I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?' And that is a very interesting question; it's a very common one. I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?' And I submit to you that that second question is actually the more important of the two — because you can build a business strategy around the things that are stable in time. … In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices, and I know that's going to be true 10 years from now. They want fast delivery; they want vast selection. It's impossible to imagine a future 10 years from now where a customer comes up and says, 'Jeff I love Amazon; I just wish the prices were a little higher,' or 'I love Amazon; I just wish you'd deliver a little more slowly.' Impossible. And so the effort we put into those things, spinning those things up, we know the energy we put into it today will still be paying off dividends for our customers 10 years from now. When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.

— Jeff Bezos

When someone tells me 'you do fundamental analysis' or 'you're a value investor,' I genuinely don't know how to respond. What I do is take all this information continuously, run it through my brain, and something comes out the other side. I go through all the data, calculate the risks involved, and arrive at a result of 'this is crystal clear' or 'it jumps off the page' — or too complicated / don't know.

As an investor I start with the question of whether the business is healthy enough to withstand at least the first tsunami wave that appears from nowhere, and whether its leaders are a good enough crew to navigate the storm that follows. Is there a certain quality to the business — in execution ability, an excellent team with a culture that stands behind it and makes the difference between it and everyone else. We never know what tomorrow holds, or what will happen with the business. The question is a probabilistic one about what lies ahead. But the healthier the business in terms of balance sheet — the more oxygen and blood it has to sustain and invest in growth (stable, positive cash flow that grows over time) and the stronger its culture, the better. There aren't many businesses like that. And there are businesses that have no choice but to be that way.

You will see that I have very strong intellectual influences from certain figures. I say upfront that I'm not trying to imitate them. I try to take an idea I agree with, or that suits me, and adapt it to my own style. I cannot do what Warren Buffett did with Coca-Cola. That's a fact. And he cannot do what I did with other stocks. When I attended the Berkshire shareholder meeting in Omaha, I was struck. A large portion had confused the message with the messenger — they'd elevated him to the level of a personality cult. For many of them, what he did is the only way, and they try to imitate him in every possible layer.

There are infinite paths to paradise. Some will make billions as activists, short-sellers, traders. Statistically their number is lower than those who hold assets long-term — because making money by buying and holding excellent assets over the long term is easier. It suits me, because I don't think I'm smart enough to do anything else. I don't dismiss any style or any person. I might be skeptical about the depth of thinking behind a given action, and I'll try to examine their thinking process and maybe encourage them to learn or think in additional directions — even if the action they took is identical to mine. The one thing you'll see me echo most is the ability to celebrate others making money in ways different from ours. That is the best protection against investing in a bubble.

And I said I will not mention Him nor speak anymore in His name, but His word was in my heart like a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary of holding it in, and I could not.

— Jeremiah 20:9

As a joke when I opened Facebook back in 8th grade, it asked me to choose a profession. Unlike everyone who decided to write 'not working, people work for me,' I chose an alternative that made no sense to anyone and had probably never appeared on that platform before.

Because I am a delusional person. Get used to it.

A personal joke that defined itself as working in 'Prophet In God's Army.' God apparently cursed me — not by speaking to me, of course, but by letting me think things alone and simmer with them until I can't rest and I'm compelled to release them into the world. Meaning, I'm incapable of doing anything else until I release the burden of things I have to say — things I usually keep quiet about because people don't want to hear or listen. And on the other hand, the same curse: no one listens because I interest no one. Maybe that's also a blessing — being a prophet like in the Bible comes with great responsibility and a terrible life. I want neither the responsibility nor the price the prophets paid. So I'm happy that no one listens and no one will read.

I mention this because I have nothing to sell. And that's important to note. Because everyone who usually talks about these things is trying to sell something. Financial journalists want to sell articles, editors want to sell ads. People on news panels want a contract and publicity. Contractors want to sell apartments. Brokers want you to buy their service. Politicians try to sell themselves for votes. Investment managers want to sell their service. Course sellers of all kinds try to sell their general knowledge instead of applying it in practice — if it's actually correct.

When people ask me what I work at or what I do, I have no short, concise answer beyond saying I'm me. So I start to explain slowly and they get lost quickly, or they try to tell me they understand and start describing something that is really, really not it. The more a person is driven by less ego, the more likely they are to listen. So most don't listen at all. And those who do listen a little — their subconscious quickly collides with the fact that the person across from them carries an ocean of knowledge that isn't clear. An ocean cannot be put in a box. So they quickly try to put me into familiar boxes, and in doing so they miss what's right in front of them.

They, like almost everyone, think in Aristotelian logic — a way of thinking that's not very good. It's a logic that tries to define everything and put everything in boxes. The world doesn't operate according to clear definitions, and we see this in physics and science all the time. (Additional reference: the excellent book Science and Sanity by Alfred Korzybski, which explains how our language and categorical thinking distort our perception of reality.)

