📖Seth Klarman

Review Thesis Regularly

🌿 Intermediate★★★★☆

Challenge your thesis when facts change.

💬

Regularly challenge your investment thesis. If the facts change, change your mind. Stubbornness is not a virtue in investing.

— Margin of Safety,1991

🏠 Everyday Analogy

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

📖 Core Interpretation

Seth Klarman advocates a repeatable process: define criteria, execute consistently, and review decisions against evidence. Process quality drives outcome consistency.
💎 Key Insight:Flexibility to change views prevents losses.

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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
Dot-Com Bubble Discipline (2000)
Klarman avoided overvalued tech stocks despite market euphoria, focusing on businesses with tangible cash flows and margins of safety.
✨ Outcome:Baupost sidestepped major losses when the bubble burst, preserving capital and outperforming many growth-focused peers.
2
Washington Post Deep Value Buy (1974)
The Washington Post traded at a deep discount to asset value amid market pessimism and regulatory fears, offering a large margin of safety for patient value investors.
✨ Outcome:Investors who bought at distressed prices realized extraordinary long-term returns as earnings grew and sentiment normalized.

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