Thoughts on Decision-Making, Position Sizing and Improving my Investment Framework
$Meta $BTC $Wintaai
Disclaimer: I’m not an investment professional nor have any financial training. I write this substack for my own learning and pleasure. Stop here if you value your time.
It has been 6 months since I’ve posted on my Substack. These posts usually take 2-3 months to conceive and complete. I was hoping this would be more of monthly journal, but it hasn’t quite turned out that way. A lot has happened over the course of 2022. The market has declined 20-30% from its peak. Threads titled, “Is the Bottom Almost Here?”, “Energy Sector”, “China”, and “Position Sizing” have popped up on the Corner of Fairfax and Berkshire with lots of spirited discussions. With a reasonable amount of unrealized red ink in my own portfolio, it got me thinking, how did I get myself here and what can I do to improve?
As I tell my kids when we work through their Spirit of Math homework, simplify, sketch it out, and look for patterns. I thought I should take my own medicine and reflect a bit more deeply about my own investing framework and how I should structure making investment decisions.
As a retail investor, I am given a set of realities. The following is the reality I face when designing my investing program.
1. Limited to working alone or with other novice retail investors
2. Lacking expert mentorship
3. Limited access to reliable datasets
4. Limited tacit experience in the analysis of fundamentals, technicals, strategy, and other relevant industry factors
5. Poorly defined of circle of competence
6. Unconstrained universe of investment opportunities with no mandate
7. No outside accountability for performance
8. Limited time to devote to investing.
My family, my fund manager, and my professional circle of non-financial colleagues, often remind me that investing should be left to people that do it full-time. They tell me that successful investors need absolute focus and dedication that someone, like myself, cannot provide. They remind me that even the full-time investor has difficulty beating the market. The problem with this perspective is that it is analogous to saying that only elite athletes should exercise and eat healthy and everyone else should not bother with it too much. The conventional wisdom is that retail investors should only dollar-cost average into broad indices or out-source to active managers. Perhaps it is my ego and my understanding of some of the shortcomings of blind index investing, that prevents me from fully being able to accept this choice. Like most things in life, there is more nuance to this, and investing activities should so be viewed as a continuum. A healthy diet of financial and business knowledge is important to all people, especially if they are interested in achieving wealth independence.
Investing is Hard
I have been hacking away at this endeavor since 2007. It has been 15 years starting from zero. The S&P 500 was 1,500 at that time. Since then, it has increased ~ 2.7x to today, ending ~ 4,000. If I were to have invested $1 each year on January 1st for 15 years, my nest egg would have been worth ~ $43. This would translate into a 2.9x on invested capital. My actual return is approximately 2.24x which has under-performed simple indexing. Although this is the case, I would like to think that I have gained some valuable knowledge, tacit experience, and some insight with respect to my behavioral flaws.
Investing occurs in what, Gerd Gigerenzer, describes as a wicked environment; an environment which is unkind to the forecaster. Its ability to provide decision feedback is sparse and often surfaces after extended periods of time. Its outcome is probabilistic based when the factors are known. However, there also exists significant unknown factors that can cause non-linear events (aka luck, black swans). And even when decisions are made systematically based on a large set of stringent criteria, small errors can creep into each item and cause large total error rates due to its multiplicative effect (Garrett Hardin’s Filters against Folly is a great book for these broad concepts). This can be compounded further by groupthink and lack of opinion diversity that can be the result of homogeneous teams and the lack of a psychological safe place to debate and deliberate. And finally, being human, once we commit to an idea, it is emotionally difficult to change our minds even in the face of hard new contradictory facts due to commitment and confirmation bias, anchoring & loss aversion.
That said, there have been a handful of successful long-term investors. Each has their own style to suit their personality and environment. Studying the greats, I have noticed a few patterns:
1. Concentrating positions when there is considerable certainty in the future business fundamentals. This could mean stable industries with hard to assail competitive advantages or long-standing businesses where industry and company-specific dynamics have changed in a manner that will unmask sustainable future profitability. This requires significant business insight and experience, astute judgment of the stakeholder actions, a definable valuation range, and the ability to ride through potentially years of public under-performance until this certain future state happens.
2. When certainty is high, acting fast and decisively is important. This is highly dependent on one’s circle of competence, emotional make-up, and your specific investment structure. However, not all investing requires this degree of certainty. In some cases, if there exists a possibility of an exceptionally large asymmetric upside, some will add to these positions slowly, in order to collect data and analyze it over time to guide further accumulation.
