📖Charlie Munger

Know the Edge of Competence

🌱 Beginner★★★★★

Recognizing your limitations is a strength.

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Knowing what you don't know is more useful than being brilliant. If you know the edge of your competence, you're way ahead of the pack.

— Psychology of Human Misjudgment,1995

🏠 Everyday Analogy

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

📖 Core Interpretation

Charlie Munger advocates a repeatable process: define criteria, execute consistently, and review decisions against evidence. Process quality drives outcome consistency.
💎 Key Insight:Awareness of ignorance prevents costly mistakes.

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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 Financial Stocks (2007)
US homebuilders and mortgage-related financials enjoyed record profits and valuations pre-2008, driven by easy credit and belief that housing prices couldn’t fall nationally.
✨ Outcome:Mean reversion hit: defaults surged, profits evaporated, and prices crashed 2007–2009. Investors who assumed abnormal profitability would persist suffered large permanent losses.
2
Fermat-Pascal Betting System Insight (1994)
Munger discussed the ‘Fermat-Pascal system’ as the math behind rational betting, emphasizing expected value and edge in investment decisions.
✨ Outcome:Applied probability-weighted thinking to concentrate capital in high-odds situations.

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