📖Li Lu

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.

— Li Lu Columbia Lectures,2010

🏠 Everyday Analogy

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

📖 Core Interpretation

Li Lu 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
Financial Crisis Bank Bets (2008)
During the global financial crisis, high‑quality U.S. financials traded at distressed prices despite strong franchises and survivable balance sheets.
✨ Outcome:Purchases made at large discounts to conservative intrinsic value estimates produced substantial gains as panic subsided and earnings normalized.
2
Investment in BYD (1999)
Li Lu analyzed BYD’s technological and cost advantages in batteries and autos, seeing a durable moat in engineering talent and vertical integration.
✨ Outcome:Backed BYD early; Berkshire Hathaway later invested, and BYD became a multibagger over the following decade.

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