3. Never-sell or Buy & Hold only works for businesses that can reinvest its cash flow at high rates of return or convert their unencumbered unproductive asset into a highly productive and profitable entity. Re-investment can be within its existing products that have more markets to capture or adjacencies to entrench customer dependence and further create lopsided supplier/distributor relationships. One exception to this rule, is investing in extremely talented people/organizations that can innovate into new successful product categories or find high-return investment opportunities. It is quite difficult to find great business models with excellent assets operated by intelligent, enthusiastic people with strong work ethic coupled with integrity, who are continuously learning and seeking self-improvement. Often, you can find one or the other, which may mean letting go of positions with time or when situations change.
4. The great investors can be highly quantitative or highly qualitatively, whereas many are a mixture of both. Benjamin Graham, Walter Schloss and Jim Simons have a strong focus on the numbers but had varying holding periods. Phil Fisher was a never-sell investor that had a focus on founders/owners, the interaction of people within the business and their resulting productivity and innovative capacity, as well as broad trends. Our beloved Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger combines both elements. The commonality is between all of them is the dispassionate use of their preferred data to make accurate forecasts of the future.
5. Finally, great investors have a deep understanding of their ability to change their minds with added information. More stubborn, slow to change their mind investors like Prem Watsa, need to avoid investment situations where there is significant disruption and change. But he thrives using a quantitative approach to situations with less ambiguity. Bill Miller, Stan Druckenmiller and George Soros incorporate large volumes of new information at high velocity and can change their minds rapidly, allowing them to be more comfortable in the world of macro investing or disruptive technologies.
My Simplified Investing Framework
The lessons, described above, are categorized into a 2 x 2 square as shown below. The key two questions for would-be DIY investors to ask themselves are:
1. How accurate am I with my forecasts of the future? (Good or Poor)
2. How easy is it for me (emotionally and cognitively), to act when faced with reality of being wrong? (Easy or Hard)
Quadrant # 1 (Good & Easy)
Large position sizes, few large discrete opportunistic purchases/sales, match holding periods with their forecast horizons, has a deep understanding of the core business drivers and act decisively to relevant changes, discretionary asset selection
Quadrant #2 (Poor & Easy)
Emphasize portfolio construction over discretionary asset selection, rules-based asset selection and rebalancing, survivable position sizing, favor holding companies run by good capital allocators
Quadrant #3 (Good & Hard)
Survivable positions sizes, opportunistic buying/selling activity, matching holding periods with forecast horizon, discretionary asset selection with a focus on settled industries with slow rates of change
Quadrant #4 (Poor & Hard)
Diversification with primacy on portfolio construction, automated rebalancing rules, dollar cost averaging, use ETFs
The elite investors occupy the top left (Quadrant #1), but the majority resided in the bottom right (Quadrant #4). With arduous work, good introspection, and to the lucky few, good mentorship, can help one move into the other squares over time (Quadrant #2 – Poor/Easy; Quadrant #3 – Good/Hard). I have dedicated a previous post to Quadrant #4 that people can refer to here. The reminder of this post will focus on Quadrants #2 and #3. There are three advantages retail investors have over the professionals that I want to highlight before diving in deeper. These are:
A. We have a “steady” source of employment income that is not dependent upon the vicissitudes of investment performance whereas fund managers are.
B. We can purchase a small # of shares in investments over extended periods of time, without external pressure to make massive bets to move the needle because our jobs depend upon it.
C. There is no obligation to adhere to a single style, and we are free to experiment with various techniques to our choosing until we find the ones that fit our temperament and limited free time.
The key is to optimize these tactical advantages is to have a clear understanding of where we stand relative to all the smart people out there who are also making these investment bets. There is a fantastic paper titled “Investing in the Unknown and Unknowable” by Richard Zeckhauser. This is a must read. The key takeaways are the following:
1. Is the person on the other side that you are trading with more knowledgeable about the risks and probabilities than you are?
2. Do you have a special competency that gives you an advantage to make an investment work that others cannot or will not?
3. Are there investment ponds where other people are afraid to fish because there is an extreme degree of uncertainty to the point it is unknowable? These are great areas to make bets because the prices are often very attractive.