Although Newtonian physics was enough to land people on the moon, we know today the universe doesn't work the way he described — but we still don't know exactly what the truth is. The same goes for light rays and the speed of light. We have no idea what photons really are. Many of the studies we conduct indicate a certain probability that something is as it seems, but we don't know for certain. It's like a medication that treats 90% of cases but not 100% — and if you ask your doctors what the NNT is (the percentage of patients a drug actually works on), it might, in certain cases, surprise you.

Similarly, our foundational assumptions — which in many cases rest on things that are not absolute — are built on a broken reed and become a house of cards that collapses. The sport of the investment world and the business world is a sport for people who can think in an unconstrained way. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb suggests: if you want a job where you perform an action that will probably produce a more or less known result in advance — be a dentist. And before someone tells me that even in investing there are instruments whose result is known in advance, like a savings account — maybe the return is known, but purchasing power, which is the very reason you asked for the interest in the first place, is not known at all.

It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so.

— Mark Twain

The main problem that costs people a great deal of money is closely related to whether the feedback loop is short or long. Investing in stocks appears simple (you're welcome to read Simple But Not Easy by Richard Oldfield) — people buy or sell stocks at the click of a button. The main problem is that almost no one actually measures returns properly, and knowing whether you made a good decision is nearly impossible. Moreover, the feedback loop can give you a very quick feeling that you're a genius.

The stock investor is neither right or wrong because others agreed or disagreed with him; he is right because his facts and analysis are right.

— Benjamin Graham, The Intelligent Investor

Anyone who thinks The Intelligent Investor is a complex book doesn't know Graham's real professional book. The real test for an investor serious about investing is whether they've read Graham and David Dodd's Security Analysis. So next time someone gets excited that they read The Intelligent Investor — ask them about Security Analysis.

The complex issue in investing is that there are so many variables we don't see. And that's a serious problem in itself. That's why you'll hear many very successful people say they were lucky. The goal, then, is to position ourselves in a place where:

Heads I win big, tails I do not lose much.

— Mohnish Pabrai

Most people don't really make this decision. The vast majority decide to be like everyone else — claiming on one hand that 'you can't beat the market,' yet on the other hand sometimes making decisions that claim they've identified an excellent investment manager. Everyone looks for the next stock in conversation instead of trying to understand ways of thinking. And the biggest problem: we can never identify who is right about the future and who isn't.

No amount of sophistication is going to allay the fact that all of your knowledge is about the past and all of your decisions are about the future.

— Ian Wilson, former GE executive

The fact that someone has an incredible track record doesn't mean they'll continue investing amazingly — as was the case with Seth Klarman in the last decade.

Howard Marks describes his investor meetings as sessions where he asks whether they prefer higher returns or lower risk. They answer both, to which he replies: 'You can't have both.' The only way to truly try to create situations where the risk in the investor's view is very low and the upside very high must be a situation where the investor knows more than the general public, or understands the data better than the general public. Therefore in many cases that investor thinks differently from their peers.

And this is the funniest part about choosing an investment manager — people who choose to invest with one then drive him crazy with questions about the portfolio, apply pressure, threaten, or pull funds. Or in the worst case, they put all their money with a manager who promises the impossible: insane returns and zero risk.

The investment game is a probabilistic game where we try to understand the probability of risks, the potential damage, and the probability of things developing positively — and if so, what the potential gain is. The issue is that we deal constantly with the unknown.

Warren Buffett once told me about his two criteria for a desirable piece of information: it has to be important, and it has to be knowable.

— Howard Marks

And since we're dealing with the future, no one knows. Not even the best investors of the next 30 years know — and we don't know they'll be that. Only after 30 years will we know that from 2025–2055 they delivered amazing returns. Therefore we need to be able to assess the information given to us and feel the information unknown to us — meaning to understand there are things we don't know and still make decisions about them.

There are unknown unknowns.

— Donald Rumsfeld, Former U.S. Secretary of Defense

Even though Barry Bonds took steroids, what was truly extraordinary about his abilities as a baseball player was his intelligence. What made him so dangerous was his ability to 'anticipate' what was coming. Anticipate is not to predict — it's to be able to estimate. He was so good at estimating what was coming that he didn't try to hit anything bad, and when something good came, he didn't miss.

And this is essentially what is required from every investor — to try and estimate what the future holds, and to ask the two hard questions: what are the failures I can afford, and what are those I cannot.

When all assets rise, everyone feels wealthier. When the purchasing power of an entire public rises, everyone's quality of life improves. And more than anything, everyone thinks they too can reach the top tier of the wealth index through good economic decisions. In the dot-com bubble, anyone could open a website in Silicon Valley and get rich. That didn't mean they were necessarily a good entrepreneur.

Sometimes people don't want to hear the truth because they don't want their illusions destroyed.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

And I'm not here to sell you any truth — only to share with you how I think. Exactly what no one wants to know. Everyone just wants a simple answer, and that cannot be given. The price is excellent for what I have to say, because it's free.

My sole purpose is to make you think in a multidimensional, critical way — one that dissects the time dimension and crosses between many fields: philosophy, biology, history, psychology, economics, technology, sociology, physics and more. And that's why I love capital markets. It's a place where I can test everything I've learned and everything I think I know.