📖Jeremy Grantham

Checklist Discipline

🌱 Beginner★★★★☆

Use checklists to prevent investment oversights.

💬

Use an investment checklist to ensure you don't skip critical steps. Aviation-style checklists prevent costly oversights in investment analysis.

— GMO Quarterly Letters,2017

🏠 Everyday Analogy

A process is like a pilot checklist: discipline prevents simple mistakes when pressure rises and keeps outcomes more repeatable.

📖 Core Interpretation

Jeremy Grantham advocates a repeatable process: define criteria, execute consistently, and review decisions against evidence. Process quality drives outcome consistency.
💎 Key Insight:Checklists enforce discipline and prevent errors.

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❓ Why It Matters

Without process, there is no reliable feedback loop. Structured execution and review improve decision quality over time.

🎯 How to Practice

Run a decision loop of research, thesis, execution, and post-mortem; document assumptions and update playbooks with evidence, not hindsight bias.

⚠️ Common Pitfalls

Having opinions without execution criteria
Reviewing outcomes but not decisions
Abandoning rules during volatility spikes

📚 Case Studies

1
Housing and Credit Bubble Call (2007)
Grantham labeled 2005–2007 a global housing and credit bubble, slashing exposure to risky mortgage-linked and leveraged financial assets before the crisis hit.
✨ Outcome:Underperformance before mid-2007, then strong relative results during the 2008 crash as portfolios were less exposed to collapsing financials.
2
Dot-Com Bubble Avoidance (1999)
Grantham warned clients about tech stock overvaluation and shifted portfolios away from momentum-driven internet names despite intense client pressure and underperformance.
✨ Outcome:When the bubble burst in 2000–2002, his value-tilted portfolios preserved capital and outperformed tech-heavy benchmarks significantly.

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