4. Sidecar your investments with those that are more knowledgeable and aligned with your interests.
Quadrant #2 – I know I am not smart enough
In this quadrant, the first step is to prioritize portfolio construction like in quadrant #4 and rebalance on a regular schedule so that your asset allocation does not wander too far from your targets. However, instead of just ETFs, one could venture out into the market to choose discrete businesses. When selecting these individual businesses, there are two ways to approach this. The key is to determine if anybody else is better at forecasting the business’ future than you are. Inevitably, retail investors have a massive disadvantage competing against these shrewd investors on the other side of the trade.
What individuals could do is to utilize well-trodden quantitative methods in a basket approach (buying a pre-determined amount with a maximum exposure for each position) to compensate for one’s ignorance. People can subscribe to various screeners such as TIKR.com, Screener.co, or QuickFS.net to get access to financial data and help screen for businesses with specific characteristics (I receive no benefits from these companies, just like their services). Listed below are some methodologies:
A) Ben Graham net-nets
B) Jeroen Bos asset-light net-nets
C) Tobias Carlisle’s acquirer’s multiple coupled with Altman’s z-score
D) Greenblatt’s magic formula
E) Piotroski’s F-score
F) Mohanran’s G-score
This is not without work. For some of the above methods, it may be difficult to find all the data necessary to carry this out effectively. Furthermore, these methods do not work all the time but, statistically, over the long-term they can generate positive returns. The premise is to use simple decision rules to compensate for lack of valuation skills, and to buy when they meet these criteria and sell if they don’t.
Another consideration here is position sizing and trading liquidity when the ability to forecast and value a business is limited. To compensate for this deficit, it is prudent to have sufficient liquidity to move out of positions when needed. As my general rule-of-thumb, the position size depends on the intersection of trading liquidity with the relative business resilience within its ecosystem. If the ability to evaluate the business resilience limited, the certainty of its valuation will be difficult to determine, as such trading liquidity needs to be of sufficient quantity to ensure the ability to exit when preplanned decision criteria is met.
The alternative to this DIY approach is to outsource investment decisions to great capital allocators of public companies. Businesses, such as Berkshire, Markel, Fairfax, Exor, Brookfield, and Constellation Software, are a few examples. Our role is to let these allocators do the heavy analytical work and decision-making for us. Unfortunately, for the retail investor, understanding the complexity of their organizations can be challenging. It is a bit of faith and earned trust. The pragmatic way is to dollar-cost average monthly as you get your paycheck and make a pre-planned decision to rebalance their % every few years. This gives time to read and understand the mindset of these chosen few. It would be one’s task to determine if these allocators continue to be aligned with one’s interest.
What happens if there are investment opportunities where no one can predict its probabilistic future in any confident way? In this case, being a retail investor may not put you at a greater disadvantage relative to institutional professionals. The top-of-mind example is Bitcoin. Is it worth zero or is it worth a million dollars? Is it morally repugnant, or will it bring economic equality to the world? Will nations ban it, or will the world adopt it as a global currency? These are questions no one can accurately forecast. The price volatility has made it a wonderful place for speculation and provided a full demonstration of market psychology. Is this untouchable as an investment or is there a possibility of an asymmetric return relative to its downside in the long-term? I would argue that its volatility and its extreme uncertainty makes Bitcoin an investment opportunity to those with the proper mindset and temperament.
Bitcoin is a public ledger of all transactions that have occurred between all the wallet addresses within its system. It is based on open-source software code which volunteers maintain it, but any significant changes require approval from the system’s nodes (eg Raspberry pi’s) and miners (eg specialized ASIC computers) through consensus. Its programming contains a unique economic incentive structure where there will be an eventual fixed 21 million bitcoin to come into existence, and miners compete to solve cryptographic puzzles to win the right to record these transactions within a block on the public ledger. For this electricity-intensive work, they are rewarded bitcoins (where every 4 years, these rewards are halved) along with a market-determined transaction fee. This technology solves the issue of double spending by preventing the same bitcoin from being spent twice by the same address. It does all this in a decentralized manner, with no single political entity controlling it or having the ability to alter its incentive structure.
The first reaction is that this is a Ponzi scheme, and it is not valuable because it has no cash flows. The conclusion is that it is worthless. It is only for speculators and traders to play with until it goes to zero. Given the price fluctuations, how can one rationally decide when to convert your hard-earned cash to this thing call Bitcoin?
