well: If we decide we were wrong about something, in terms of why we did it, we exit, period.
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Texas hold 'em is all about folding and waiting for that time that comes up every hour or two where you actually have an advantage and you can press it.