📖Li Lu

Review Your Investment Thesis

🌿 Intermediate★★★★☆

Regularly challenge your original investment thesis.

💬

Regularly review whether your original reasons for owning a stock still hold. If the facts change, change your mind. Holding a broken thesis is the costliest mistake.

— Li Lu Columbia Lectures,2010

🏠 Everyday Analogy

Long-term investing is like planting trees. Early progress looks slow, but compounding happens underground before it becomes visible.

📖 Core Interpretation

Li Lu frames investing as a compounding game. Time amplifies quality and discipline, while unnecessary activity often destroys long-horizon returns.
💎 Key Insight:Adapting to new facts prevents holding broken investments.

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❓ Why It Matters

Short-term noise often forces investors out before value is realized. Long-term discipline increases the odds that fundamentals, not emotions, drive outcomes.

🎯 How to Practice

Extend research and review horizon, reduce unnecessary turnover, and adjust only when intrinsic value, risk, or opportunity cost materially changes.

⚠️ Common Pitfalls

Calling it long term while never reviewing thesis
Overtrading and damaging compounding
Ignoring opportunity cost and alternatives

📚 Case Studies

1
Bank of America Legacy Issues (2015)
Ongoing legal settlements and past misconduct at Bank of America highlighted culture and management integrity risks despite improving balance sheet.
✨ Outcome:Li Lu emphasized assessing current leadership’s character and incentives; concluded management had shifted toward prudence, making the bank an investable turnaround with substantial upside.
2
Dot-Com Bubble Discipline (1999)
Li Lu avoided most internet stocks despite market euphoria, focusing on businesses with proven cash flows and understandable models.
✨ Outcome:Preserved capital through the 2000–2002 crash, reinforcing his principle that intellectual honesty means resisting narratives unsupported by economics.

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