Maybe, you take some time and read a few things on this subject starting with the following: The Bitcoin Whitepaper, Friedrich Hayek’s book “The Denationalization of Money”, and Horizon Kinetics/FRMO Corporation’s research papers and call transcripts on the economics of Bitcoin mining. Although it is beyond the scope of this blog to discuss the details of these ideas, perhaps at the end of it, you might be open to the possibility of very impactful return if Bitcoin succeeds. This would be analogous to the Zeckhauser’s example of Warren Buffett offering Californian earthquake reinsurance when no one else would because he recognized that the pricing was very lucrative. Everyone else was hesitant with the extreme uncertainty, and Buffett knew that no one else had any informational advantage. The price was right, and his bet was made.
Bitcoin exists in a very liquid market, it can be purchased in small amounts over time, the volatility is too scary for most professional investors and their clients, it’s future is unknowable, but if it succeeds as an alternative to gold (it might be worth $500K per bitcoin), or global “narrow money – M0,M1” (it might be worth $1.9M per bitcoin, or global “broad money – M0,M1,M2 and M3” (it might be worth $4.3M), or global bonds (it might be worth $6M). This coupled with the decision to mine bitcoin vs buying bitcoin from an exchange, the most inefficient miner would rationally only partake in this activity if the spot price was greater than $30K given certain assumptions about today’s electricity and mining rig costs. With continued halving of bitcoin block rewards, this economic decision will drive the breakeven price higher over time. Undoubtedly there will be speculators overlaying price volatility on top of these fundamentals. However, making small bets over time taking advantage of its current price volatility with the potential large asymmetric return might not be so irrational.
Remember operating in this quadrant, the key is to determine if anybody else is better at forecasting the future than you are then acting appropriately in a manner that you can survive if things do not go your way.
Quadrant #3 – I know I cannot act or will have a difficult time to acting
This quadrant is reserved for those with more advanced business analytic skills, a deep understanding of valuation nuances, and lots of tacit market experience. It is also applicable to private illiquid investments controlled personally or sidecar-ed with professional investors. In essence, this quadrant is relevant to illiquid investments, start-ups/micro-cap businesses, and those suffer from or work in environments with rational decision-making barriers.
There is plenty written on behavioral finance. James Montier has written about investors having a tendency of elevated decision confidence with greater information provided regardless of their relevance. Robert Cialdini has discussed that people’s desire to be consistent encourages confirmation biases, leading to the inability to change one’s mind when faced with opposing evidence. Groupthink and feelings of psychological safety when conducting group work, can reduce opinion diversity and create systematic blind spots. These habits are hard to break and can make one slow to react and continue to hold on to losing positions even as the investment thesis falls apart. Conversely, it can prevent people from selling “winning” positions because of thesis creep, by not recognizing gradual buildup of investment risk.
For retail investors who feel ready to begin a more discretionary selection of businesses, there are a couple caveats to keep in mind.
1) We, often, over-estimate our abilities especially once we attain some working knowledge but before acquiring a deeper understanding of the nuances.
2) Due to time limitations, we can become impatient and suffer from FOMO once we put effort into studying a business, causing irrational decision-making.
3) We do not spend enough time regularly trying to destroy an idea.
These caveats are particularly problematic for people who are well-educated and successful in their non-investing careers. Furthermore, the demands of their day job limit the time they can devote to investing, making loss aversion to perceived missed opportunities more acute. Having suffered from these emotions regularly and making every mistake possible, I have come to realize several rules-of-thumb that readers might find helpful as well.
A) Start with simple businesses where you can have a reasonable understanding of the products, customer purchase decisions, stable supplier/distribution relationships, in an industry that is settled from major disruptions.
B) Avoid micro-cap or small-cap businesses where existential threats and poor management is more prevalent, unless you can devote significant time going out to scuttlebutt.
C) Look for reasonable liquidity to avoid choosing the wrong business and getting stuck in a position forever.
D) Make it a habit to write down the reasons why you want to own the business, what are the risks, what are the factors that determine its future success or failure, and the hard signals to let you know when to pivot, and how you plan to enter or exit positions.
E) Automate what you can, such as carefully thought-out buy and sell limits and let the market come to you.
F) Underwrite an intrinsic value range encompassing the worst, bear, and base case scenario. Average down in tranches as along as your thesis is intact. This works in industries and businesses with little change where greater confidence can be placed on your intrinsic value calculations. Those undergoing disruption or subject to unpredictable macroeconomic winds require smaller sizes with buying activity spread out over time with or without escalating stinker bids.
G) Make steel-manning your investments a regular scheduled event.
H) Use monthly dollar-cost averaging with your paycheck or dividends to ease into positions over time. Opportunities present themselves across investments and over months to years. There is never a rush and always something to do.
I) Sitting on cash (despite inflation) gives optionality to move when opportunities arise. The alternative is rotating a permanent portfolio into attractive investments during market downturns with the caveat that these portfolios can go down with market turmoil, necessitating realized losses.
J) Start small and build up reps over time until you start to develop your own pattern recognition and style. Concentrated portfolios do not work for every type of business, investment style or temperament. Also, you are not Warren Buffett.
K) 1-5% portfolio positions are survivable. 5-10% positions can be emotionally damaging.
One recent investment that I have made is Meta Platforms. It is a highly unloved liquid mega-cap stock with a business that gets lots of media and investor attention. It has enjoyed large stock price gains during the Covid pandemic onset which it has now given back and trades at level not seen since the beginning of the pandemic and during the 2018 Cambridge Analytica scandal. It faces several uncertainties and threats to its business. These include the following: well publicized privacy and safety fails that are a result of their pursuit for growth in their earlier life stage that have garnered government and public scrutiny which have and will impair certain future business prospects (break-up calls, regulatory fines, and anti-competitive headwinds for future acquisitions); the rise of alternative forms of media that compete for people’s attention of which Tiktok, YouTube, Discord, SnapChat, Roblox, etc. have been extremely successful; Apple’s iOS 14.5 update has reduced the ability for Meta to access user activity on its platform which in turn provides Apple and Amazon tailwinds on a fix global pot of Ad dollars; efforts to monetize WhatsApp with payment is early days and faces stiff fintech competition; increasing headcount costs, underwater stock option plans, litigation costs, and rising content moderation expenses; and finally, Mark Zuckerberg’s investment of billions into his uncertain Metaverse project that requires a very difficult frontier application of software and hardware, where their historical track record has been less than flattering (remember the Facebook phones and Portal devices).
So why am I making this contrarian bet? Perhaps it boils down to my belief that Meta’s imminent social media death is greatly exaggerated and although there is significant competition for attention, the ability for others to avoid the constant tension (between privacy/safety vs national security) to globally scale on a sustainable basis is limited in today’s regulatory-unfriendly/capital-constrained environment. The foundation of this view is based on the following: its 3.6 billion Family of Apps monthly active users (out of 4.95 billion global internet users) is really difficult and costly to replicate; it is easier for an advertising-based top of marketing funnel business model to move down the stack than the other way around; global demographic trends suggest that places such as India (which have already surpassed US users by ~1.5x) are key to Meta’s future especially as these leapfrogging emerging digital-first economies increase their GDP and Ad spend over time; the demographic squaring in developed markets of Facebook’s earlier user cohort who have greater discretionary dollars and sustained engagement continue to be valuable to businesses of all sizes when it comes to advertising; the consumers of headline news and primarily developed market shareholders control the current narrative and stock price, do not necessarily reflect the “Rest of World” reliance on Family of Apps for connection, communications and livelihood; and despite the double-edge sword of Mark’s full control of this business, in my opinion, he deserves a bit of leeway, in light of his dogged competitiveness, ability to continuously learn, long-term mindset and relative youth. Although, I wish he was more strategic with his stock buybacks, without intimate details of the progress of their growth options (WhatsApp payment, Reels monetization, content moderation with machine learning, and Reality Lab breakthroughs), armchair quarterbacking of his capital allocation is hubris on my part.
Using a simple back-of-the-napkin approach, at a price of $125/share, it would reflect the reality below and still give ~10% total return:
- Global GDP growth is 2.3% with $100 Ad spending per capita over the next 10 years
- Digital advertising will remain ~ 65% of total Ad spend of which Meta’s share will decline from 25% to 15%
- A future stabilized operating margin of 40% where historically it has been 50%
- A future terminal PE multiple of 16 where Meta mean reverts to a standard S&P500 company with similar growth and cash conversion characteristics
- A current operating margin of 30% and $12 per share of net cash
There could be more short-term price volatility, but if Meta doesn’t die, at these prices, only the current business is priced in and I would pay nothing for its future monetization of its billions of users and the Metaverse (which in my opinion, no one can accurately forecast its outcome). Because it is highly liquid, the business model is relatively simple, and there is sufficient disclosure to see a bird’s eye view of the economic fundamentals as time progresses, a 2-5% bet is palatable for me. I’ve averaged in with automated buys at various levels following a fixed % of price declines. I have a current 3% position at cost and will likely make this a 5% position if it ever goes close to $100/share. Tracking its user statistics over the next 2 to 3 years will be critical. If there is a declining trend in its engagement as measured by its DAU:MAU ratios, this will be the straw that will break Meta’s back and a signal for me to lick my wounds and move on. I would like to see insiders purchase shares, especially Mark, as a show of confidence in their model.
Another investment that I’ve made over the past few years is in a private holding company that plans to invest in insurance companies for the long-term in a decentralized manner like the early days of Berkshire and Fairfax. This investment fits here because it is highly illiquid with no foreseeable IPO plans or a private market that I’m familiar in navigating. The central question is what gives me the certainty that this will work out? The majority of this is qualitative. The owner-operator is a long-time family friend who has over the decades proved to be an honest and capable value investor and insurance operator. He has been willing to be contrarian, exhibit extreme patience to sit in cash and undervalued positions for long periods of time, but he has shown decisiveness to move quickly when the opportunity is right. He embodies the principles of frugality and strong work ethic. He is also idiosyncratic in his passion for investing. I believe that investing is his form of self-expression. Although he can be cryptic at times, it is my impression that the small team of individuals he is mentoring have been carefully selected, and value him greatly as a teacher. The insurance and investment business are both hard but the factors that determine success when both are combined in an intelligent, rational manner are clear. It can act as a compounding machine that amplifies the labor of the operators for good or for bad. He is the majority owner-operator of this holding company. He has put a substantial amount of his wealth in this business. Our financial fates are tied together.
From the 3 years I have been invested, the holding company’s book value has increased 1.7x. The insurance company owned has improved its A.M. Best rating to A- Excellent. The combined ratio achieved has averaged 70%. The insurance leverage is pegged at 2:1 asset to liabilities. Their reserving is conservative, covering a cumulative 90% of adverse event possibilities and their Best’s Capital Adequacy Ratio is 1.5x greater than the highest threshold. They have a large cash position of $90 million on their balance sheet. The fundamentals are strong.
This is a 25% position that have been bought in various fundraising tranches over the past 3 years. The intrinsic value of a profitable insurance company coupled with decent investment returns that can grow premiums can be worth 2+ times book value conservatively. Undoubtedly, this will not be without its ups and downs, but I am confident that this owner-operator will adhere to timeless value investing principles, seek a margin of safety, focus on capital allocation and per-share value creation. The biggest danger is key-man risk but as with most investments I’m attracted to, founder-led and talented owner-operators, I’m willing to tolerate this given that the return profile could potentially be markedly asymmetric to the upside.
The company is Wintaai Holdings Limited. The founder is Francis Chou.
The key to operating in this quadrant is your certainty in your forecast. Is the pricing too pessimistic and reflects too high a probability that a negative outcome will occur? Can I judge the people involved will consistently behave in a manner that align with my interests and treat me fairly? Position size accordingly. No hard rules, just make sure the downside is minimal or highly survivable. The greater the certainty, the larger the sizing possible.
Simple but not easy conclusion
Every time I write these Substack posts, I feel enormously spent at the end of it, but this is better use of time than watching the daily tickers go up and down. Shane Parrish had Barbara Oakley on his podcast recently where she described how the act of writing and drawing enhances our abilities to learn and understand concepts. After writing this, I feel a little bit more aware of my own decision-making processes and can see a bit more clearly the framework to guide my future investing self. I continue to strive to get to Quadrant #1 but I am still a long way there. I hope readers have found some of these thoughts from a non-professional trying to navigate this space helpful. Ultimately, investing is about buying something worth a lot more in the future. Investing time to understand how you make decisions, how to make better ones, and creating advantages for your own reality, are the only factors we can control. Hopefully, by spending time focusing here, it will be more fruitful for my portfolio the next 15 years.